The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
Interpretation
Bastiat criticizes the idea that more government intervention can solve problems caused by previous government actions.
In this quote, Frederic Bastiat argues that politicians often attempt to fix societal issues by employing methods that exacerbate the problems, particularly through increasing government regulations or interventions that lead to 'legal plunder.' He suggests that these remedies are fundamentally flawed because they rely on the same misguided principles that created the initial problems, thereby perpetuating a cycle of mismanagement and injustice in society.
In practice
During a political debate, to illustrate the failure of government solutions to economic problems.
The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish.
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.
No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.
The law is the collective organization of the individual's right to lawful defense of his life, liberty and property. When it is used for anything else, no matter how noble the cause, it becomes perverted and justice is weakened. Thus, the law has become perverted by stupid greed and false philanthropy.
If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper.
They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.
The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or a party.
One vote. That's a big weapon you have there, Mister. In 1948, just one additional vote in each precinct would have elected Dewey. In 1960, one vote in each precinct in Illinois would have elected Nixon. One vote.
It has become more and more obvious that there is one political party in America, and that is The Business Party.
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny-fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.
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