The Law

plunder spoliation: Bastiat’s term for the act of taking property from its owner through the law without consent in any form whatsoever, it must not even be spoken of; for how can one speak of it without shaking the respect that the law inspires? Furthermore, it will be necessary to teach morality and political economy from the perspective of this Law—that is to say, on the assumption that it is just for the sole reason that it is the Law.

Another effect of this deplorable perversion of the Law is that it gives to passions and political struggles—and, in general, to politics properly so-called—an exaggerated importance.

I could prove this proposition in a thousand ways. I will limit myself, by way of example, to connecting it to the subject that has recently occupied all minds: universal suffrage.

Whatever the followers of the School of Rousseau Referring to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), whose theories on the "social contract" and the "general will" Bastiat believed led to state tyranny might think—a school which calls itself highly advanced but which I believe is twenty centuries behind—universal suffrage (taking this term in its strict sense) is not one of those sacred dogmas regarding which examination and even doubt are crimes.

One can raise serious objections to it.

First, the word universal hides a gross fallacy sophisme: a clever but false argument used to deceive. There are thirty-six million inhabitants in France. For the right of suffrage to be universal, it would have to be recognized for thirty-six million