The Law

Rating:
Summary: The bible of all political books
Review: This is one of those books that when youre done reading you think "I wish I was smart enough to write a masterpiece like that". THE LAW is the most well thought out piece on the rights of man and the place of government. I personally credit this book with turning me from the Republican party to the Libertarian party.
I promise if you read this book you will never look at your elected representative the same way again. It is a short , very reader friendly book. Why it is not presented to every kid in every economics, legal, and political systems class along with a copy of the constitution I dont know. BUY THIS BOOK READ IT AND PASS IT ON TO SOMEONE ELSE TO READ.

Rating:
Summary: This should be required reading on Tax Day.
Review: This is a quick read, but as the Bard observed, "Brevity is the soul of wit." This should be required reading for anyone who pays one cent or more in taxes. Considering Tax Freedom Day was June 20th this year, the need is urgent.

Bastiat is a French word that means "Adam Smith." You would swear that he was part of the Scottish Enlightenment, along with our Founding Fathers. Indeed, he makes the Libertarians look like Vladimir Lenin.

One of his ideas that is still ringing harmoniously in my ears is the ideas of government compassion. Bastiat observes that in the name of compassion, governments can and will do anything with peoples money. But is that really compassion?

Read this along with Tocqueville's "Democracy in America."

Rating:
Summary: A Blue Print for Stable Government
Review: One of the greatest tome's on legal philosohy ever written; and by a Frenchman no less!! "Legal Plunder," the act of government taking from one person or group and giving to another person or group, only fosters negative feelings, class resentment, and condems the lowest class to professional groveling. Overall, Bastiat argues, a government that practices legal plunder under the auspices of equality and social necessity deserves not to be in power and people must have the courage to fumigate these corosive thoughts from public discourse. A book which deserves to be in the rooms of every high school civics class, "The Law" is a work that will last forever.

Rating:
Summary: You Need This Book
Review: It will clear your thinking wonderfully, with its sharp, logical explanation of the proper uses of the law, what constitutes a misuse of the law, and the causes of abuses of the law. The concept of plunder, taking what belongs to someone else, is central to The Law; it's posited early that there are two ways of surviving and gaining wealth, work and plunder. Plunder is easier than work unless there's an external restraint on plunder. But the power used to stop plunder can also be used to commit it.

If only more people read it, we might be more like the America of Bastiat's day, which he admired. Bastiat noted there were only two areas in which America fell short of the classical liberal ideal, and warned that those two might be the undoing of American liberty. Those two were protectionism and slavery, the very things that led to secession, which led to the Civil War and the loss of liberty war, especially civil war, always brings.

Rating:
Summary: An Argument for Justice
Review: More than just a treatise on socioeconomic justice, The Law is a handbook for orderly thinking. It clears away the weak arguments and rationalizing that clutter the stage of history and conceal tyrants, and exposes the foes of true liberty and brotherhood for who and what they are. To those conscientious individuals for whom a just society is an attainable ideal, this book is required reading - over and over again.

Rating:
Summary: A Blueprint for a Just Society!
Review: I was encouraged to read and purchase this book upon discovering that a former DNC chairperson was 'converted' to conservatism after he perused through the 76 pages of Bastiat's monumental work.

Logic, wit, passion, and persuasion essentially delineate the spirit of this engaging little book. No defense of liberal policies has yet emerged that can match the integrity and the power of Bastiat's straightforward, lucid commentary.

Upon completing my graduate work, I intend to teach history and political science. The reader of this review may rest assured that Bastiat's 'The Law' will be required reading for any and all of my classes.

I challenge all 'liberals' to attempt to refute the powerful logic employed by the French economist. For my fellow conservatives, I assure you that your friends are but a book away from abandoning their liberal predilections!

Read 'The Law!'

Rating:
Summary: A Classic Model For a Free Society
Review: Bastiat warns us not to kid ourselves about a kind, gentle, caring government. Like George Washington, Bastiat reminds us that law means force, and that any appeal to the law is ultimately an appeal to force. In appealing to the law, therefore, we must ask ourselves if we would be justified in using force to vindicate our appeal.

Life, liberty, and property, Bastiat argues, are the rights which God has given to each individual by virtue of the fact that the individual exists, and that with or without government, an individual is justified in defending his or her life, liberty, and property. Ideally, governments should exist to defend these three basic God-given rights.

As an individual, I cannot spend all of my time defending my life, liberty, and property, nor can my neighbors. Government is born when my neighbors and I come together to hire a sheriff to defend these rights full-time for us. The sheriff's authority to defend these rights on our behalf is derived from the authority of each of us individually to protect ourselves in these rights. Because government derives its authority from the aggregrate authority of individual citizens, government should not be allowed to do for me what I cannot legally do for myself.

