Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how systems of oppression can gain support from both beneficiaries and victims.
Frederic Bastiat's quote emphasizes the complex dynamics of power and suffering, revealing that systems like slavery, protectionism, and monopolies often receive support not only from those who profit from them but also from those who are victimized by them. This indicates a deeper societal acceptance or rationalization of such systems, suggesting that those who suffer can sometimes be complicit in their own oppression, potentially out of a perceived necessity or lack of alternatives.
In practice
During a discussion on societal structures, one might cite this quote to illustrate how people can support unjust systems.
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.
There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.
It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.
I shall ask for the abolition for the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me.
Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.
The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time.
The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.
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