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Selected Essays on
Political
Economy
by
Frederic Bastiat
Translated from the French by
SEYMOUR CAIN
Edited by GEORGE B. de HUSZAR
THE FOUNDATION FOR
ECONOMIC EDUCATION, INC.
IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533
Property and Law
The confidence of my fellow citizens has invested me with the
title of legislator.
I should certainly have declined that title if I had understood
it as Rousseau did.
"Whoever ventures to undertake the founding of a
nation," he says,
should feel himself capable of changing human
nature, so to speak; of transforming each individual, who by
himself is a perfect and separate whole, into a part of a greater
whole, from which that individual somehow receives his life and
his being; of changing the physical constitution of man in order
to strengthen it, etc., etc ... If it be true that a great prince
is a rarity, what, then, is to be said of a great law- giver? The
first has only to follow the model that the other constructs. The
latter is the artificer who invents the machine; the former is
only the operator who turns it on and runs it.
Rousseau, being convinced that society is a human contrivance,
found it necessary to place law and the lawgiver on an extremely
lofty elevation. He saw between the lawgiver and the rest of
mankind as great a distance, or rather as great a gulf, as that
which separates the inventor of the machine from the inert matter
of which it is composed.
In his opinion, the law should transform persons and should
create or not create property. In my opinion, society, persons,
and property exist prior to the law, and--to restrict myself
specifically to the last of these--I would say: Property does not
exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is
property.
The opposition between these two systems is fundamental. Since
the consequences that follow from them keep eluding us, I hope I
may be permitted to make the question very precise. First, let me
state that I use the word property in the general sense,
and not in the limited sense of landed property. I regret,
and probably all economists regret with me, that this word
involuntarily evokes in us the idea of the possession of land. By
property I understand the right that the worker has to the
value that he has created by his labor.
Now, this much granted, I ask whether this right is created by,
law, or whether it is not, on the contrary, prior and superior to
the law; whether law is needed to give rise to the right to
property, or whether, on the contrary, property is a pre-existing
fact and right that gave rise to law. In the first case, it is the
function of the legislator to organize, modify, and even eliminate
property if he deems it good to do so; in the second, his
jurisdiction is limited to guaranteeing and safeguarding property
rights.
In the preamble to a draft for a constitution, published by one
of the greatest thinkers of modern times, M. de Lamennais [Felicite
de Lamennais (1782-1854), French philosopher, Catholic priest,
reformer, and ardent champion of the working
classes.--TRANSLATOR.] I find the following words:
The French people declare that they recognize rights and duties
prior and superior to all positive laws and independent of them.
These rights and duties, emanating directly from God, are
summed up in the triple dogma which these sacred words express:
Equality, Liberty, Fraternity.
I ask whether the right to property is not one of those rights
which, far from springing from positive law, are prior to the law
and are the reason for its existence.
This is not, as might be thought, a theoretical and idle
question. It is of tremendous, of fundamental importance. Its
solution concerns society most urgently, and the reader will be
convinced of this, I hope, after I have compared the two systems
in question in regard to their origin and their consequences.
Economists believe that property is a providential fact,
like the human person. The law does not bring the one into
existence any more than it does the other. Property is a necessary
consequence of the nature of man.
In the full sense of the word, man is born a proprietor, because
he is born with wants whose satisfaction is necessary to life, and
with organs and faculties whose exercise is indispensable to the
satisfaction of these wants. Faculties are only an extension of
the person; and property is nothing but an extension of the
faculties. To separate a man from his faculties is to cause him to
die; to separate a man from the product of his faculties is
likewise to cause him to die.
There are some political theorists who are very much concerned
with knowing how God ought to have made man. We, for our part,
study man as God has made him. We observe that he cannot live
without providing for his wants, that he cannot provide for his
wants without labor, and that he will not perform any labor if he
is not sure of applying the fruit of his labor to the
satisfaction of his wants. That is why we believe that property
has been divinely instituted, and that the object of human law is
its protection or security.
