Trego's Mountain Ear

Mia Love joined the majority a week or so back.  She was one of the great success stories of immigrant Americans, born to Haitian immigrants in New York, and becoming the first black Republican woman elected to congress.  No Trump supporter, yet the Republican party grew in a way where she still fit with a party where she was no longer able to win elections. We’ll cover a few quotations from her favorite economist, Frederic Bastiat:

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?

Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim – when he defends himself – as a criminal.

The real cost of the State is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The State has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.

It’s always tempting to do good at someone else’s expense

Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation. This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat: these two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other.

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. 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.

RIP, Mia Love.  It is hard to look at politics through Bastiat’ principles and to continue to be elected.