The Law
The law perverted! The law, and in its wake all the collective forces of the nation, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue an entirely contrary one! The law turned into the tool of every kind of greed instead of its restraint! The law guilty of the very injustice it was meant to punish! If this is truly the case, it is a serious fact, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens.
We receive from God the gift that, so far as we are concerned, contains all others: life, physical, intellectual, and moral life.
But life cannot sustain itself. He who bestowed it has entrusted us with the care of sustaining, developing, and perfecting it. To that end, He has provided us with a collection of wonderful faculties and placed us amid a variety of elements. By applying our faculties to these elements, we take things in and make them our own through the processes of assimilation and appropriation by which life follows its appointed course.
Existence, faculties, and assimilation, in other words, personhood, liberty, and property, constitute the human being. Whatever clever arguments are used to sway the crowd, these three things precede and stand above all human legislation.
People do not have personhood, liberty, and property because they have made laws. On the contrary, it is because personhood, liberty, and property already exist that people make laws.
What, then, is law? As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
Nature, or rather God, has bestowed on every one of us the right to defend our person, liberty, and property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life. Each is completed by the others and cannot be understood without them. For what are our faculties but extensions of our personhood? And what is property but an extension of our faculties?
If every person has the right to defend, even by force, his person, liberty, and property, then a number of people have the right to combine, extend, and organize a common force to provide regularly for this defense.
Collective right, then, has its principle, reason for existence, and lawfulness in individual right. The common force cannot rationally have any end or mission other than that of the individual forces for which it is substituted. Just as an individual’s force cannot lawfully touch another person’s person, liberty, or property, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or classes.
Such a perversion of force would contradict our premises in either case. Who would dare to say that force has been given to us, not to defend our rights, but to annihilate the equal rights of our fellow human beings? And if this is not true of each individual force acting independently, how can it be true of collective force, which is only the organized union of individual forces?
Nothing, therefore, can be more evident than this: the law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It substitutes collective force for individual forces so that it may act within the sphere in which they have a right to act and do what they have a right to do: secure persons, liberties, and properties, maintain each in its right, and cause justice to reign over all.
If a people established on this basis were to exist, it seems to me that order would prevail among them in action as well as in thought. Such a people would have the simplest, most economical, least oppressive, least conspicuous, least burdened with responsibility, most just, and therefore most stable government imaginable, whatever its political form.
Under such an administration, everyone would feel that he possessed both the fullness and the responsibility of his existence. So long as personal safety was assured, labor was free, and the fruits of labor were protected against every unjust attack, no one would have difficulties with the state. When prosperous, we would not have to thank the state for our success. When unfortunate, we would no more think of blaming it for our disasters than our farmers think of blaming it for hail or frost. We would know it only through the priceless blessing of security.
It may further be affirmed that, because the state did not intervene in private affairs, our needs and the means of satisfying them would develop in their natural order. We would not see poor families seeking literary instruction before obtaining bread. We would not see cities populated at the expense of rural districts, nor rural districts at the expense of cities. We would not see those great displacements of capital, labor, and population caused by legislative measures, displacements that make the very sources of existence uncertain and precarious and thus enormously increase the responsibility of governments.
Unfortunately, law is by no means confined to its own domain. Nor has it left its proper sphere merely in a few debatable and unimportant matters. It has done more. It has acted in direct opposition to its proper purpose. It has destroyed its own object. It has been employed to annihilate the justice it ought to have established, to erase the boundary among rights that it was meant to respect. It has placed collective force at the service of those who wish to traffic, without risk or scruple, in the persons, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right so that it may protect it, and lawful defense into a crime so that it may punish it.
How has this perversion of law been accomplished? And what has resulted from it?
The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different causes: naked self-interest and false philanthropy.
Let us speak of the first.
Self-preservation and development are the common aspirations of all people. If everyone enjoyed the free exercise of his faculties and the free disposal of their fruits, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and inevitable.
But people also share another tendency: when they can, they wish to live and develop at one another’s expense. This is no rash accusation arising from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. History bears witness to it through incessant wars, migrations of peoples, priestly oppression, universal slavery, commercial frauds, and the monopolies with which its records abound. This fatal tendency originates in the very constitution of humanity, in that primitive, universal, and unconquerable feeling that drives people toward well-being and makes them seek to escape pain.
A person can derive life and enjoyment only from continual seeking and appropriation, that is, from the continual application of his faculties to objects, or from labor. This is the origin of property.
Yet he may also live and enjoy by seizing and appropriating the products of the faculties of his fellow human beings. This is the origin of plunder.
Since labor is itself painful, and people are naturally inclined to avoid pain, it follows, and history proves, that wherever plunder is less burdensome than labor, plunder prevails. In that situation, neither religion nor morality can prevent it from prevailing.
When, then, does plunder cease? When it becomes more burdensome and more dangerous than labor. It is very clear that the proper aim of law is to oppose the powerful obstacle of collective force to this fatal tendency. All its measures should favor property and oppose plunder.
But law is generally made by one person or one class of people. Since law cannot exist without the sanction and support of a dominant force, it must ultimately place this force in the hands of those who legislate.
This inevitable phenomenon, combined with the fatal tendency that we have said exists in the human heart, explains the almost universal perversion of law. It is easy to understand how, instead of restraining injustice, law becomes its most invincible instrument. According to the legislator’s power, law destroys, for his profit and to varying degrees among the rest of the community, personal independence through slavery, liberty through oppression, and property through plunder.
