Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how systems of oppression can gain support from both beneficiaries and victims.
Frederic Bastiat's quote emphasizes the complex dynamics of power and suffering, revealing that systems like slavery, protectionism, and monopolies often receive support not only from those who profit from them but also from those who are victimized by them. This indicates a deeper societal acceptance or rationalization of such systems, suggesting that those who suffer can sometimes be complicit in their own oppression, potentially out of a perceived necessity or lack of alternatives.
In practice
During a discussion on societal structures, one might cite this quote to illustrate how people can support unjust systems.
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.
Only God is able to humble us without humiliating us and to exalt us without flattering us.
Grassroots groups challenge the "business-as-usual" environmentalism that is generally practiced by the more privileged wildlife-and conservation-oriented groups. The focus of activists of color and their constituents reflects their life experiences of social, economic, and political disenfranchisement.
The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.
The mind becomes accustomed to things by the habitual sight of them, and neither wonders nor inquires about the reasons for things it sees all the time.
Presume not that I am the thing I was.
One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.
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