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.
Interpretation
The quote warns against an expanding state that outgrows its means, leading to the erosion of personal freedoms and dignity.
Frédéric Bastiat's quote reflects the dangers of a state that increases its power and influence beyond sustainable limits, which ultimately affects the people's freedom and prosperity. It suggests that when the state becomes too expansive and intrusive, it can stifle private enterprise and individual rights, leading to a loss of wealth, happiness, and dignity among its citizens. Bastiat's perspective emphasizes the need for individuals to restrict state power to ensure their personal freedoms and maintain a healthy society.
In practice
In a speech about government intervention, emphasizing the importance of personal freedoms.
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.
Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.
The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs a million.
We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.
If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.
War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.
We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.
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