The Law
The law: “It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defence.”
Natural rights: person, liberty and property.
Each person has the natural right to defend these.
“It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.”
If you don’t have the right to do it individually, you don’t have the right to do it collectively.
Victims of Lawful Plunder
The people who have been plundered (robbed) either want to do one of two things: either stop the plunder or join it and commit plunder themselves.
“Instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general”
The Results of Legal Plunder
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
Consequences:
“The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.”
“This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are – just – because law makes them so.”
The Fate of Non-Conformists
“Another effect of this tragic perversion of the law is that it gives an exaggerated importance to political passions and conflicts, and to politics in general.”
The Reason Why Voting is Restricted
“Because it is not the voter alone who suffers the consequences of his vote; because each vote touches and affects every-one in the entire community; because the people in the community have a right to demand some safeguards concerning the acts upon which their welfare and existence depend.”
The Answer is To Restrict the Law
Universal suffrage is important because the law is not what it ought to be. If the law was just, we wouldn't even be talking about the law. If the law were adequately applied, all of these deals and conflicts wouldn't take place; there wouldn't be confusion about the definition of the law.
“If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone’s interest in the law would be the same.”
Perverted Law Causes Conflict
"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose – that it may violate property instead of protecting it – then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder."
Slavery and Tariffs are Plunder
“They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the re- public of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer.”
“It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime – a sorrowful inheritance from the Old World – should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union.”
If the unites states didn't have these two things, then it could’ve done greater things before it did. It could’ve become more powerful sooner.
Two Kinds of Plunder
There are two kinds of plunder: legal and illegal
How to Identify Legal Plunder
“See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
“The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor working men.”
“The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretence of organising it.”
Legal Plunder has Many Names
“Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organising 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 labour, free credit, and so on, and so on.”
Socialism is Legal Plunder
“Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon. And when once the law is on the side of socialism, how can it be used against socialism?”
The only way you can fight socialism is according to the law; you have to play with the rules.
The Choice is Before Us
“We must make our choice among limited plunder, universal plunder, and no plunder. The law can follow only one of these three.”
No legal plunder: “This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic.”
The Proper Function of the Law
law is organised justice.
The Seductive Lure of Socialism
The socialist’s law: must also extend welfare, education and morality but it should also guarantee a free use of the citizen’s faculties (physical, moral, and intellectual)
“This is the lure of socialism.”
Enforced Fraternity Destroys Liberty
“It is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary.”
And since it’s not voluntary, it isn’t liberty.
Plunder Violates Ownership
Plunder: When a portion of wealth is transferred from the person who owns it – without his consent and without compensation, and whether by force or by fraud – to anyone who does not own it.
“This is what the law is supposed to stop, but it does it, so it is also considered plunder.”
Three Systems of Plunder
“Protectionism, socialism, and communism are basically the same plant in three different stages of its growth.”
Law Is Force
Socialists want the law to organize, apart from justice, labor, education and religion also. But it can’t organize the latter without destroying the former.
Law is a Negative Concept
“Justice is only achieved when injustice is absent.” So the real definition of the law should be to prevent injustice not to cause justice.
The Political Approach
“Since all persons seek well-being and perfection, would not a condition of justice be sufficient to cause the greatest efforts toward progress, and the greatest possible equality that is compatible with individual responsibility?”
The Law and Charity
“You say: ‘There are persons who have no money,’ and you turn to the law. But the law is not a breast that fills itself with milk”
“Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen or one class unless other citizens and other classes have been forced to send it in”
The Law and Education
There are only two ways for education: that the law permits everyone to operate freely without the use of force, or it takes some money from some in order to pay the teachers to instruct others. The second case is legal plunder.
The Law and Morals
Socialists say that we are individualists, because since we ask little from the law, they assume that we reject fraternity, unity, organization and association.
A Confusion of Terms
Socialism confuses the distinction between government and society.
That is why when liberalists object to something having to do with the state, they assume that we reject it in general (when we reject state education, they assume that we reject education in general)
The Influence of Socialist Writers
“These writers on public affairs begin by supposing that people have within themselves no means of discernment; no motivation to action.”
Socialist’s writers view people as something to be shaped.
The Socialists Want to Play God
“Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations.”
Socialists think that without their help, mankind would ruin themselves.
The Socialists Despise Mankind
Socialists think that mankind tends towards evil, and they tend toward good.
