Remembering Law Day - May 1st

Remembering Law Day, May 1st
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.com – Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Today we begin a series of honest and fair news reporting versus politically correct agenda news reporting. You decide. Here is Pepperdine University Economics Professor Gary M. Galles:

“May 1 is Law Day, inaugurated by President Dwight Eisenhower to help “vigilantly guard the great heritage of liberty, justice and equality under the law which our forefathers bequeathed to us.” However, legislation today violates those central principles more than it sustains them. That fact cannot be made clearer than by reading the French political economist Frederic Bastiat’s 1850 classic, “The Law.” Compare the acts of our public servants with Bastiat’s words.

“Each of us has a natural right - from God – to defend his person, his liberty, and his property… the common force that protects this collective right cannot have logically have any other purpose …{I}t cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.”

“No individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others… The same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces.” {There is no} greater evil than… conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”

“Under the pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law takes property from one person and gives it to another… the law has come to be an instrument of injustice.”

“{H}ow is this legal plunder to be identified?... See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and give it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime … When the law itself commits this act that is supposed to suppress … plunder is still committed.” “Try to imagine … a transfer of wealth imposed by force that is not a violation of property.”

“{I}s not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does harm other persons?” “It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights.”

“The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property … Its mission is to protect persons and property… if the law acts in any manner except to protect them, its actions then necessarily violate the liberty of persons and their right to own property.” …

Frederic Bastiat showed that the only just use of law is to defend liberty and people’s voluntary arrangements when given that liberty… On Law Day, we need to reconsider how completely legislation has abandoned that approach.” George H. Kubeck (Refer to Orange County Register, May, 2010)