I arrived early last evening at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville to attend an “Economic Forum with the Fed. While waiting for the doors to open, I read a few pages of Bastiat’s “The Law.”

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. Nor are the lacteal veins of the law supplied with milk from a source outside the society. 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. If every person draws from the treasury the amount that he has put in it, it is true that the law then plunders nobody. But this procedure does nothing for the persons who have no money. It does not promote equality of income. 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.

Frederic Bastiat, (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman, and author. He published “The Law” as a pamphlet in June 1850. Bastiat did most of his writing during the years before and after the 1848 socialist revolutions in throughout Europe.

The 1848 revolutions are largely ignored in history courses in this country, but they had a tremendous impact upon our government and culture. Few people realize that German ex-patriot socialists settled in and around St. Louis in the early 1850s and played an important role in Lincoln’s War against the Republic.

The excerpt quoted above from “The Law” provides such a simple argument for restricting any government largess. Anytime the government pays for something, it has to take that money from someone by force. If that something is outside the limited sphere of protecting the innocent and punishing the lawless, then you and I have been robbed. It’s just that simple.

The thieves are not at Brushy Mountain, they are in Washington, DC and unfortunately their children are in Nashville.

May we all begin to understand our own participation in the theft.

From Solitude,
David O Jones