I have read Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law more than five times — a mere forty pages which allow for his ability to condense a powerful message in such a short space.
Bastiat’s central argument is well known: law is meant to protect life, liberty, and property — rights which he believes exist prior to and independently of the state. In his words, “life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws”. On the contrary, life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” For Bastiat, any law that goes beyond this protective role and starts redistributing wealth is nothing more than “legal plunder.”
Yet, despite the force of Bastiat’s reasoning, one fundamental question remains: If nature truly endows us with life, liberty, and property, why are we left to create law ourselves?
Bastiat never answers this question. He assumes that natural rights are self-evident but nature does not enforce property; nature does not stop violence; nature does not give us courts or judges. The idea that rights exist “naturally” without law may be comforting, but in reality, there is another basic truth: without human-made law, rights are meaningless.
Contrary to what Bastiat asserts, law is not just a passive protector of pre-existing rights; it is what makes rights real and enforceable.
Thomas Hobbes saw this with brutal clarity. Without law, he said, human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Without a sovereign authority to enforce rules, there are no effective rights — only competing wills and violence.
We often act as if rights, facts, and truths are given, when in reality they are human constructs — shaped by the very legal systems we invent to define and enforce them.