“Conventional classical thought everywhere says that behind passive society there is a concealed power called law or legislator which moves, controls, benefits, and improves mankind.”
A Defence of Compulsory Labour
Even what they taught Louis XIV was socialism… no wonder
The Idea of Passive Mankind
Many kings were also raised with these ideas.
Socialists Want to Regiment People
“It is from this sort of philosophy that we receive our first polit- ical ideas! We are taught to treat persons much as an instructor in agriculture teaches farmers to prepare and tend the soil.”
A Famous Name and an Evil Idea
"To maintain the spirit of commerce, it is necessary that all the laws must favour it. These laws, by proportionately dividing up the fortunes as they are made in commerce, should provide every poor citizen with sufficiently easy circumstances to enable him to work like the others. These same laws should put every rich citizen in such lowered circumstances as to force him to work in order to keep or to gain."
“We find the idea of equalising fortunes by law, by force.”
“Those who desire to establish similar institutions must do as follows: establish common ownership of property as in the republic of Plato; revere the gods as Plato commanded; prevent foreigners from mingling with the people, in order to preserve the customs; let the state, instead of the citizens, establish commerce. The legislators should supply arts instead of luxuries; they should satisfy needs instead of desires.”
A Frightful Idea
“These random selections from the writings of Montesquieu show that he considers persons, liberties, property – mankind itself – to be nothing but materials for legislators to exercise their wisdom upon.”
The Leader of the Democrats
Rousseau: he has accepted that the legislator can mold people.
“He has, to a greater extent than anyone else, completely accepted the theory of the total inertness of mankind in the presence of the legislators”
“And what part do persons play in all this? They are merely the machine that is set in motion.”
“Tolerate neither wealthy persons nor beggars.”
Socialists want forced Conformity
Rousseau
The leader should believe that he has the capabilities and power to transform the people, to change their human nature.
“Thus the person who would undertake the political creation of a people should believe in his ability to alter man’s constitution; to strengthen it; to substitute for the physical and independent existence received from nature, an existence which is partial and moral.”
Legislators Desire to Mould Mankind
Legislators are the ones that are supposed to know how to improve the citizen; he is the source of success. They are the ones that are supposed to know how to implement it.
Legislators Told How to Manage Men
“Oh, sublime writers! Please remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, and this manure which you so arbitrarily dispose of are men! They are your equals! They are intelligent and free human beings like yourselves! As you have, they too have received from God the faculty to observe, to plan ahead, to think, and to judge for themselves!”
The legislator must realize that the people he is governing are just like him. They are equal in capacities: to think, plan, etc.
A Temporary Dictatorship
“There came a time when everyone wished to place himself above mankind in order to arrange, organise, and regulate it in his own way.”
An extraordinary measure of power for a short time, because society needs a blow.
Socialists Want Equality of Wealth
Socialists want equality before wealth and dignity. But there is no way to achieve this except through coercion.
“And that the evils of society are made because of inequality, and if everything becomes equal then there wont be no evil.”
The Error of the Socialist Writers
“it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything – form, face, energy, movement, life – from a great prince or great legislator or a great genius.”
These centuries were based on the study of antiquity. Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome were the example for this. But they moulded men by force and fraud.
“And these socialist writers…. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself.”
What is Liberty?
The Socialists Want Dictatorship
“Again, it is claimed that persons are nothing but raw material. It is not for them to will their own improvement; they are incapable of it.”
“the people should have no prejudices, no affections, and no desires except those authorised by the legislator.”
The legislator can govern over the people in order to improve society. But these people have to adjust to the likes and will of the legislator. And this “virtue” cannot be established without terror.
Dictatorial Arrogance
Most of these writers set themselves above the rest of mankind. Even above government, etc. they believe that they themselves will remake mankind. And once he has remade mankind, he will allow the law to take over again.
“But in reality, he desires nothing short of using terror to extinguish from France selfishness, honour, customs, manners, fashion, vanity, love of money, good companionship, intrigue, wit, sensuousness, and poverty.”
Napoleon Wanted Passive Mankind
Napoleon considered all Europe to be material for his experiments. But, in due course, this material reacted against him.
Instead of making people decide whether they want to follow something, they force it, which means that people don't think it is a good idea anyways.
Natural rights: person, liberty and property.
Each person has the natural right to defend these.
“It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.”
