The Law

“The law become the tool of every kind of avarice,” Bastiat thundered in 1850. With those words, he launched one of the sharpest indictments ever written against socialism, collectivism, and the corruption of liberty. The Law lays down a principle that cuts down centuries of political pride: government exists for one purpose only — the protection of life, liberty, and property. Anything beyond that is perversion. This edition also includes excerpts from Bastiat’s famed essays The Broken Window and The Candlemakers’ Petition, completing a package that belongs in every serious collection of liberty’s classics.

Bastiat observes policies of his day — tariffs, subsidies, state schooling, welfare, “jobs” programs — and reveals them as what they are: legal plunder. He traces how such plunder erases the line between justice and injustice, corrupts education, and breeds a culture where people seek wealth not through honest production but through politics. He foresaw what economists later called “rent-seeking” — the wasteful, corrupt pursuit of privilege at others’ expense. His warning is stark: when the law is perverted, society itself is poisoned and destroyed.

What makes Bastiat so enduring is his clarity and courage. He unmasks the socialist drive for forced conformity, state-controlled education, and confiscation dressed up as charity. He rejects the cult of “great men” who pretend to be fathers of their country but are merely petty tyrants with an itch to command. And he sets America — despite its own failures of slavery and protectionism — as the closest model to his vision of a government confined to defending natural rights.

For today’s readers, Bastiat’s voice is not antiquated but prophetic. He anticipated the politics of redistribution, the corruption of public schools, the dangerous illusion of democracy as plunder, and the hollow morality of “legalized charity.” His words arm those who resist collectivism with reasoning that has never lost its edge. The Law is more than a book — it is a standard for measuring justice, a shield against tyranny, and a timeless call to restore the true purpose of government. (2019ed, 87pp, pb)