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.”
The benefit from this conversion accrues to the insiders who write, enforce, and judge the laws for their own benefit and protection. These laws are used to steal wealth, enslave men, and even end life. They are used against political enemies and helpless citizens.
When laws become immoral, the human desire to exploit others has no restriction, especially because lawmakers write provisions to protect themselves. All that remains of justice is a perversion: Perverse ends defined by perverted law that protects its perverse creators.
Image: United States Supreme Court (cropped) by Jesse Collins. CC BY 3.0.
America once was a nation of laws, real laws that protected life, liberty, and property. Now, though, the laws are immoral in both purpose and effect. For example:
The DOJ enforces search warrants against political enemies with excessive but legal force. These personal enemies are arrested in the most publicly embarrassing manner possible.
A pro-life activist is arrested in his home using massed, armed federal police and accused of violating a law that a state court concluded was not violated. The jury acquitted him.
When it enforced its warrant against President Trump for classified documents, the DOJ carefully refrained from crossing over the edge of legal acceptability while maximizing the pain and inconvenience.
The treatment of the J6 prisoners is legal abuse. The judges and prosecutors seek maximum punishments for minor crimes, and the reports of the treatment in jail are shocking. The treatment pushes the edge of permissibility, and many will say that the treatment is unconstitutional and illegal. Their lives have been plundered, while the friends of insiders who participated in riots in the summer of 2020 are mostly untouched. Julie Kelly has done great work documenting this.
The IRS uses financial force to coerce compliance just within the bounds of the law. And when politics call, the IRS will illegally punish opponents, as it did with Tea Party groups. The TSA and Homeland Security push the limits of legality with No-Fly lists and searches in the name of safety. The law is specifically designed to protect this plunder of liberty.
The government pushed the limits of legality during COVID. Various government entities used barely legal means to force the mRNA technology (courts overturned the employer mandate), denied property owners a right to evict (ruled unconstitutional by The Supreme Court), and pushed policies that closed businesses, put people out of work, and mandated possibly useless masks. All are losses of liberty under the color of law. Some were found to be illegal.
It never ends. The persecution of Masterpiece Bakery, gas stove bans, EV mandates, drag queen story hours, teaching CRT, ESG scores, creative ballot collection, and unenforced borders all stretch the bounds of legality under perverted law.
The law that is supposed to protect life, liberty, and property is used to take them away. The persecution under the law pushes to the edge of legality and quite often past it. The elites designed the limits under which they operate. They chose the limits purposefully to use them to excess.
It seems that nothing stops them. There are no consequences or pushback. No one is fired or demoted. If there is a judgment against them, the taxpayers pay, but no heads roll.
Civil society requires respect for the law. We expect the law to be moral and just. We have been forced to make the impossible choice to abandon either law or morality. The law should be designed to achieve justice to the point that law and justice are often considered synonymous. This has been perverted to the point that the law creates injustice. The unjust treatment of those without power has been made legal under the law.
Individual judgments now define how the law is applied and against whom, and political insiders holding power define both the law and its enforcement, superseding what is actually morally right or wrong. A personal bias for morality is written into law so that it can be enforced by whatever power and coercion is necessary. Justice is no longer just.
Getting to this point was a long process. It will be a long and difficult job to reverse it. The current investigations in the House are a start, but nothing will change until there is a public outcry. This affects people on both sides, but too many still don’t realize that their lives, liberty, and property are being taken by the same very government the Founders organized to protect those things. I hope it is not too late.