If you don’t have the right to do it individually, you don’t have the right to do it collectively.
Victims of Lawful Plunder
The people who have been plundered (robbed) either want to do one of two things: either stop the plunder or join it and commit plunder themselves.
“Instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general”
The Results of Legal Plunder
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
Consequences:
- Erases the distinction between justice and injustice
“The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.”
“This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are – just – because law makes them so.”
The Fate of Non-Conformists
“Another effect of this tragic perversion of the law is that it gives an exaggerated importance to political passions and conflicts, and to politics in general.”
The Reason Why Voting is Restricted
“Because it is not the voter alone who suffers the consequences of his vote; because each vote touches and affects every-one in the entire community; because the people in the community have a right to demand some safeguards concerning the acts upon which their welfare and existence depend.”
The Answer is To Restrict the Law
Universal suffrage is important because the law is not what it ought to be. If the law was just, we wouldn't even be talking about the law. If the law were adequately applied, all of these deals and conflicts wouldn't take place; there wouldn't be confusion about the definition of the law.
“If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone’s interest in the law would be the same.”
Perverted Law Causes Conflict
"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose – that it may violate property instead of protecting it – then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder."
Slavery and Tariffs are Plunder
“They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the re- public of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer.”
“It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime – a sorrowful inheritance from the Old World – should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union.”
If the unites states didn't have these two things, then it could’ve done greater things before it did. It could’ve become more powerful sooner.
Two Kinds of Plunder
There are two kinds of plunder: legal and illegal
How to Identify Legal Plunder
“See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
“The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor working men.”
“The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretence of organising it.”
Legal Plunder has Many Names
“Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organising 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 labour, free credit, and so on, and so on.”
Socialism is Legal Plunder
“Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon. And when once the law is on the side of socialism, how can it be used against socialism?”
The only way you can fight socialism is according to the law; you have to play with the rules.
The Choice is Before Us
“We must make our choice among limited plunder, universal plunder, and no plunder. The law can follow only one of these three.”
No legal plunder: “This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic.”
The Proper Function of the Law
law is organised justice.
The Seductive Lure of Socialism
The socialist’s law: must also extend welfare, education and morality but it should also guarantee a free use of the citizen’s faculties (physical, moral, and intellectual)
“This is the lure of socialism.”
Enforced Fraternity Destroys Liberty
“It is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary.”
And since it’s not voluntary, it isn’t liberty.
Plunder Violates Ownership
Plunder: When a portion of wealth is transferred from the person who owns it – without his consent and without compensation, and whether by force or by fraud – to anyone who does not own it.
“This is what the law is supposed to stop, but it does it, so it is also considered plunder.”
Three Systems of Plunder
“Protectionism, socialism, and communism are basically the same plant in three different stages of its growth.”
Law Is Force
Socialists want the law to organize, apart from justice, labor, education and religion also. But it can’t organize the latter without destroying the former.
Law is a Negative Concept
“Justice is only achieved when injustice is absent.” So the real definition of the law should be to prevent injustice not to cause justice.
The Political Approach
“Since all persons seek well-being and perfection, would not a condition of justice be sufficient to cause the greatest efforts toward progress, and the greatest possible equality that is compatible with individual responsibility?”
The Law and Charity
“You say: ‘There are persons who have no money,’ and you turn to the law. But the law is not a breast that fills itself with milk”
“Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen or one class unless other citizens and other classes have been forced to send it in”
The Law and Education
There are only two ways for education: that the law permits everyone to operate freely without the use of force, or it takes some money from some in order to pay the teachers to instruct others. The second case is legal plunder.
The Law and Morals
Socialists say that we are individualists, because since we ask little from the law, they assume that we reject fraternity, unity, organization and association.
A Confusion of Terms
Socialism confuses the distinction between government and society.
That is why when liberalists object to something having to do with the state, they assume that we reject it in general (when we reject state education, they assume that we reject education in general)
The Influence of Socialist Writers
“These writers on public affairs begin by supposing that people have within themselves no means of discernment; no motivation to action.”
Socialist’s writers view people as something to be shaped.
The Socialists Want to Play God
“Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations.”
Socialists think that without their help, mankind would ruin themselves.
The Socialists Despise Mankind
Socialists think that mankind tends towards evil, and they tend toward good.
“Conventional classical thought everywhere says that behind passive society there is a concealed power called law or legislator which moves, controls, benefits, and improves mankind.”
