“The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850. Bastiat Frédéric
too scrupulous for that. There are still tyrants and victims certainly, but between them has placed itself the intermediary that is the state, that is to say, the law itself. What is more calculated to silence our scruples and, perhaps more appealing, to overcome our resistance? For this reason, we all make calls upon the state on one ground or pretext or another. We tell it, “I do not consider that there is a satisfactory relation between the goods I enjoy and my work. I would like to take a little from the property of others to establish the balance I desire. But this is dangerous. Can you not make my task easier? Could you not provide me with a good position? Or else hinder the production of my competitors? Or else make me an interest-free loan of the capital you have taken from its owners? Or raise my children at public expense? Or award me subsidies? Or ensure my well-being when I reach the age of fifty? By these means I will achieve my aim with a perfectly clear conscience, since the law itself will have acted on my behalf and I will achieve all the advantages of plunder without ever having incurred either its risks or opprobrium!
As it is certain, on the one hand, that we all address more or less similar requests to the state and, on the other, it is plain that the state cannot procure satisfaction for some without adding to the work of the others, while waiting for a new definition of the state I think I am authorized to give my own here. Who knows whether it will not carry off the prize? Here it is:
The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.
For today, as in the past, each person more or less wants to profit from the work of others. We do not dare display this sentiment; we even hide it from ourselves, and then what do we do? We design an intermediary, we address ourselves to the state, and each class in turn comes forward to say to it, “You who can take things straightforwardly and honestly, take something from the general public and we will share it.” Alas! The state has a very ready tendency to follow this diabolical advice as it is made up of ministers and civil servants, in short, men, who like all men are filled with the desire and are always quick to seize the opportunity to see their wealth and influence increase. The state is therefore quick to understand the profit it can make from the role that the general public has entrusted to it. It will be the arbiter and master of every destiny. It will take a great deal; therefore a great deal will remain to it. It will increase the number of its agents and widen the circle of its attributions. It will end by achieving crushing proportions.
But what we should clearly note is the astonishing blindness of the general
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public in all this. When happy soldiers reduced the conquered to slavery, they were barbaric, but they were not absurd. Their aim, like ours, was to live at someone else’s expense, but they did not fail to do so like us. What ought we to think of a people who do not appear to have any idea that reciprocal pillage is no less pillage because it is reciprocal, that it is no less criminal because it is executed legally and in an orderly fashion, that it adds nothing to public well-being, and that, on the contrary, it reduces well-being by everything that this spendthrift of an intermediary that we call the state costs us?
And we have placed this great illusion at the forefront of the Constitution to edify the people. These are the opening words of the preamble:
France has set itself up as a republic in order to . . . call all its citizens to an increasingly higher level of morality, enlightenment, and well-being.
Thus, it is France, an abstraction, that calls French citizens, real persons, to morality, well-being, etc. Is it not wholeheartedly going along with this strange illusion that leads us to expect everything from some energy other than our own? Does it not give rise to the idea that there is, at hand and outside the French people, a being that is virtuous, enlightened, and rich that can and ought to pour benefits over them? Is it not to presume, quite gratuitously of course, that there is between France and the French, between the simple, abbreviated, abstract name of all these unique individuals and these individuals themselves, a relationship of father and child, tutor and pupil, teacher and schoolchild? I am fully aware that it is sometimes metaphorically said that the fatherland is a tender mother. However, to catch a constitutional proposition in flagrant inanity, you need to show only that it can be inverted, not without inconvenience but even advantageously. Would accuracy have suffered if the preamble had said:
The French people have set themselves up as a republic in order to call France to an increasingly higher level of morality, enlightenment, and well-being?
Well, what is the value of an axiom in which the subject and attribute can change places without causing trouble? Everyone understands that you can say: “Mothers suckle their children.” But it would be ridiculous to say: “Children suckle their mothers.”
The Americans had another concept of the relationship between citizens
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and the state when they placed at the head of their Constitution these simple words:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain, etc.6
Here we have no illusions, no abstraction from which its citizens ask everything. They do not expect anything other than from themselves and their own energy. They place no expectations on anything other than themselves and their own energy. Or they place their expectations only on themselves and their own energy.
If I have taken the liberty of criticizing the opening words of our Constitution, it is because it is not a question, as one might believe, of wholly metaphysical subtlety. I claim that this personification of the state has been in the past and will be in the future a rich source of calamities and revolutions.
Here are the public on one side and the state on the other, considered to be two distinct beings, the latter obliged to spread over the former and the former having the right to claim from the latter a flood of human happiness. What is bound to happen?
In fact, the state is not and cannot be one-handed. It has two hands, one to receive and the other to give; in other words, the rough hand and the gentle hand. The activity of the second is of necessity subordinate to the activity of the first. Strictly speaking, the state is able to take and not give back. This has been seen and is explained by the porous and absorbent nature of its hands, which always retain part and sometimes all of what they touch. But what has never been seen, will never be seen, and cannot even be conceived is that the state will give to the general public more than it has taken from them. It is therefore a sublime folly for us to adopt toward the state the humble attitude of beggars. It is radically impossible for the state to confer a particular advantage on some of the individuals who make up the community without inflicting greater damage on the community as a whole.
The state therefore finds itself, because of our demands, in an obvious vicious circle.
If the state refuses to supply the services being demanded of it, it is accused of impotence, lack of willpower, and incapacity. If it tries to provide them,
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it is reduced to inflicting redoubled taxes on the people, doing more harm than good, and attracting to itself general dislike from the other direction.
Thus there are two hopes in the general public and two promises in the government: a host of benefits and no taxes. Hopes and promises that, since they are contradictory, can never be achieved.
Then is this not the cause of all our revolutions? For between the state, which is hugely generous with impossible promises, and the general public, which has conceived unattainable hopes, have come two classes of men, those with ambition and those with utopian dreams. Their role is clearly laid out by the situation. It is enough for these courtiers of popularity to shout into the people’s ears: “The authorities are misleading you; if we were in their place, we would shower you with benefits and relieve you of taxes.”
And the people believe this, and the people hope, and the people stage a revolution.
No