Topic: Law, Matches 48 quotes.

Law Is Force

Since the law organizes justice, the socialists ask why the law should not also organize labor, education, and religion.

Why should not law be used for these purposes? Because it could not organize labor, education, and religion without destroying justice. We must remember that law is force, and that, consequently, the proper functions of the law cannot lawfully extend beyond the proper functions of force. When law and force keep a person within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing but a mere negation. They oblige him only to abstain from harming others. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They safeguard all of these. They are defensive; they defend equally the rights of all.

Source: Frederic Bastiat
The Law

Topics: Force; Law

Law Is a Negative Concept

The harmlessness of the mission performed by law and lawful defense is self-evident; the usefulness is obvious; and the legitimacy cannot be disputed.

As a friend of mine once remarked, this negative concept of law is so true that the statement, the purpose of the law is to cause justice to reign, is not a rigorously accurate statement. It ought to be stated that the purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is injustice, instead of justice, that has an existence of its own. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.

But when the law, by means of its necessary agent, force, imposes upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed—then the law is no longer negative; it acts positively upon people. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills; the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives. When this happens, the people no longer need to discuss, to compare, to plan ahead; the law does all this for them. Intelligence becomes a useless prop for the people; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their liberty, their property.

Try to imagine a regulation of labor imposed by force that is not a violation of liberty; a transfer of wealth imposed by force that is not a violation of property. If you cannot reconcile these contradictions, then you must conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.

Source: Frederic Bastiat
The Law

Topics: Law

The Law and Charity

You say: “There are persons who have no money,” and you turn to the law. But the law is not a breast that fills itself with milk. Nor are the lacteal veins of the law supplied with milk from a source outside the society. Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen or one class unless other citizens and other classes have been forced to send it in. If every person draws from the treasury the amount that he has put in it, it is true that the law then plunders nobody. But this procedure does nothing for the persons who have no money. It does not promote equality of income. The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder.

With this in mind, examine the protective tariffs, subsidies, guaranteed profits, guaranteed jobs, relief and welfare schemes, public education, progressive taxation, free credit, and public works. You will find that they are always based on legal plunder, organized injustice.

Source: Frederic Bastiat
The Law

Topics: Charity; Law

The Law and Morals

You say: “Here are persons who are lacking in morality or religion,“and you turn to the law. But law is force. And need I point out what a violent and futile effort it is to use force in the matters of morality and religion?

It would seem that socialists, however self-complacent, could not avoid seeing this monstrous legal plunder that results from such systems and such efforts. But what do the socialists do? They cleverly disguise this legal plunder from others-and even from themselves-under the seductive names of fraternity, unity, organization, and association. Because we ask so little from the law-only justice-the socialists thereby assume that we reject fraternity, unity, organization, and association. The socialists brand us with the name individualist.

But we assure the socialists that we repudiate only forced organization, not natural organization. We repudiate the forms of association that are forced upon us, not free association. We repudiate forced fraternity, not true fraternity. We repudiate the artificial unity that does nothing more than deprive persons of individual responsibility. We do not repudiate the natural unity of mankind under Providence.

Source: Frederic Bastiat
The Law

Topics: Law; Morality

The Foundation of Laws

Let the bar proclaim “the laws, the rights, the generous plan of power” delivered from remote antiquity, inform the world of the mighty struggles and numberless sacrifices made by our ancestors in defense of freedom. Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments but original rights, conditions of original contracts, coequal with prerogative and coeval with government; that many of our rights are inherent and essential . . . . Let them search for the foundations of . . . laws and government in the frame of human nature, in the constitution of the intellectual and moral world. There let us see that truth, liberty, justice, and benevolence are its everlasting basis; and if these could be removed, the superstructure is overthrown of course.

Source: John Adams, 1765

Topics: Law; Rights

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

Source: Ayn Rand
Essays on Liberty, vol 11, p106-7

Topics: Free Agency; Law

Some of the responsible personal conduct that is necessary to save America is the kind of conduct that is enforceable by law and legal process, but much of it can only be encouraged. In the end, many of our most important personal, family, civic, and church responsibilities are entirely voluntary. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said in his address at this Freedom Festival last year, “Our whole society really rests on the capacity of its citizens to give ‘obedience to the unenforceable.’”

Source: Elder Dallin H. Oaks
“Some Responsibilities of Citizenship”
America’s Freedom Festival at Provo, Utah, July 3, 1994

Topics: Law; Responsibility

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

Source: Thomas Jefferson

Topics: Law; Liberty

On this holiday we celebrate, as we have for more than two hundred years, the establishment of a government in a country unlike any other in the history of the world. It has had at its very heart the concept of a government “instituted of God for the benefit of man” (D&C 134:1). The deepest taproots of our nation and state have lain in the very essence of our humanity, our faith in God. This nation as a democracy has as its basic foundation a government of laws and equality of all before the law. Under the Constitution it has the right and the duty to institute laws to protect its citizenry in their inalienable rights, recognizing that, as the Doctrine and Covenants says, “sedition and rebellion are unbecoming every citizen thus protected, and should be punished accordingly” (D&C 134:5). The government has the right and duty to enact laws, within the institutions set up by the Constitution, which are best calculated to secure the public interest while at the same time preserving the individual rights of its citizenry.

Source: James E. Faust
Address given 2 July 1995 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Government, Good; Law; Rights

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