Today we are going to discuss the law and why it is important to our lives in America today.

Frederic Bastiat was a French economic theorist who died in 1850 at the age of 49 apparently from tuberculosis. His most famous book, The Law, has been the basis of much free market thinking over the years. His last book, Economic Harmonies, was an attempt to explain the workings of the social order under liberty, and how this capacity of people to cooperate is the source of civilization.

In “The Law” he addresses not economic theory but political theory. He asks, what is the law? He argues that it came after liberty and after property. It did not create them. The purpose of law is to serve to bolster the institutions that make social and economic life work. It is the servant, not the master of liberty and property.

His book opens with this statement: “The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish! If this is true, it is a serious fact, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow citizens to it.”