The real cost of the State is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The State has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the hidden costs of government intervention in the economy, emphasizing lost opportunities and potential prosperity.
In this quote, Bastiat argues that the true cost of government actions goes beyond immediate taxation or regulation; it encompasses the unseen consequences of lost jobs, potential technological advancements, and entrepreneurial opportunities that never materialize due to excessive state control. He likens the state's actions to theft, suggesting that citizens are deprived of their rightful prosperity and future potential by government overreach.
In practice
During a debate on economic policies, this quote can be used to illustrate the hidden costs of regulations.
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.
Terrorism has become a festering wound. It is an enemy of humanity.
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
You are living in a dream of your own creation. Let it be the dream of a lifetime, for that is exactly what it is.
Flee the country where a lone man holds all power: It is a nation of slaves.
Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren’t even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?
Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.