French Yellow Vests Protests Show Prescience of Frédéric Bastiat

Ironically enough, 21st century yellow vest protesters are proving the wisdom of their 1800s countryman Frédéric Bastiat, and his famous 1850 book, "The Law".  It's unfortunate because they aren't seeing Bastiat being proven right and are demanding things that he specifically showed were wrong.  Tabitha Alloway writing at the Foundation for Economic Education opens with with this harrowing story from the Guardian.

"I see my hand and scream in horror as it hadn't completely come off, it was hanging from my wrist, with the bones completely exposed."

A young man who has taken part in the yellow vests protests in France tells his story as he shows The Guardian cameraman the stump of his wrist, a testament to the violence of the clash between police and protesters.

Another who lost an eye during a protest says despondently, “I no longer believe in freedom.”

The yellow vest protests, as you probably recall, have been going on since last October.  An early reason claimed was rebellion against an imposed carbon tax on gasoline.  Tensions escalated, and these protests often turned violent, with thousands having now been injured and several killed.  The protests drew other anti-government other protesters and the movement spread, turning this into a phenomenon going well beyond France, from Australia to Canada.

Ms. Alloway does as good job as you'll find explaining Bastiat's main points.

For the sake of brevity, his work can be distilled down to a few basic points in question-and-answer format:

Q. What is the purpose of law?

A. Organized justice.

Q. What is justice?

A. Use of the collective force (law) to secure persons, liberty, and property, maintaining each in its right.

Q. What is the perversion of law?

A. Legal plunder and any use of force for reasons beyond the purpose of securing persons, liberty, and property.

Q. What is legal plunder?

A. Use of the collective force (law) to take the property of some persons to bestow it on others.

Q. What motivates legal plunder?

A. Two very different things: naked greed and false philanthropy.

Q. What is the outcome of a government that persists in legal plunder?

A. A discontented populace ready for revolution.

Bastiat argued that a government has but three choices regarding its relationship to personal property rights:

    1. The few plunder the many.

    2. Everybody plunders everybody else.

    3. Nobody plunders anybody.

    We must make our choice among limited plunder, universal plunder, and no plunder. The law can follow only one of these three.

How do you know if your government practices legal plunder? He answers:

   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.

In other words, if it would be a crime for me to enter your house and demand your money at the point of a gun so I can share it with the "poor," there's nothing that magically makes this moral simply because it's done by a man wearing a badge.

What is morally wrong for me is morally wrong for government. What is ethically wrong for an individual is ethically wrong for a group of individuals (government).
...
Bastiat came to a simple conclusion: economic justice means that my property is safe from the looting hands of any individual or collective entity—including government.

A person free from plunder is free to prosper.

And this is how we know the yellow vests are wrong.  They're not demanding freedom from plunder so that they may prosper; they're demanding the Macron government plunder others for their benefit.  While supposedly protesting taxes, they've simultaneously demanded that the government abolish homelessness, increase the minimum wage, provide free parking in the city center, give a minimum pension equal to $1,369.46 US dollars, raise taxes on big companies, etc..  Demands the government can't possibly meet - nor should they.  They're not protesting taxes so much as they're protesting not receiving more tax money - more plunder - from other people. 

At the time Bastiat was preparing his book, France was recovering from the Revolution of February 1848. This was the period when France was rapidly turning to complete socialism.  He was studying and debunking each socialist fallacy as it hit the legislature.

Bastiat argued that for the government to organize charity, it would have to disorganize justice. He observed that the natural consequences of making the government responsible for everybody's wellbeing and happiness are a litany of complaints, discontent, and unrest tending to violence and revolution.

(Screen capture from the Guardian video)

The problem of the yellow vests and the perspectives of Frédéric Bastiat are worth looking at because America in 2019 bears a striking resemblance to 1850s France; the socialist arguments from 1850s France are talking points on most of the 691 Democratic presidential candidates' platforms.