So true is it that property is prior to law that
it is recognized even among savages who do not have laws, or at
least not written laws. When a savage has devoted his labor to
constructing a hut, no one will dispute his possession or
ownership of it. To be sure, another, stronger savage may chase
him out of it, but not without angering and alarming the whole
tribe. It is this very abuse of force which gives rise to
association, to common agreement, to law, and which puts
the public police force at the service of property. Hence, law is
born of property, instead of property being born of law.
One may say that the principle of property is recognized even
among animals. The swallow peacefully cares for its young in the
nest that it has built by its own efforts.
Even plants live and develop by assimilation, by appropriation.
They appropriate the substances, the gases, the salts
that are within their reach. Any interruption in this process is
all that is needed to make them wither and die.
Man, too, lives and develops by appropriation. Appropriation
is a natural phenomenon, providential and essential to life; and property
is only appropriation that labor has made a right. When labor
has rendered substances assimilable and appropriable
that were not so before, I do not really see how it can be alleged
that, by right, the act of appropriation should be performed for
the benefit of another individual than the one who has done the
work.
It is because of these primordial facts, which are necessary
consequences of the very nature of man, that the law intervenes.
As the desire for life and self-development can induce the strong
man to despoil the weak, and thus to violate his right to the
fruits of his labor, it has been agreed that the combined force of
all members of society should be devoted to preventing and
repressing violence. The function of the law, then, is to
safeguard the right to property. It is not property that is a
matter of agreement, but law.
Let us now seek for the origin of the opposing system.
All our past constitutions proclaim that property is
sacred, a fact that seems to indicate that the goal of social
organization is the free development of private associations or
individuals through their labor. This implies that the right to
property is prior to the law, since the sole object of the law
would be to protect property.
But I wonder whether such a declaration has not been introduced
into our constitutions instinctively, so to speak, as a mere pious
phrase, as a dead letter, and whether, above all, it underlies all
our social convictions.
Now, if it is true, as has been said, that literature is the
expression of society, doubts may well be raised in this regard;
for never, certainly, have political theorists, after having
respectfully saluted the principle of property, invoked so much
the intervention of the law, not to safeguard property rights, but
to modify, impair, transform, balance, equalize, and organize
property, credit, and labor.
Now, this supposes that an absolute power over persons and
property is imputed to the law, and hence to the legislator.
This may distress us, but it should not surprise us.
Whence do we derive our ideas on these matters, and even our
very notion of rights? From Latin literature and Roman law.
I have not studied law, but it is sufficient for me to know
that the source of our theories is in Roman law, to affirm that
they are false. The Romans could not fail to consider property
anything but a purely conventional fact--a product, an artificial
creation, of written law. Evidently they could not go back, as
political economy does, to the very nature of man and perceive the
relations and necessary connections that exist among wants,
faculties, labor, and property. It would have been absurd and
suicidal for them to have done so. How could they, when they lived
by looting, when all their property was the fruit of plunder, when
they had based their whole way of life on the labor of slaves; how
could they, without shattering the foundations of their society,
introduce into their legislation the idea that the true title to
property is the labor that produces it? No, they could neither say
it nor think it. They had to have recourse to a purely empirical
definition of property -- jus utendi et abutendi ["The
right to use and abuse.-- TRANSLATOR.] -- a definition that
refers only to effects and not to causes or origins, for they were
indeed forced to conceal the latter from view.
It is sad to think that the science of law as we know it in the
nineteenth century is still based on principles formulated in
antiquity to justify slavery; but this is easily explained. The
teaching of law is monopolized in France, and monopoly excludes
progress. It is true that jurists do not create all of public
opinion; but it must be said that university and clerical
education prepares French youth marvelously to accept the false
ideas of jurists on these matters, since, the better to assure
this, it plunges all of us, during the ten best years of our
lives, in the atmosphere of war and slavery that enveloped and
permeated Roman society.
Do not be surprised, then, to see reproduced in the eighteenth
century the Roman idea that property is a matter of convention and
of legal institution; that, far from law being a corollary of
property, it is property that is a corollary of law. We know that,
for Rousseau, not only property but the whole of society was the
result of a contract, of an invention, a product of the
legislator's mind.
The social order is a sacred right that serves
as the basis of all the others. However, this right does not
come from Nature. Therefore, it is founded on convention.
