"Frederic Bastiat once wrote a satirical petition...."

"Frederic Bastiat once wrote a satirical petition to the French parliament on behalf of candle makers and related industries.  He was seeking relief from "ruinous competition of a foreign rival who works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price."  The "foreign rival" he was speaking of was the sun, which was unfairly giving away light for free.  The relief sought was a law requiring the closing of all blinds to shut out the sunlight and thereby stimulate the domestic candle industry.  That is what so many fallacious arguments against free trade amount to." -Page 95 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Economic freedom is based on a simple moral rule..."

"Economic freedom is based on a simple moral rule: everyone has a right to his or her life and property, and no one has the right to deprive anyone of these things.

To some extent, everyone accepts this principle. For instance, anyone going to his neighbor's home an taking his money at gunpoint, regardless of all the wonderful, selfless things he promised to do with it, would be promptly arrested as a thief.

But for some reason it is considered morally acceptable when government does that very thing. We have allowed government to operate according to its own set of moral rules. Frederic Bastiat, one of the great political and economic writers of all time, called this "legal plunder."

Bastiat identified three approaches we could take to such plunder:

1) The few plunder the many.
2) Everybody plunders everybody.
3) Nobody plunders anybody.

We presently follow option number two: everyone seeks to use government to enrich himself at his neighbor's expense. That's why Bastiat called the state "the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

Now here's a radical idea: what if we pursued option number three and decided to stop robbing one another? What if we decided that there was a better, more humane way for people to interact with each other? What if we stopped doing things we would consider morally outrageous if done by private individuals but that we consider perfectly all right when carried out by government in the name of "public policy"? -Page 69 & 70 of The Revolution, A Manifesto