The law (justice) can never be philanthropic. It cannot guarantee property of any kind to anyone because the law has no property to give. The law does not create property. The Law does not summon property out of thin air-where none previously existed. The Law can only take from someone else what is theirs.
It therefore behooves those charged with writing and managing the law (and more importantly those who elect or appoint the stewards) to ensure that philanthropy is not the foundation of the States interest. The only way to fulfill that interest is through the progressive accumulation of other people’s property under the cover of legalized plunder. The only way for the law to be philanthropic is to legalize theft.
Those who try to justify this theft (legal plunder) by filtering it through the lens of the State are lying to you. They are using you to advance some other agenda. Because in the absence of any government at all common sense tells us that in arrangements between two or more men, you have no right to liberty or happiness at the expense of the other. This rule does not change when there are two men, three men, or three hundred million. Peace demands that we acknowledge the individual, the individual right to engage in labor or commerce, and to accumulate the benefits of such enterprise whatever they may be as long as they do not deny any other individual the opportunity to do the same.
So you are not (cannot be) entitled to liberty, nor happiness, at the expense of another. Your personal welfare is not an occupational responsibility of the state nor should it be. To rely at all on such a scheme as state welfare (in any form) is simply ill advised. At any point, a State which creates laws to arbitrarily deny the property rights of others so that it might enrich someone else can just as easily change the law to deny property rights to the recipients of such largesse; a power that you probably gave them and will insist was fair, just, and equal right up until you found yourself the object of their enforcement.
There is nothing right, or equal about this. It becomes nothing more than a series of random acts of legalized theft to secure political power by making some class or classes of people dependent on those writing the laws and operating the bureaucracies created to manage the legal plunder. It enshrines in the culture the need to legislate your own advantage above others such that you are no longer voting for equality, or rights, or the rule of law. You are not voting to defend equality of opportunity, you are voting to secure your own personal advantage directly or by proxy, at the expense of another, by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. To “spare the beneficiaries the shame, danger, and scruple which their acts would otherwise involve.” And you do this because you have been convinced that the law can be philanthropic. You have been convinced by wretched people that everyone else is like them. That the only hope is to make the law philanthropic. But it can never be. Philanthropy is to freely give for the benefit of others without any expectation of recompense. Law works by force, in this case to deny the rights of others to satisfy “rights” manufactured to justify the taking.
Law does not exist to make any life more prosperous. It does not even exist to create subsistence. It exists to ensure that others (including those who would write the law) do not deny you the opportunity to make yourself prosperous becasue prosperity is a choice, both what defines it–for it will vary from person to person–and how you go about achieving it, or not achieving it. That is your choice. The Law cannot make this choice for you unless it acts to inhibit equal opportunity. If and where there are laws that deny you that opportunity, you should act not to deny others of their lawfully acquired property or vote to give yourself some advantage, you should instead act to remove barriers to participation, including barriers you have erected yourself, that having nothing whatsoever to do with the law.
As for the notion of promises made, they are probably promises you made to yourself or allowed yourself to believe, through the force of law and legal plunder, at the expense of someone else. And since someone else has used legal plunder at your expense you believe yourself entitled to the same. But that is just turning thief to make up for being robbed. You chose to believe in the impossible. You elected to sustain the fraud.
Phrases in Italics are direct quotes from Bastiat’s “The Law.”
