The Law by Frederic Bastiat

Summary

The Law was an essay or series of essays written in the mid-1800s. If it can be said to have a most useful idea it is to define the ethical purpose for government as the protection of citizens rights. Those rights include not to be coerced or to experience violence. To Bastiat everything else is an overstep.

He describes how a government, starting with that noble premise, grows in funding, naturally attracting those who wish to use the excess for their own purposes. As the burden of the state grows, so too do the various interests that are involved in spending the money. He does not describe any mechanism by which this can be stopped.

Quotes

The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. (p. 3)

When successful, we would not have to thank the state for our success. And conversely, when unsuccessful, we would no more think of blaming the state for our misfortune than would the farmers blame the state because of hail or frost. (p. 3)

The idea is that government should be limited to that monopoly on force and shouldn't attempt to manage citizen's lives.

Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it. (p. 6)

The word plunder is used to describe any taxation that goes above and beyond that needed to fund the monopoly on force. They here are citizens who understand that taxes have grown thusly.

Instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general. (p. 7)

Though unjust, it's possible to use the law to spread the burden of overgrown taxation across the population.

the person who receives the benefits is not responsible for the act of plundering... independent of personal intentions that each of us profits from it without wishing to do so, and suffers from it without knowing the cause of the suffering. (p. 19)

There is a form of shielding that happens when taxation is used as a form of wealth redistribution. It is this obfuscation through layers that weakens common sense reason against growth and misuse of these funds.

these writers on public affairs begin by supposing that people have within themselves no means of discernment; no motivation to action. (p. 25)

Here we're transitioning from description of the path from low-tax to high-tax to how rulers and planners place themselves above their common man.

it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest toward the origins of history. (p. 42)

It is therefore dangerous to use distant historical precedent to support one's plans. Things are probably much better now than they were then. Learn from history but do not think that our ancestors had achieved any kind of utopia. It is better to give individuals the freedom to live their lives as they see fit than to impose a master plan upon them.