Thus, the right that serves as the basis of all the others is
purely conventional. Hence, property, which is a
subsequent right, is also conventional. It does not come from
Nature.
Robespierre was imbued with the ideas of Rousseau. In what the
disciple says about property, we recognize the theories and even
the rhetorical forms of the master.
Citizens, I propose to you first a few
necessary articles to complete our theory of property. Let
this word alarm no one. You sordid souls, who esteem only gold, do
not be frightened; I do not wish to lay hands on your treasures,
however impure their source ... For my part, I would rather be
born in the hut of Fabricius than in the palace of Lucullus, etc.,
etc.
Here it should be noted that, when one analyzes the notion of
property, it is irrational and dangerous to treat this term as
synonymous with opulence, and, even worse, with ill-gotten
opulence. The hut of Fabricius [Gaius Luscinus
Fabricius, distinguished Roman general and consul whose integrity
so impressed Pyrrhus when he was sent as an ambassador to treat
for the ransom and exchange of prisoners in 280 B.C. that they
were released without ransom. He died so poor that the state had
to provide for his daughter.--TRANSLATOR.] is property just
as much as the palace of Lucullus. [Lucius
Licinius Lucullus (110-56 B.C.), Roman general and plutocrat
famous for the sumptuousness and elegance of his mode of life and
especially for his extravagant gourmet meals.-- TRANSLATOR.]
But let me call the reader's attention to the following words,
which sum up the whole system:
In defining freedom, man's primary need, the
most sacred of his natural rights, we have said, quite
correctly, that it has as its limit the rights of others. Why have
you not applied this principle to property, which is socially
instituted, as if the eternal laws of Nature were less
inviolable than the conventions of men?
After these introductory remarks, Robespierre formulates his
principles in these terms:
Art. 1. Property is the right that each citizen
has to enjoy and to dispose of the portion of goods that is
guaranteed to him by law.
Art. 2. The right to property is limited, as
are all others, by the obligation to respect the rights of others.
Thus, Robespierre sets up an opposition between liberty and
property. These are two rights of different origin: one
comes from Nature; the other is socially instituted. The first is natural;
the second, conventional.
The fact that Robespierre imposes identical limits on these two
rights should have led him, it would seem, to think that they come
from the same source. Whether liberty or property is in question,
to respect the right of others is not to destroy or impair the
right, but rather to recognize and confirm it. It is precisely
because property as well as liberty is a right prior to the law
that both exist only on condition of respecting the like right of
others, and it is the function of the law to see that this limit
is respected, which means to recognize and support this very
principle.
In any case, it is certain that Robespierre, following
Rousseau's example, considered property as a social institution,
as a convention. He did not connect it at all with its true
justification, which is labor. It is the right, he said, to
dispose of the portion of goods guaranteed by law.
I do not need to recall here that through Rousseau and
Robespierre the Roman idea of property has been transmitted to all
our self-styled socialist schools of thought. We know that the
first volume of Louis Blanc, on the Revolution, is a dithyramb to
the philosopher of Geneva and to the leader of the Convention.
Thus, this idea that the right to property is socially
instituted, that it is an invention of the legislator, a creation
of the law--in other words, that it is unknown to men in the state
of nature-- has been transmitted from the Romans down to us,
through the teaching of law, classical studies, the political
theorists of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of 1793,
and the modem proponents of a planned social order.
Let us now proceed to consider the consequences of the two
systems that I have just placed in opposition. Let us begin with
the legal system. The first result is to open an unlimited field
to the imagination of the utopians.
This is obvious. Once it is accepted in principle that property
derives its existence from the law, there are as many possible
ways of organizing labor as there are possible laws in the heads
of dreamers. Once it is accepted in principle that it is the
responsibility of the legislator to arrange, combine, and form
persons and property in any way he pleases, there are no limits to
the imaginable ways in which persons and property can be arranged,
combined, and formed. At this moment, there are certainly five
hundred proposals in circulation in Paris for the organization of
labor, without counting an equal number of proposals for the
organization of credit. Undoubtedly, these plans are mutually
contradictory, but all have in common this underlying thought: it
is the law that creates the right to property; it is the
legislator who disposes of the workers and the fruits of their
labor as an absolute master.
