“The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850. Bastiat Frédéric

money. “Is it not with écus that we buy these things? Increasing the number of écus,” he will say, “will increase the amount of bread and cloth. Increasing the amount of paper will increase the number of écus. Let us do this.” A fourth will demand that competition be abolished, a fifth that personal self-interest be abolished. Someone else wants the state to provide work; another, education; and yet another, pensions for every citizen. Yet another person wants to bring down every king on this earth and decree universal war in the name of fraternity. I will stop there. It is perfectly clear that going down this road we will find an inexhaustible source of utopias. They will be rejected, people will say. This may be so, but it is possible that they will not, and this would be enough to create uncertainty, the greatest scourge of work.

      Under this regime, it will be impossible to build up capital. It will become scarce, expensive, and concentrated. This means that earnings will decrease and that inequality will create an ever-deepening abyss between the classes.

      Public finances will not be slow to descend into total confusion. How could it be otherwise when the state is responsible for supplying everything to everyone? The people will be crushed by taxes, and loan upon loan will be taken out. Once the present has been exhausted, the future will be devoured.

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      Finally, since it will be accepted in principle that the state is responsible for producing fraternity in favor of its citizens, the entire people will be seen to be transformed into supplicants. Landed property, agriculture, industry, commerce, the merchant navy, and industrial companies will all clamor to receive favors from the state. The treasury will literally be pillaged. Each individual will have good reason to prove that legal fraternity has to be seen from the following angle: the advantages for me and the burdens for others. Everyone will devote his efforts to extracting some shred of fraternal privilege from the legislature. Despite having the best founded claims, the suffering classes will not always have the most success; their numbers will constantly increase, however, which will lead to our being able to go nowhere save from one revolution to the next.

      In a word, we will witness the progress of the entire sad spectacle of which a few modern societies are offering us a foretaste since they have adopted this disastrous idea of legal fraternity.

      I have no need to say that this notion is rooted in generous sentiments and pure intentions. It is indeed because of this that it attracted the sympathy of the masses so quickly and also that it opens an abyss beneath our feet if it is wrong.

      I add that I personally would be happy if someone proved to me that it is not wrong. Good heavens, if universal fraternity could be decreed and this decree effectively given the sanction of government; if, as Louis Blanc would wish it, the spring of personal self-interest could be made to disappear from this world through the vote; if, through legislation, that article in the program of La Démocratie pacifique titled No More Egoism could be achieved; and if we could organize for the state to give everything to everyone without receiving anything from anyone, then let all this be done. I would certainly vote for the decree and rejoice that humanity had achieved perfection and happiness via such a short and easy route.

      But, it has to be said, such notions appear illusory and futile to the point of puerility. It is not surprising that they have awakened hopes in the classes that work, suffer, and have no time to reflect. But how can they mislead leading political writers?

      At the sight of the sufferings that overwhelm many of our brothers, these political writers thought that they could be laid at the door of the freedom that is justice. They started with the idea that the system of freedom and strict justice had been tested legally and had failed. They concluded that the time had come to make legislation take a further step forward and that

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      it ought, in a word, to become imbued with the principle of fraternity. This has given rise to the schools of the followers of Saint-Simon, Fourier, communism, and Owen; to attempts to organize work; to declarations that the state owes subsistence, well-being, and education to all its citizens; that it should be generous, charitable, involved in everything, and devoted to all; that its mission is to give milk to babies, educate young people, ensure work for the able-bodied and pensions for the weak; in a word, that it should intervene directly to alleviate all forms of suffering, satisfy and anticipate every need, supply capital to all enterprises, enlightenment to all minds, balm to every wound, asylums to all misfortunes, and even help end the sacrifice of French blood to all the oppressed around the world.

      Once again, who would not wish to see all these benefits flow over the world from the law as though from an everlasting source? Who would not be happy to see the state assume responsibility for every trouble, every precaution, every responsibility, every duty, and every arduous and weighty burden that the impenetrable design of Providence has placed on humanity, and reserve for the individuals who make it up the attractive and easy side of things: the satisfactions, enjoyments, certainties, peace, rest, a present that is always assured and a future full of gaiety, wealth without care, a family without responsibility, credit without surety, and an existence without effort?

      Certainly, we would all like that, if it were possible. But is it possible? That is the question. It is not easy to grasp what people mean by the state. I find, in the perpetual personification of the state, the strangest and most humiliating mystification of all. What in fact is this state that takes on itself all virtues, all duties, and all liberalities? From where does it draw these resources that we urge it to shower such bounty on individual people? Is it not from the individuals themselves? How then can these resources grow when they pass through the hands of a parasitic and voracious intermediary? It is not clear, on the contrary, that this system is such that it will absorb a great deal of useful effort and reduce the workers’ share of income by an equivalent amount? Do we not also see that workers will abandon to it, along with part of their well-being, part of their freedom?

      From whatever point of view I consider human law, I cannot see that we can reasonably ask of it anything other than justice.

      Take religion, for example. Certainly, it would be desirable for there to be just one belief, one faith, and one religion in the world, on condition that it was the true faith. But however desirable unity may be, diversity, that is to say research and discussion, is even better for as long as the infallible sign

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      by which this true faith will be recognized does not shine out before men’s intelligence. The intervention of the state, even where it took fraternity as a pretext, would therefore be an oppression, an injustice if it claimed to be establishing unity, for who would guarantee that the state, unbeknown to itself perhaps, would not work to stifle truth in favor of error? Unity must result from the universal consent of freely held convictions and the natural attraction that truth exercises over the minds of men. All that we can therefore ask of the law is freedom for all forms of belief, whatever anarchy may result in the thinking world. For what does this anarchy prove? That unity is not at the origin but at the end of intellectual evolution. It is not the point of departure; it is a result. The law that would impose it would be unjust, and if justice does not necessarily imply fraternity, it will at least be agreed that fraternity excludes injustice.

      The same is true of teaching. Who will not agree that, if we could reach consensus on the best form of teaching possible with regard to the subject and method, then a single methodology or one imposed by government would be preferable since, on this assumption, only error could be excluded by law. But for as long as this criterion has not been found, as long as the legislator or the minister of public education does not bear the irrefutable sign of infallibility on his forehead, the best chance for the true method to be discovered and absorb the others lies in diversity, tests, experience, and individual effort, all directed by the concern for success, in a word, freedom. The worst option is a uniform system of education by decree since, under this regime, error will be permanent, universal, and irremediable. Therefore, those who, spurred on by a sentiment of fraternity, demand that the law should direct and impose a system of education should be aware that they are running the risk that the law will direct and impose only error and that legal prohibition may attack truth