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There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation.

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
Situation
Personally
Cannot
Economics
Soon
Alarming
Think
Becomes
Plunder
Thinking
Loses
Immorality
People
Liberty
Libertarianism
Economic
Legal
Imagine
Libertarian

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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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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.
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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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Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
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Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.
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It is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it.
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Taking Five and Returning Four is not Giving
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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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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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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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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.
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Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and his works.
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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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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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Man acquires wealth in proportion as he puts his labor to better account.
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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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If everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing.
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Property, the right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor, the right to work, to develop, to exercise one's faculties, according to one's own understanding, without the state intervening otherwise than by its protective action this is what is meant by liberty
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And this is what has taken place. The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it.
Frederic Bastiat
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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