Among these proposals, the ones that have attracted the most
public attention are those of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen, Cabet,
and Louis Blanc. But it would be absurd to believe that these five
modes of organization are the only ones possible. There are an
unlimited number of them. Each morning a new one may appear, more
seductive than that of the day before, and I leave it to your
imagination to envision what would become of mankind if, as soon
as one of these plans were imposed on us, another more plausible
were suddenly to make its appearance. Mankind would be reduced to
the alternative either of changing its mode of life every morning,
or of persevering forever along a road recognized as false, simply
because it had already been entered upon.
A second result is to arouse in all these dreamers a thirst for
power. Suppose I conceive of a system for the organization of
labor. To set forth my system and wait for men to adopt it if it
is good, would be to assume that the initiative lies with them.
But in the system that I am examining, the initiative lies with
the legislator. "The legislator," as Rousseau says,
"should feel strong enough to transform human nature."
Hence, what I should aspire to is to become a legislator, in order
to impose on mankind a social order of my own invention.
Moreover, it is clear that the systems which are based on the
idea that the right to property is socially instituted all end
either in the most concentrated privilege or in complete
communism, depending upon the evil or good intentions of the
inventor. If his purposes are sinister, he will make use of the
law to enrich a few at the expense of all. If he is
philanthropically inclined, he will try to equalize the standard
of living, and, to that end, he will devise some means of assuring
everyone a legal claim to an equal share in whatever is produced.
It remains to be seen whether, in that case, it is possible to
produce anything at all.
In this regard, the Luxembourg [The
meeting-place of the National Assembly.-- TRANSLATOR.] has
recently presented us with a most extraordinary spectacle. Did we
not hear, right in the middle of the nineteenth century, a few
days after the February Revolution (a revolution made in the name
of liberty) a man, more than a cabinet minister, actually a member
of the provisional government, a public official vested with
revolutionary and unlimited authority, coolly inquire whether in
the allotment of wages it was good to consider the strength, the
talent, the industriousness, the capability of the worker, that
is, the wealth he produced; or whether, in disregard of these
personal virtues or of their useful effect, it would not be better
to give everyone henceforth a uniform remuneration? This is
tantamount to asking: Will a yard of cloth brought to market by an
idler sell at the same price as two yards offered by an
industrious man? And, what passes all belief, this same individual
proclaimed that he would prefer profits to be uniform, whatever
the quality or the quantity of the product offered for sale, and
he therefore decided in his wisdom that, although two are two
by nature, they are to be no more than one by law.
This is where we get when we start from the assumption that the
law is stronger than nature.
Those whom he addressed apparently understood that such
arbitrariness is repugnant to the very nature of man, that one
yard of cloth could never be made to give the right to the same
remuneration as two yards. In such a case, the competition that
was to be abolished would be replaced by another competition a
thousand times worse: each worker would strive to be the one who
worked the least, who exerted himself the least, since, by law,
the wage would always be guaranteed and would be the same for all.
But Citizen [This title of address used during
the French Revolution has. of course, an ironic connotation here,
much like the term "Comrade" in our time.--TRANSLATOR.]
Blanc had foreseen this objection, and, to prevent this dolce
far niente so natural in man, alas! when his work is not
remunerated, he thought of the idea of erecting in each community
a post where the names of the idlers would be inscribed.
But he did not say whether there would be inquisitors to spy out
the sin of laziness, tribunals to judge it, and police to carry
out the sentence. It is to be noted that the utopians are never
concerned with the vast governmental apparatus that alone can set
their legal mechanism in motion. When the delegates of the
Luxembourg appeared a bit incredulous, up strode Citizen Vidal, [Francois
Vidal (1814-1872), journalist, politician, and writer on economic
subjects. An ardent advocate of government intervention in the
relations between labor and capital, he edited a number of
publications, including La Presse. After the Revolution of
1848, Louis Blanc made him secretary of the commission for the
organization of labor. He later took an active part in the
political opposition to Louis Bonaparte. His most famous work, to
which Bastiat's French editor makes reference on p. 327 infra, is
entitled De la repartition de richesses ou De la justice
distributive en economic sociale (1846). It is a
critical examination of the economic doctrines of his
day.--TRANSLATOR.] the secretary of Citizen Blanc, to add
the finishing touches to the thought of the master. Following
Rousseau's example, Citizen Vidal proposed nothing less than to
change human nature and the laws of Providence.2
It has pleased Providence to give to every individual certain wants
and their consequences, as well as certain faculties and
their consequences, thus creating self-interest, otherwise
known as the instinct for self- preservation and the desire for
self-development, as the great motive force of mankind. M. Vidal
is going to change all this. He has looked at the work of God, and
he has seen that it was not good. Consequently, proceeding from
the principle that the law and the legislator can do everything,
he is going to suppress self-interest by decree. He
substitutes for it the code of honor. It is no longer in
order to live or to raise and support their families that men are
to work, but to maintain their honor, to avoid the fatal post,
as if this new motive were not again self-interest of
another sort.
