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The Law
by Frederic Bastiat
Translated from the French by Dean Russell
Foreword by Walter E. Williams
Introduction by Richard Ebeling
Afterword by Sheldon Richman
Foundation for Economic Education
Irvington-on-Hudson, New York
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The Law
Copyright © 1998 by the Foundation for Economic Education
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permis-
sion in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief
passages in a review.
Foundation for Economic Education
30 South Broadway
Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533
[phone]
Publisher’s Cataloging in Publication
(Prepared by Quality Books, Inc.)
Bastiat, Frederic, 1801-1850
[Loi. English]
The law / Frederic Bastiat. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes index
Preassigned LCCN: 98-73568
ISBN 1-57246-073-3
1. Law and socialism. 2. Law—Philosophy. 3.
Socialism and liberty. I. Title.
K357.B37   1998                                          340.115
QBI98-1118
Second edition, August 1998
second printing, September 2000; third printing, October 2001
fourth printing, June 2004
Cover design by Doug Hesseltine
Manufactured in the United States of America
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iii
Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Eco-
nomics  at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
Foreword
Walter E. Williams
I must have been forty years old before reading Frederic
Bastiat’s classic The Law. An anonymous person, to whom I shall
eternally be in debt, mailed me an unsolicited copy. After read-
ing the book I was convinced that a liberal-arts education with-
out an encounter with Bastiat is incomplete. Reading Bastiat
made me keenly aware of all the time wasted, along with the
frustrations of going down one blind alley after another, organiz-
ing my philosophy of life. The Law did not produce a philosoph-
ical conversion for me as much as it created order in my thinking
about liberty and just human conduct.
Many philosophers have made important contributions to
the discourse on liberty, Bastiat among them. But Bastiat’s great-
est contribution is that he took the discourse out of the ivory
tower and made ideas on liberty so clear that even the unlet-
tered can understand them and statists cannot obfuscate them.
Clarity is crucial to persuading our fellowman of the moral supe-
riority of personal liberty.
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Like others, Bastiat recognized that the greatest single
threat to liberty is government. Notice the clarity he employs to
help us identify and understand evil government acts such as
legalized plunder. Bastiat says, “See if the law takes from some
persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to
whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at
the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot
do without committing a crime.” With such an accurate descrip-
tion of legalized plunder, we cannot deny the conclusion that
most government activities, including ours, are legalized plun-
der, or for the sake of modernity, legalized theft.
Frederic Bastiat could have easily been a fellow traveler of
the signers of our Declaration of Independence. The signers’
vision of liberty and the proper role of government was captured
in the immortal words “We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain Unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these
rights, governments are instituted among Men. . . .” Bastiat
echoes the identical vision, saying, “Life, faculties, production—
in other words individuality, liberty, property— that is man. And
in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts
from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.”
Bastiat gave the same rationale for government as did our
Founders, saying, “Life, liberty and property do not exist
because men have made laws. On the contrary, it is the fact that
life, liberty and property existed beforehand that caused men to
make laws in the first place.” No finer statements of natural or
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God-given rights have been made than those found in our Dec-
laration of Independence and The Law.
Bastiat pinned his hopes for liberty on the United States
saying, “ . . . look at the United States. There is no country in the
world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the
protection of every person’s liberty and property. As a conse-
quence of this, there appears to be no country in the world
where the social order rests on a firmer foundation.” Writing in
1850, Bastiat noted two areas where the United States fell short:
“Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a
violation, by law, of property.”
If Bastiat were alive today, he would be disappointed with
our failure to keep the law within its proper domain. Over the
course of a century and a half, we have created more than 50,000
laws. Most of them permit the state to initiate violence against
those who have not initiated violence against others. These laws
range from anti-smoking laws for private establishments and
Social Security “contributions” to licensure laws and minimum
wage laws. In each case, the person who resolutely demands and
defends his God-given right to be left alone can ultimately suffer
death at the hands of our government.*
Bastiat explains the call for laws that restrict peaceable, vol-
untary exchange and punish the desire to be left alone by saying
that socialists want to play God. Socialists look upon people as
raw material to be formed into social combinations. To them—
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*Death is not the stated penalty for disobedience; however, death can
occur if the person refuses to submit to government sanctions for his disobedi-
ence.
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