Property and Law
What is the relationship between Law and Property? Is property a creation of the law, or, on the contrary, the law is the one which derives its own existence from the existence of property? What are the consequences that follow, in each case, from the answer to this question? In Propriété et Loi – probably the must succinct expression of the fundamental ideas of the famous French economist – Frédéric Bastiat exposes, in a way which in contemporary terms is very similar to public choice school analyses, the social unrest and disorder produced by the idea that property is an artificial institution, created, maintained and defined by statue law, while at the same time he demystifies the fatal propensity of all the adversary of a private property order towards what Friedrich von Hayek will later describe as „social constructivism”.
The State
The French Liberal School, founded by Jean-Baptiste Say, had in Frédéric Bastiat, at the beginning of the 19th century, probably the most brilliant exposer of economic science and the principles of a free society of all times. Written in the revolutionary year of 1848 in the form of a pamphlet, the author’s preferred literary genre, as a reply to the first modern socialist political program, L‘État can be considered an introduction to Bastiat’s later works, La loi, his treaty of political philosophy, and Harmonies économiques, his treaty of political economy. It’s also the place where Bastiat gives his famous definition of the State :
“The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else”.
War, Peace and the State
What is the consistent libertarian view on war? Rothbard solves this dilemma in the manner of the Austrian School: first he shows what the libertarian view should logically be on the conflict between two persons and on it he builds the analysis of war. Doing so, he also sheds light on the state's inner affinity to war and explains why in our modern era of advanced etatism the weapons of mass destruction are pervasive. Conclusion: if we want peace we should abolish the state.
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