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No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate).

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
Shall
Stability
Justice
Legal
Peace
Tyranny
Force
Principle
Plunder
Death
Logic
Proclaim
Order
Harmony
Inadequate
Principles
Lungs
Liberty
Alas

More quotes by Frederic Bastiat

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People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.
Frederic Bastiat
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The impulses of my heart are the voice of Nature, which is never mistaken. The institutions that stand in my way are man-made and are only arbitrary conventions to which I have never given my consent. In trampling these institutions underfoot, I shall have the double pleasure of satisfying my inclinations and of believing myself a hero
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Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense of punishing injustice?
Frederic Bastiat
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And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works
Frederic Bastiat
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No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice.
Frederic Bastiat
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What, then is law [government]? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
Frederic Bastiat
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Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal.
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It is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it.
Frederic Bastiat
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The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
Frederic Bastiat
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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.
Frederic Bastiat
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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.
Frederic Bastiat
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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.
Frederic Bastiat
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The plans differ the planners are all alike.
Frederic Bastiat
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Man acquires wealth in proportion as he puts his labor to better account.
Frederic Bastiat
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Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state, that is, to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.
Frederic Bastiat
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Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?
Frederic Bastiat
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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.
Frederic Bastiat
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The mind never fully accepts any convictions that it does not owe to its own efforts.
Frederic Bastiat
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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.
Frederic Bastiat
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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.
Frederic Bastiat