The Law

assistance welfare or state relief, which is the poor man's share of plunder original: "spoliation." Bastiat uses this term to describe the act of using the law to take property from one person and give it to another.. For this, we must be voters and lawmakers, so that we may organize Alms on a grand scale for our class, just as you have organized Protection economic protectionism, such as tariffs that benefit specific industries on a grand scale for yours. Do not tell us that you will give us our share, or that you will throw us—as per the proposal of Monsieur Mimerel Auguste Mimerel (1786–1871) was a prominent French manufacturer and politician known for advocating high protective tariffs.—a sum of 600,000 francs to keep us quiet, like a bone to gnaw on. We have other ambitions and, in any case, we wish to stipulate for ourselves just as the other classes have stipulated for themselves!"

What can be answered to such an argument? Indeed, as long as it is admitted in principle that the Law can be diverted from its true mission—that it can violate property instead of guaranteeing it—every class will want to make the Law, either to defend itself against plunder or to organize it for its own benefit. The political question will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing; in a word, people will fight at the door of the legislative Palace. The struggle will be no less fierce within. To be convinced of this, one hardly needs to look at what is happening in the Chambers referring to the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers, the French legislative bodies of the era in France and England; it is enough to know how the question is framed there.

Is there any need to prove that this odious per-