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.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes various forms of government policies that redistribute wealth under the guise of legal plunder.
Frederic Bastiat's quote emphasizes the idea that the government can legally take money from one group and redistribute it to another through a variety of schemes, often justified as being for the common good. He derides these methods by labeling them as 'legal plunder,' highlighting that such practices undermine individual rights and property ownership while creating an infinite array of justifications to sustain them, thus critiquing the moral implications of such actions in society.
In practice
In a debate about taxation policies, one might quote this to illustrate the dangers of legislative overreach.
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.
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.
Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.
In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.
Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.
The moon of Mahomet Arose, and it shall set; While, blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon, The cross leads generations on.
The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.
Without moral and intellectual independence, there is no anchor for national independence.
The State lives by its very existence on the two-fold and pervasive employment of aggressive violence against the very liberty and property of individuals that it is supposed to be defending.
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