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When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.

Frederic Bastiat

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Frederic Bastiat
Age: 49 †
Born: 1801
Born: June 30
Died: 1850
Died: December 24
Economist
Essayist
Magistrate
Philosopher
Politician
Baiona
Claude Frédéric Bastiat
Government
Losing
Citizens
Respect
Contradict
Liberty
Alternative
Either
Cruel
Law
Citizen
Moral
Alternatives
Sense
Morality

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They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority.
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If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper. When people have learned this lesson, everyone will seek his individual welfare in the general welfare. Then jealousies between man and man, city and city, province and province, nation and nation, will no longer trouble the world.
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When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.
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Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
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If goods don't cross borders, armies will.
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When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.
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Trade protection accumulates upon a single point the good which it effects, while the evil inflicted is infused throughout the mass. The one strikes the eye at a first glance, while the other becomes perceptible only to close investigation.
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Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.
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The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder.
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Man acquires wealth in proportion as he puts his labor to better account.
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The creation of new capital always... releases... labor. Its actual effect [though] is not to make jobs scarce, but to free men's labor for other jobs.
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It is not true that the legislator has absolute power over our persons and property. The existence of persons and property preceded the existence of the legislator, and his function is only to guarantee their safety.
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No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice.
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There is in all of a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are just because the law makes them so.
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Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.
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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.
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Legal plunder has two roots: One, as we have just seen, is in human selfishness the other is in false philanthropy.
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When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
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There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.
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The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even thought the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.
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