- Vidal keeps incessantly citing what adherence to a code of
honor has made armies do. But, alas! let him tell us the whole
truth, and if his plan is to regiment the workers, let him
say, then, whether martial law, with its thirty crimes
punishable by death, is to become the code of labor.
An even more striking effect of the harmful principle that I am
here seeking to combat is the uncertainty that it always holds
suspended, like the sword of Damocles, over labor, capital,
commerce, and industry; and this is so serious that I venture to
ask the reader to give his full attention to it.
In a country like the United States, where the right to
property is placed above the law, where the sole function of the
public police force is to safeguard this natural right, each
person can in full confidence dedicate his capital and his labor
to production. He does not have to fear that his plans and
calculations will be upset from one instant to another by the
legislature.
But when, on the contrary, acting on the principle that not
labor, but the law, is the basis of property, we permit the makers
of utopias to impose their schemes on us in a general way and by
decree, who does not see that all the foresight and prudence that
Nature has implanted in the heart of man is turned against
industrial progress?
Where, at such a time, is the bold speculator who would dare
set up a factory or engage in an enterprise? Yesterday it was
decreed that he will be permitted to work only for a fixed number
of hours. Today it is decreed that the wages of a certain type of
labor will be fixed. Who can foresee tomorrow's decree, that of
the day after tomorrow, or those of the days following? Once the
legislator is placed at this incommensurable distance from other
men, and believes, in all conscience, that he can dispose of their
time, their labor, and their transactions, all of which are their property,
what man in the whole country has the least knowledge of the
position in which the law will forcibly place him and his line of
work tomorrow? And, under such conditions, who can or will
undertake anything?
I certainly do not deny that among the innumerable systems that
this false principle gives rise to, a great number, the greater
number even, originate from benevolent and generous intentions.
But what is vicious is the principle itself. The manifest end of
each particular plan is to equalize prosperity. But the still more
manifest result of the principle on which these plans are founded
is to equalize poverty; nay more, the effect is to force the
well-to-do families down into the ranks of the poor and to
decimate the families of the poor by sickness and starvation.
I confess that I fear for the future of my country when I think
of the seriousness of the financial difficulties that this
dangerous principle will aggravate still further.
On February 24, we found that we had a budget that exceeds the
income that France can reasonably attain; and, beyond that,
according to the present Minister of Finance, nearly a billion
francs worth of debts payable immediately on demand.
In this situation, already so alarming, the expenses have been
continually increasing, and the receipts constantly decreasing.
Nor is this all. The public has been deluged, with an unlimited
prodigality, by two sorts of promises. According to one, a vast
number of charitable, but costly, institutions are to be
established at public expense. According to the other, all taxes
are going to be reduced. Thus, on the one hand, nurseries,
asylums, free primary and secondary schools, workshops, and
industrial retirement pensions are going to be multiplied. Slave
owners are going to be paid indemnities, and the slaves themselves
are to be paid damages; the state is going to found credit
institutions, lend to workers the tools of production, double the
size of the army, reorganize the navy, etc., etc., and, on the
other hand, it will abolish the tax on salt, tolls, and all the
most unpopular excises.
Certainly, whatever idea one may have of France's resources, it
will at least be admitted that these resources must be developed
in order to be adequate for this double enterprise, so gigantic
and apparently so contradictory.
