Two cheers to Mitt Romney for his performance last week at
the NAACP convention in Houston. “Any policy that lifts up and
honors the family is going to be good for the country and that must
be our goal,” Romney said. “As president I will promote strong
families — and I will defend traditional marriage.” That was the
big-applause line. More tellingly, however, he also told this
potentially hostile audience: “As you may have heard from my
opponent, I am also a strong believer in the free enterprise
system. I believe it can bring change where so many well-meaning
government programs have failed. I’ve never heard anyone look
around an impoverished neighborhood and say, ‘You know, there’s too
much free enterprise around here. Too many shops, too many jobs,
too many people putting money in the bank.’”
Even so, this was — as NAACP President and CEO Benjamin
Todd Jealous said — “a missed opportunity.” It was a missed
opportunity to deliver a crushing blow to the intellectual claptrap
that passes for enlightened thinking in the NAACP — and not just
there, but in the larger nexus of elitist thinking to be found in
our nation’s college campuses, the mainstream media, Hollywood,
and, not least, the Obama White House.
Who better to deliver that much-needed blow than Frederic
Bastiat, the great free-market French economist who loved liberty
and spoke out against “socialism” — which he defined as “legalized
plunder”? Bastiat died 162 years ago — on December 24, 1850. But
his words are as timely today as they were back then (two years
after the publication of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”). Long
before Hayek, Bastiat recognized government as the greatest single
threat to liberty. He wrote:
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of
ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it:
tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements,
progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed
profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of
labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a
whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute
socialism.
Bastiat hated the arrogance of the progressive (i.e.
progress as defined and controlled by government), let’s-play-God
mindset: “Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed
into social combinations. To them… the relationship between persons
and the legislator appears to be the same as the relationship
between the clay and the potter.” And again he said of the
do-gooders’ belief in exalted government: “Ah, you miserable
creatures! You who think you are so great! You who judge humanity
to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don’t you
reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.”
Here then is how the acerbic Frenchman might have addressed
the NAACP convention if he had awoken from a prolonged Rip van
Winkle-like slumber.
*****
Good morning NAACP! I speak to you across a gulf of many years
and yet I can’t help noticing how much today’s world resembles that
of the one that I departed more than a century and a half ago. Did
you know that Alexis de Tocqueville and I were both deputies in the
Constituent Assembly that was formed in Paris following the
revolution of 1848? This is how Tocqueville described in the scene
on the streets:
On my return (to Paris), I found in the capital a hundred
thousand armed workmen formed into regiments, out of work, dying of
hunger, but with their minds crammed with vain theories and
visionary hopes. I saw society cut into two: those who possessed
nothing, united in common greed; those who possessed something,
united in a common terror.
Yes, we had demonstrations and protests in Paris and other
French cities that were not dissimilar to the ones that happened
all over the United States and other countries through the “Occupy”
movement. But I see that you, Monsieur Jealous (president of the
NAACP), went out of your way to express your sympathy — and indeed
your solidarity — with the bands of people who “occupied” public
parks and spaces. You said:
We are encouraged by the broad national support and by the great
diversity of Americans who have been participating in the Occupy
Wall Street campaign. The movement and the peaceful (sic)
protesters who are part of the campaign share many of the goals as
the NAACP… and (we) share the protesters’ concerns about the
growing disparity of access to wealth in America, and the decline
of economic opportunity for poor and middle-class Americans. For
over 102 years we have supported the policies which create,
preserve, and expand living wage jobs, increase economic
opportunity, and protect the right of every American to build and
retain wealth and equity.
With those words, my friends, I can tell you that you are
embarked upon a self-destructive course. Like the “occupiers,” you
want to use the collective force of the state in order to take from
some and give to others. Almost all of the policies that your
organization supports — in calling for bigger and more active
government — are profoundly counter-productive. They will not
create, preserve, and expand jobs. To the contrary, they will
destroy jobs and condemn this great country to the unhappy fate of
never-ending economic stagnation and unending political and social
turmoil. Like Sampson in the Bible, you will pull the temple down
on your own head.
We are all struck by the spectacle of inequality in society. No
one wants to see poverty in the midst of plenty. But what causes
this inequality? Our attempt to remedy an evil may have the
perverse effect of perpetuating the very thing that caused the evil
in the first place: what I have called “legal plunder.”
You and I expect the law to protect us against criminal
plunder — where others deprive us of what is rightfully ours
through the use of force or deception. But there is the other kind
of plunder — legal plunder — when the government itself
is responsible for violating our property rights in the pursuit of
wrong-headed social policies that undermine the ability of people
to think and act on their own. In this case, the state has
converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder.
We must face up to the realities of the human
condition.
On the good side, self-preservation and self-development are
common aspirations among all people. Man is well-equipped to
satisfy his wants through the ceaseless application of his
faculties to natural resources.
On the not-so-good side, there is another tendency that is
common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper
at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. The annals of
history bear witness to this ancient truth. It is to blame for
incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, slavery,
dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies.
Forgive me if I quote from my own book, The Law (which
indeed I already have in several places). You will not find it on
the tables outside this great hall, but it is easily accessible on
the Internet. In that book, I wrote of The Choice Before
Us, saying:
The question of legal plunder must be settled once and for all,
and there are only three ways to settle it:
1. The few plunder the many.
2. Everybody plunders everybody.
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.
Limited legal plunder: This system prevailed when the
right to vote was restricted.
Universal legal plunder: We have been threatened with
this system since the franchise was made universal. The newly
franchised majority has decided to formulate law on the same
principle of legal plunder that was used by their predecessors when
the voted was limited.
No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice,
peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my
death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my
lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate). [Note to the
reader: Bastiat wrote these words knowing that he was dying of
tuberculosis. Within a year, he was dead.]
You know which way I would choose. If everyone enjoyed the
unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the
fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless,
uninterrupted, and unfailing. That is what I believe.
Dare I hope that some of you might be persuaded to join me in
this belief?
And so, my friends, I will just say in closing:
Let freedom ring!
*****
An afterthought: In the context of this article, it is worth
noting that Bastiat, a close friend and correspondent of Richard
Cobden, was a major figure in the anti-slavery movement as well as
the free trade movement in the time period leading up the American
Civil War. Ever the champion of freedom and liberty, he called
slavery “the most shameful traffic in which human beings have ever
engaged.”