A Defence of Compulsory Labour
Even what they taught Louis XIV was socialism… no wonder
The Idea of Passive Mankind
Many kings were also raised with these ideas.
Socialists Want to Regiment People
“It is from this sort of philosophy that we receive our first polit- ical ideas! We are taught to treat persons much as an instructor in agriculture teaches farmers to prepare and tend the soil.”
A Famous Name and an Evil Idea
"To maintain the spirit of commerce, it is necessary that all the laws must favour it. These laws, by proportionately dividing up the fortunes as they are made in commerce, should provide every poor citizen with sufficiently easy circumstances to enable him to work like the others. These same laws should put every rich citizen in such lowered circumstances as to force him to work in order to keep or to gain."
“We find the idea of equalising fortunes by law, by force.”
“Those who desire to establish similar institutions must do as follows: establish common ownership of property as in the republic of Plato; revere the gods as Plato commanded; prevent foreigners from mingling with the people, in order to preserve the customs; let the state, instead of the citizens, establish commerce. The legislators should supply arts instead of luxuries; they should satisfy needs instead of desires.”
A Frightful Idea
“These random selections from the writings of Montesquieu show that he considers persons, liberties, property – mankind itself – to be nothing but materials for legislators to exercise their wisdom upon.”
The Leader of the Democrats
Rousseau: he has accepted that the legislator can mold people.
“He has, to a greater extent than anyone else, completely accepted the theory of the total inertness of mankind in the presence of the legislators”
“And what part do persons play in all this? They are merely the machine that is set in motion.”
“Tolerate neither wealthy persons nor beggars.”
Socialists want forced Conformity
Rousseau
The leader should believe that he has the capabilities and power to transform the people, to change their human nature.
“Thus the person who would undertake the political creation of a people should believe in his ability to alter man’s constitution; to strengthen it; to substitute for the physical and independent existence received from nature, an existence which is partial and moral.”
Legislators Desire to Mould Mankind
Legislators are the ones that are supposed to know how to improve the citizen; he is the source of success. They are the ones that are supposed to know how to implement it.
Legislators Told How to Manage Men
“Oh, sublime writers! Please remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, and this manure which you so arbitrarily dispose of are men! They are your equals! They are intelligent and free human beings like yourselves! As you have, they too have received from God the faculty to observe, to plan ahead, to think, and to judge for themselves!”
The legislator must realize that the people he is governing are just like him. They are equal in capacities: to think, plan, etc.
A Temporary Dictatorship
“There came a time when everyone wished to place himself above mankind in order to arrange, organise, and regulate it in his own way.”
An extraordinary measure of power for a short time, because society needs a blow.
Socialists Want Equality of Wealth
Socialists want equality before wealth and dignity. But there is no way to achieve this except through coercion.
“And that the evils of society are made because of inequality, and if everything becomes equal then there wont be no evil.”
The Error of the Socialist Writers
“it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything – form, face, energy, movement, life – from a great prince or great legislator or a great genius.”
These centuries were based on the study of antiquity. Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome were the example for this. But they moulded men by force and fraud.
“And these socialist writers…. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself.”
What is Liberty?
- Union of all liberties: of conscience, of education, of press, of travel, of labor, of trade.
- Freedom for everyone to make use of their faculties as long as he doesn't harm others.
- Destruction of despotism.
- Restricting the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right to individual self-defence and punishing injustice.
The Socialists Want Dictatorship
“Again, it is claimed that persons are nothing but raw material. It is not for them to will their own improvement; they are incapable of it.”
“the people should have no prejudices, no affections, and no desires except those authorised by the legislator.”
The legislator can govern over the people in order to improve society. But these people have to adjust to the likes and will of the legislator. And this “virtue” cannot be established without terror.
Dictatorial Arrogance
Most of these writers set themselves above the rest of mankind. Even above government, etc. they believe that they themselves will remake mankind. And once he has remade mankind, he will allow the law to take over again.
“But in reality, he desires nothing short of using terror to extinguish from France selfishness, honour, customs, manners, fashion, vanity, love of money, good companionship, intrigue, wit, sensuousness, and poverty.”
Napoleon Wanted Passive Mankind
Napoleon considered all Europe to be material for his experiments. But, in due course, this material reacted against him.
Instead of making people decide whether they want to follow something, they force it, which means that people don't think it is a good idea anyways.