Slavery and Tariffs Are Plunder - Frédéric Bastiat, The Law [1850]
Edition used:
The Law, trans. Dean Russell, introduction by Walter E. Williams, foreword by Sheldon Richman (Irvington-on-Hudson NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1998).
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Slavery and Tariffs Are Plunder
What are these two issues? They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer.
Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.
It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime—a sorrowful inheritance from the Old World—should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union. It is indeed impossible to imagine, at the very heart of a society, a more astounding fact than this: The law has come to be an instrument of injustice. And if this fact brings terrible consequences to the United States—where the proper purpose of the law has been perverted only in the instances of slavery and tariffs—what must be the consequences in Europe, where the perversion of the law is a principle; a system?
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