But here, in the midst of this extraordinary movement, which
may be considered as above the power of man to accomplish, at the
same time as all the energies of the country are being directed
toward productive labor, a cry arises: The right to property is
a creation of the law. Consequently, the legislator can
promulgate at any time, in accordance with whatever theories he
has come to accept, decrees that may upset all the calculations of
industry. The worker is not the owner of a thing or of a value
because he has created it by his labor, but because today's law
guarantees it. Tomorrow's law can withdraw this guarantee, and
then the ownership is no longer legitimate.
What must be the consequence of all this? Capital and labor
will be frightened; they will no longer be able to count on the
future. Capital, under the impact of such a doctrine, will hide,
flee, be destroyed. And what will become, then, of the workers,
those workers for whom you profess an affection so deep and
sincere, but so unenlightened? Will they be better fed when
agricultural production is stopped? Will they be better dressed
when no one dares to build a factory? Will they have more
employment when capital will have disappeared?
And from what source will you derive the taxes? And how will
you replenish the treasury? How will you pay the army? How will
you meet your debts? With what money will you furnish the tools of
production? With what resources will you support these charitable
institutions, so easy to establish by decree?
I hasten to turn aside from these dreary considerations. It
remains for me to examine the consequences of the principle
opposed to that which prevails today, the economist's principle,
the principle that derives the right to property from labor, and
not from the law, the principle which says: Property is prior to
law; the sole function of the law is to safeguard the right to
property wherever it exists, wherever it is formed, in whatever
manner the worker produces it, whether individually or in
association, provided that he respects the rights of others.
First, whereas the jurists' principle involves virtual slavery,
the economists' principle implies liberty. Property, the
right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor, the right to work, to
develop, to exercise one's faculties, according to one's own
understanding, without the state intervening otherwise than by its
protective action--this is what is meant by liberty. And I still
cannot understand why the numerous partisans of the systems
opposed to liberty allow the word liberty to remain on the
flag of the Republic. To be sure, a few of them have effaced it in
order to substitute the word solidarity. They are more
honest and more logical. But they should have said communism,
and not solidarity; for the solidarity of men's interests,
like property, exists outside the purview of the law.
Moreover, it implies unity. This we have already seen.
If the legislator creates the right to property, there are as many
modes of property as there can be errors in the utopians' heads,
that is, an infinite number. If, on the contrary, the right to
property is a providential fact, prior to all human legislation,
and which it is the function of human legislation to safeguard,
there is no place for any other system.
Beyond this, there is security; and all evidence clearly
indicates that, if people sincerely recognize the obligation of
every person to provide his own means of existence, as well as
every person's right to the fruits of his own labor as prior and
superior to the law, if human law is needed and intervenes only to
guarantee to all the freedom to engage in labor and the ownership
of its fruits, then all human industry is assured a future of
complete security. There is no longer reason to fear that the
legislature may, with one decree after another, stifle effort,
upset plans, frustrate foresight. Under the shelter of such
security, capital will rapidly be created. The rapid accumulation
of capital, in turn, is the sole reason for the increase in the
value of labor. The working classes will, then, be well off; they
themselves will co-operate to form new capital. They will be
better able to rise from the status of wage earners, to invest in
business enterprises, to found enterprises of their own, and to
regain their dignity.
Finally, the eternal principle that the state should not be a
producer, but the provider of security for the producers,
necessarily involves economy and order in public finances;
consequently, this principle alone renders prosperity possible and
a just distribution of taxes.
Let us never forget that, in fact, the state has no resources
of its own. It has nothing, it possesses nothing that it does not
take from the workers. When, then, it meddles in everything, it
substitutes the deplorable and costly activity of its own agents
for private activity. If, as in the United States, it came to be
recognized that the function of the state is to provide complete security
for all, it could fulfill this function with a few hundred
million francs. Thanks to this economy, combined with industrial
prosperity, it would finally be possible to impose a single direct
tax, levied exclusively on property of all kinds.
But, for that, we must wait until we have learned by experience
--perhaps cruel experience--to trust in the state a little less
and in mankind a little more.
