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“ ”But when James Goodfellow hands over a hundred sous to a government official to receive no service for it or even to be subjected to inconveniences, it is as if he were to give his money to a thief.
About Frédéric Bastiat
Frédéric Bastiat (30 June 1801 – 24 December 1850) was an early free-market economist and classical liberal French author.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Additional quotes by Frédéric Bastiat
The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.
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? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority.
For what are our faculties, but the extension of our personality? and what is property, but an extension of our faculties?