Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes how government can create a system where people benefit at the cost of others' resources.
Frederic Bastiat's quote points out the irony of government functioning as a mechanism that allows individuals to seek personal gain by leveraging the collective resources and efforts of society. It reflects a deep skepticism about the nature of political systems where the actions of one group can diminish the opportunities or assets of another, thus engaging in a deceptive social contract that purportedly serves the common good but often cultivates self-interest.
In practice
In a debate on taxation, one might reference this quote to support the argument that government taxes can feel exploitative.
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.
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.
No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.
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.
If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper.
They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people. Before you tell me how much you love your God, show me in how much you love all His children.
All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle
The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.
Yes, President Romney will not take God off our coins. And that is so important because right now, just like God, the value of our currency really has to be taken on faith.
Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly all nature seeks God and works toward [God].
After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic.
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