I shall conclude with a few words on the Association for Free
Trade. [In 1846, Bastiat helped to organize the
first Association for Free Trade in Bordeaux, and soon thereafter
he was named secretary of a similar association established in
Paris.--TRANSLATOR] It has been very much criticized for
having adopted this name. Its adversaries have rejoiced, and its
supporters have been distressed, by what both consider as a
defect.
"Why spread alarm in this way?" said its supporters.
"Why inscribe a principle on your banner? Why not
limit yourself to demanding those wise and prudent changes in the
customs duties that time has rendered necessary and experience has
shown to be expedient?"
Why? Because, in my eyes at least, free trade has never been a
question of customs duties, but a question of right, of justice,
of public order, of property. Because privilege, under whatever
form it is manifested, implies the denial or the scorn of property
rights; because the intervention of the state to equalize wealth,
to increase the share of some at the expense of others, is communism,
as a drop of water is just as much water as the whole ocean;
because I foresaw that the right to property, once weakened in one
form, would soon be attacked in a thousand different forms;
because I had not given up my solitude in order to work for a mere
reduction in customs duties, which would have implied my adherence
to the false idea that the law is prior to property, but to
fly to the rescue of the opposite principle, compromised by the
protectionist system; because I was convinced that the landed
proprietors and the capitalists had themselves implanted, in the
tariff, the seed of that communism which now frightens
them, since they asked the law for additions to their
profits, to the detriment of the working classes. I saw clearly
that these classes would not delay in claiming also, by virtue of
equality, the benefit of the law for the equalization of
wealth, which is communism.
If our critics will but read the first statement issued by our
Association, the program drafted at a preliminary session, May 10,
1846, they will be convinced that this was our dominating idea:
Exchange, like property, is a natural right.
Every citizen who has produced or acquired a product should have
the option of applying it immediately to his own use or of giving
it to whoever on the face of the earth consents to give him in
exchange the object of his desires. To deprive him of this
faculty, when he has committed no act contrary to public order and
good morals, and solely to satisfy the convenience of another
citizen, is to legitimize an act of plunder and to violate the law
of justice.
It is, further, to violate the conditions of
public order; for what order can exist in a society in which each
industry, aided and abetted by the law and the public police
force, seeks its success in the oppression of all the others?
We placed the question so far above customs duties that we
added:
The undersigned do not contest the right of
society to levy on the merchandise that crosses its borders taxes
reserved for the common expense, provided that they are determined
solely by the needs of the public treasury.
But as soon as the tax, losing its fiscal
character, has for its object the exclusion of a foreign product,
to the detriment of the treasury itself, in order to raise
artificially the price of a similar domestic product, and to exact
tribute from the community for the profit of one class, from that
moment protection, or rather plunder, makes its appearance, and this
is the principle that the Association seeks to discredit and
to efface completely from our laws.
Certainly, if we had been working only for an immediate
reduction in customs duties, if we had been, as has been alleged,
the agents of certain commercial interests, we should have been
very careful not to inscribe on our banner a word that implies a
principle. Is it supposed that I did not foresee the obstacles
that this declaration of war against injustice would place in our
path? Did I not know very well that by evasive maneuvering, by
hiding our aim, by veiling half our thought, we should the sooner
achieve such or such a partial victory? But just how would these
triumphs, actually ephemeral, have redeemed and safeguarded the
great principle of property rights, which in that case we should
ourselves have kept in the background and out of the discussion?
I repeat, we asked for the abolition of the protectionist
system, not as a good governmental measure, but as an act of
justice, as the realization of liberty, as the strict consequence
of a right superior to the law. We should not conceal what we
really want under a misleading form of expression.3
The time is coming when it will be recognized that we were
right not to consent to put into the name of our Association a
lure, a trap, a surprise, an equivocation, but rather the frank
expression of an eternal principle of order and justice; for there
is power only in principles: they alone are a beacon light for
men's minds, a rallying point for convictions gone astray. In
recent times, a universal tremor has spread, like a shiver of
fright, through all of France. At the mere mention of the word communism
everyone becomes alarmed. Seeing the strangest systems emerge
openly and almost officially, witnessing a continual succession of
subversive decrees, and fearing that these may be followed by
decrees even more subversive, everyone is wondering in what
direction we are going. Capital is frightened, credit has taken
flight, work has been suspended, the saw and the hammer have
stopped in the midst of their labor, as if a disastrous electric
current had suddenly paralyzed all men's minds and hands. And why?
