Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Re: "Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs..."
by
FredericBastiat
on 02/11/2011, 16:13:56 UTC
Then he probably shouldn't run around telling people they don't know the definition of socialism when his is one shared by maybe 0.00001% of the world's population. You can argue over the little details of socialism, how it should be achieved, the proper place of unions, all of that stuff, but the definitions shared by no actual socialists and only fierce opponents who see a socialist lurking in every shadow are most assuredly not what Marx had in mind.

Perhaps I shouldn't use any -ism words at all as they do in fact have many different interpretations by many people. However and notwithstanding that, if your modus operandi is to force a man to relinquish his property for a purpose other than self-defense (or for restitution), you would be stealing, injuring or enslaving. Frederic Bastiat described this as the difference between legal plunder and extralegal plunder.

Legal plunder was where you could legislate laws or statutes which could expropriate another man's property for purposes other than lawful defense. Examples of this would be: government health care, welfare programs, unemployment insurance etc.

Extralegal plunder was more obvious, but neverthess equivalent in its effect. These were things like stealing, murdering, raping, kidnapping, etc.

I'll leave you with one of his quotes as that would be very apropos to this thread, considering the fact it actually began with someone paraphrasing him.

"Collective right, then, has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness, in individual right; and the common force cannot rationally have any other end, or any other mission, than that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted. Thus, as the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty, or the property of another individual—for the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes.

For this perversion of force would be, in one case as in the other, in contradiction to our premises. For who will dare to say that force has been given to us, not to defend our rights, but to annihilate the equal rights of our brethren? And if this be not true of every individual force, acting independently, how can it be true of the collective force, which is only the organized union of isolated forces?

Nothing, therefore, can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense; it is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all."