Our Government Is Populated By Perverts

In 1848, French economist and statesman, Frederic Bastiat wrote, “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

I would also add that the state has a habit – particularly lately — of perverting the meaning of words and the word of law to suit its own aims.

I served 22 years in the United States Army and come from a family of service to this nation, as my dad served in the Army in World War II, my older brother in Vietnam as a Marine, and now my nephew as the second Army officer and the fourth in the lineage of West combat veterans. To me, that’s the definition of patriotism, but not so in the case of our progressive socialist President Obama.

As they do so often, liberal progressives work hard to redefine language, now to include the meaning of patriotism. The new poll-tested term from the Democrats is “economic patriotism.” What does that mean? It’s patriotic to pay very high taxes.

As reported by CNBC, “Washington is as cynical a place as you will find on earth but President Barack Obama’s latest attack on corporate “deserters” in a speech in Los Angeles and an interview with CNBC’s Steve Liesman sets a new bar.”

“Obama brought the full weight of the Oval Office to the issue of U.S. companies acquiring sizable stakes in foreign firms in order to reduce their U.S. tax burden, saying doing so is “neither fair nor is it something that’s going to be good for the country over the long-term.” Obama added, “If you are doing business here, if you are basically an American company but you are simply changing your mailing address in order to avoid paying taxes then you are really not doing right by the country and the American people.”

However, is Obama’s term “economic patriotism,” only a tool for his political ideological advancement, and really more like economic tyranny? Could it be that Obama in his purely socialist sense is violating the most basic principle of The Law as first outlined by Frederic Bastiat? Does Obama fail to realize that government exists not to punish entrepreneurial advancement but to enable it, and in so doing prevent government itself from violating the fundamental premise of The Law?

I’d like to offer a simple tutorial to President Obama — and to you as well – regarding this key premise about which early 19th century French economist and philosopher, Frederic Bastiat, wrote in his simple essay, The Law.

This brief but prescient writing truly affirmed the relationship of law to the individual. Bastiat advanced the idea that the purpose of law is the defense of life, liberty, and property — the seminal concept defined by classical liberal theorist, John Locke, and the fundamental premise of our unalienable rights, as Jefferson articulated in the Declaration of Independence. The law, Bastiat says is, “the collective organization of the individual right of lawful defense.”

But just so my collectivist socialist friends don’t get all excited, this is how Bastiat defined the collective organization: “The principle of collective right — its reasoning for existence, its lawfulness — is based on individual right.”

So the purpose of the law — this collective organization — is the protection of individual rights. Jefferson referred to the existence of government as based on the “consent of the governed.” However, what is it that perverts The Law’s simple purpose? It is what Bastiat referred to as “lawful plunder” — some have called it legal plunder – when the class of people who indeed make the law (legislation), or even those sworn to uphold the law (executive) decide in turn to plunder.

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