Because the right to property, already essentially compromised by
the protectionist system, has been subjected to new shocks
consequent upon the first one; because the intervention of the law
in matters of industry, as a means of stabilizing values and
equilibrating incomes, an intervention of which the
protectionist system has been the first known manifestation, now
threatens to manifest itself in a thousand forms, known or
unknown. Yes, I say it openly: it is the landowners, those who are
considered property owners par excellence, who have undermined
property rights, since they have appealed to the law to
give an artificial value to their lands and their products. It is
the capitalists who have suggested the idea of equalizing wealth
by law. Protectionism has been the forerunner of communism;
I say more: it has been its first manifestation. For what do
the suffering classes demand today? They ask for nothing else than
what the capitalists and landlords have demanded and obtained.
They ask for the intervention of the law to achieve
balance, equilibrium, equality in the distribution of wealth. What
has been done in the first case by means of the tariff, they wish
to do by other means, but the principle remains the same: Use
the law to take from some to give to others; and certainly
since it is you, landowners and capitalists, who have had this
disastrous principle accepted, do not complain, then, if people
less fortunate than you are claim its benefits. They at least have
a claim to it that you do not.4
But finally people's eyes are beginning to open, and they see
the nature of the abyss toward which we are being driven because
of this first violation of the conditions essential to all social
stability. Is it not a terrible lesson, a tangible proof of the
existence of that chain of causes and effects whereby the justice
of providential retribution ultimately becomes apparent, to see
the rich terrified today by the inroads made by a false doctrine
of which they themselves laid the iniquitous foundations, and
whose consequences they believed they could quietly turn to their
own profit? Yes, protectionists, you have been the promoters of
communism. Yes, property owners, you have destroyed the true idea
of property in our minds. It was political economy that gave us
this idea, and you have proscribed political economy, because in
the name of the right to property it opposes your unjust
privileges.6 And when the adherents of these new schools of
thought that frighten you came to power, what was the first thing
they tried to do? To suppress political economy, for political
economy is a perpetual protest against the legal leveling which
you have sought, and which others, following your example, seek
today. You have demanded of the law something other and more than
should be asked of the law, something other and more than the law
can give. You have asked of it, not security (that would have been
your right), but a surplus value over and above what
belongs to you, which could not be accorded to you without
violating the rights of others. And now, the folly of your claims
has become a universal folly. And if you wish to ward off the
storm that threatens to destroy you, you have only one recourse
left. Recognize your error; renounce your privileges; let the law
return to its proper sphere, and restrict the legislator to his
proper role. You have abandoned us, you have attacked us, because
you undoubtedly did not understand us. Now that you perceive the
abyss that you have opened with your own hands, hasten to join us
in our defense of the right to property by giving to this term its
broadest possible meaning and showing that it includes both man's
faculties and all that his faculties can produce, whether by labor
or by exchange.
The doctrine which we are defending arouses a certain
opposition because of its extreme simplicity; it confines itself
to demanding of the law security for all. People can
scarcely believe that the machinery of government can be reduced
to these proportions. Moreover, as this doctrine restricts the
law to the limits of universal justice, it is
reproached for excluding fraternity. Political economy does not
accept this accusation. This will be the subject of a forthcoming
article.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
- [Article printed in the May 15, 1848, issue
of the Journal des économistes. --EDITOR.]
- [See, in Vol. I (of the French edition), the
account of the work of M. Vidal on "The Distribution of
Wealth" and, in Vol. II (of the French edition), the
reply to five letters published by M. Vidal in the newspaper
La Presse.-- EDITOR.]
- [See, in Vol. I (of the French edition), the
letter addressed in January, 1845, to M. de Lamartine on
"The Right to Employment."--EDITOR.]
- [See, in Vol. II (of the French edition),
the collection of articles on the question of subsidies and
(chap. 7 of this volume), "Protectionism and
Communism."--EDITOR.]
- [See (in this volume) chap. 8, "Plunder
and Law," and chap. 10, "Declaration of War against
the Professors of Political Economy."--EDITOR.]
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