This is the foundation of Bastiat's argument, and when taken to its natural conclusion, it shows us that redistribution-of-wealth schemes that the government forces upon some members of society to benefit others are a potential threat to a free people. Social security, welfare, and other government entitlements are all examples of this. Bastiat referred to such government programs as "legalized plunder" which ultimately creates far more social problems than it solves.

The recent presidential race has shown us just how weak and dependent Americans have become. Just as Bastiat predicted, every little social group is clamoring to get its own share of government entitlements, and politician are clamoring to pander to these groups in exchange for political power, even if it means continuing the disastrous economic course of deficits and staggering public debt which may someday threaten the country with bankruptcy and economic collapse.

We should learn the lesson of communism--it isn't government's job to take care of us. Being responsible for our own subsistence, including the inherent risks involved in such responsibility, is the price we must pay for freedom and prosperity. If we succumb to the lure of government-provided security by means of legalized plunder, we will one day find ourselves bereft of the freedom which we once took for granted.

Bastiat's classic shows us how to preserve a free society and avoid the consequences of legalized injustice.

Rating:
Summary: Negative Rights Positively Explained
Review: Does the government take care of you by making sure you are left free from interference by others? Or does it give form and substance to your freedom by making sure you are given, by the government, enough Maslowian scaffolding to get you within jumping distance of the last triangle of self-actualization at the top of the pyramid of your desires? That's always the question. I'd be free if only someone would pay off my mortgage, or do my homework, or abort my inconvenient child for me. Here in this book is a very good template to evaluate these alternative viewpoints, especially appropriate for smart high school kids, since it furnishes ammunition to carry them through most of the garbage they will find littered in their books, written on their classroom walls, and mincingly elaborated by their discontented, yet strangely power-hungry liberal law professors, all of whom will basically insist on refuting the truth of what Bastiat identifies as the central fact of state power: That the government is "not a breast that fills itself with milk." High school boys especially like that part. Yet this is what so many people think--and Keynes even monkeyed together some funny looking math to show how dollars taxed away and then re-spent by the government become supercharged, and are better for the economy than un-taxed and un-respent dollars held privately. Here is where he meets our Founding generation--all of whom saw how dangerous it was to cede too much function to any government, which of course would need more and more money to fund these activities. Am I straying from the point? No. Just look at our political contests: craven beg-fests for votes based on what the government can spend on you, or how the internet will bring it all "closer" to you. For your benefit. And if someone wants to take less from people in the first place, that's "spending [by the government] on the richest 1%"--who of course have had much more taken from them to begin with. Bastiat explains, in universal terms not hinged to any particular group of pilgrims, kings, or communists, how the law is enlisted in the plunder of the many by the few who control the law, and how law must be continually twisted into unjust forms to keep up the subsidies, the taxes, the programs, all designed to treat the same population differently. His greatest example, though, is to contrast liberty with the perversion of law, (and here he partakes in some cultural non-relativism) by using the image of a tribe of natives who flatten the noses, pierce the ears and lips, bend-up the feet, and depress the foreheads of their newborns, insisting these are signs of beauty. The same thing is done to our laws and our liberty by the socialist plunderers, according to Bastiat, unforgettably according to Bastiat. Would the next generation of any country be more or less likely to make a world-and-life-view out of sucking up to government employees for their prescription drugs, family planning, education, utility bill assistance, or internet domain monopolies if they read this book in time to become immune to the excuse-making and false moralizing of socialism? So do we put the govenment in charge of our kids, our sick grandparents, and our businesses, so we can finally be more "free?" You read Bastiat and be the judge.

Rating:
Summary: One of the 25 most important conservative books
Review: A Frenchman who lived during the 19th century, Bastiat was a journalist, an economist and a politician. The Law, his most famous work, is concerned primarily with economics, in the context of traditional values. A fantastic book!

Rating:
Summary: A great introduction to Libertarian Philosophy
Review: Frederick Bastiat was a French Farmer in the first half of the 19th century who watched his country's government assume more and more power. That is what I thought made this book unique - In the first paragraph, he states his intent of the book to be an "alert" to his countrymen - which is probably why the book is so emotional as well as succinct.

Bastiat manages to describe the purpose of "law," from a religious standpoint, in the first 3-4 pages. The rest of the book is mostly specific details of how his description of the proper purpose of the law has been thwarted in France in 1850. Many of the same principals apply today.

For three bucks and an hour of your time, this book is guaranteed to engage you and make you think. In my experience, its ability to persuade people is uncanny.