How to Identify Legal Plunder

See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Source: Frédéric Bastiat, The Law 1849
Taken From: Legal Obedience, Walter Williams, 8/24/2011

Life, Liberty, Property and Law

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.

Frédéric Bastiat  (The Law par. L.34, 1850)

the Law and Morality

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.

Frédéric Bastiat  (The Law par. L.34, 1850)

Law and 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.

Frédéric Bastiat (The Law par. L.31, 1850)

Legal Plunder

When plunder has become a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frédéric Bastiat (The Law, 1850)