“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it.”

–  Frederic Bastiat, 1850

One of my favorite quotes.  It is about the redistribution of wealth through taxation, plain and simple.  Plunder is to take wrongfully, as by pillage, robbery, or fraud.

Take? Take what?

Property.  Your money is your property.  You don’t let the government come and take one of the wheels off your car do you?  Or siphon some of the gas out of your tank?  Why then do you allow onerous taxation of your wadges and by extension the private sector by Government?

Government is necessary.  Taxation is necessary.  However, the intervention of Government into free markets through protectionism, excessive taxation or the desire to administrate serves to deprive free citizens of their personal property; the wage.

A good online bio of Bastiat can be found on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website.  Bastiat was a champion of the free markets and his essays stand in stark contrast to those of Karl Marx in extolling the free markets ability to increase the standard of living for both employer and employee, and that if left to their own free wills, both can find a harmony through free-market economics.

Bastiat’s quote is an indictment of excessive government taxation of  individual wealth.  He considered that excessive taxation as nothing less than plunder, legalized by the very government through the enactment of laws and justified by those who benefited from it by claiming their actions contribute to the ‘greater good’.

Sound familiar?

After reading this Daily Mises, this quote came into an even more stark clarity.  I had always lacked that little something extra when discussing this issue with a socialist, but dealing with those who appropriate property (ie money for taxes) for the purpose of redistribution is nothing less than criminal activity.  We have, as a society, created laws to facilitate this activity (ie welfare, social security and medicare), and a moral code to justify it (ie a corruption of compassion).

In America it is legal to appropriate money through compulsory taxation, and compassionate to redistribute it, but by natural law’s it is still criminal.