In “The Law,” Frédéric Bastiat writes that a nation’s laws, which should protect private property, can also be used to plunder property. It is much easier to take others’ wealth using legalized theft than violent plunder.
According to Bastiat, “Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” The law, when morally applied, protects life, liberty, and property. Immoral law can be written to plunder those same rights. There is no greater evil to society than “the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”
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