People naturally rise against injustices of which they are the victims. When plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who perpetrate it, all the plundered classes tend, by peaceful or revolutionary means, to seek some part in making the laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these classes may pursue two very different goals when they seek political rights: they may wish to end legal plunder, or they may wish to participate in it.
Woe to the nation in which this second idea prevails among the masses when they, in their turn, seize legislative power!
Until then, legal plunder has been practiced by the few upon the many, as in countries where the right to legislate is confined to a few hands. But now it becomes universal, and equilibrium is sought through universal plunder. Instead of rooting out the injustice contained in society, people generalize it. As soon as the injured classes recover their political rights, their first thought is not to abolish plunder, which would require enlightenment they cannot possess, but to organize against other classes, and to their own injury, a system of reprisals. It is as though, before justice can reign, everyone must undergo cruel retribution, some for their injustice and others for their ignorance.
It would therefore be impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than the conversion of law into an instrument of plunder.
What would be the consequences of such a perversion? It would take volumes to describe them all. We must be content to identify the most striking.
First, it would erase from everyone’s conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.
No society can exist unless its laws are respected to some degree, and the surest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen faces the cruel choice of losing either his moral sense or his respect for the law, two evils of equal magnitude between which it would be difficult to choose.
It is so much the nature of law to support justice that, in the minds of the masses, the two are one and the same. We all have a strong tendency to regard whatever is lawful as legitimate, so much so that many falsely derive all justice from law. It is enough, then, for law to order and sanction plunder for that plunder to appear just and sacred to many consciences. Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them, but among those who suffer from them. If you raise a doubt about the morality of these institutions, you are immediately told, “You are a dangerous innovator, a utopian, a theorist, a despiser of the laws. You would shake the foundation on which society rests.”
If you lecture on morality or political economy, official bodies will be found to make this request to the government:
“That from now on science be taught not only with exclusive reference to free exchange, that is, to liberty, property, and justice, as it has been until now, but also, and especially, with reference to the facts and legislation contrary to liberty, property, and justice that regulate French industry.
“That, in public lecture halls funded by the treasury, the professor strictly refrain from endangering in the slightest degree the respect due to the laws now in force.”
This request came from the General Council of Manufacturing, Agriculture, and Commerce at its meeting of May 6, 1850.
Thus, if a law exists that sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or plunder, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned. For how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect it inspires? More than that, morality and political economy must be taught in relation to this law, under the assumption that it must be just merely because it is law.
Another effect of this deplorable perversion of law is that it gives exaggerated importance to human passions, political struggles, and politics properly so called.
I could prove this assertion in a thousand ways. By way of illustration, I shall confine myself to applying it to a subject that has recently occupied everyone’s mind: universal suffrage.
Whatever the adherents of Rousseau’s school may think of it, a school that claims to be very far advanced but that I consider twenty centuries behind, universal suffrage, taking the word in its strictest sense, is not one of those sacred dogmas about which examination and doubt are crimes.
Serious objections may be made to it.
First, the word universal conceals a gross sophism. France has 36,000,000 inhabitants. To make the right of suffrage universal, 36,000,000 electors would have to be counted. The broadest system counts only 9,000,000. Three people out of four, then, are excluded, and more than that, they are excluded by the fourth. On what principle is this exclusion founded? On the principle of incapacity. Universal suffrage, then, means universal suffrage for those who are capable. In fact, who are the capable? Are age, sex, and judicial convictions the only conditions to which incapacity is attached?
On looking more closely at the subject, we soon perceive why the right of suffrage depends on a presumption of incapacity. The broadest system differs from the narrowest only in its judgment of the conditions on which incapacity depends. The difference is not one of principle, but of degree.
The reason is that the voter does not act only for himself, but for everyone.
If, as republicans in the Greek and Roman style maintain, the right of suffrage fell to everyone at birth, it would be unjust for adults to prevent women and children from voting. Why are they prevented? Because they are presumed incapable. And why is incapacity grounds for exclusion? Because the voter does not bear alone the responsibility for his vote; because every vote binds and affects the community at large; and because the community has a right to demand some guarantees regarding acts on which its well-being and existence depend.
I know what might be said in answer. I know what might be objected. But this is not the place to exhaust such a controversy. What I wish to observe is that this controversy, like most political questions, agitates, excites, and unsettles nations, but would lose almost all its importance if law had always been what it ought to be.
Indeed, if law were confined to causing all persons, liberties, and properties to be respected; if it were merely the organization of individual right and individual defense; if it were the obstacle, restraint, and punishment opposed to every oppression and every plunder, would we, as citizens, be likely to dispute much about the greater or lesser universality of suffrage? Would it be likely to endanger that greatest of advantages, public peace? Would the excluded classes not quietly await their turn? Would the enfranchised classes be very jealous of their privilege? And is it not clear that, since everyone’s interest would be the same, some could act without causing much inconvenience to others?
But suppose the fatal principle is introduced that, under the pretext of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, law may take from one group to give to another. Suppose it may help itself to wealth acquired by all classes in order to increase the wealth of one class, whether farmers, manufacturers, shipowners, artists, or actors. Then certainly no class could fail, with reason, to claim the right to lay its hand on the law, furiously demand the right to vote and hold office, and overturn society rather than fail to obtain it. Even beggars and vagrants will prove that they have an indisputable title to it. They will say:
“We never buy wine, tobacco, or salt without paying the tax, and part of that tax is given by law as benefits and gratuities to people richer than we are. Others use the law to create an artificial rise in the price of bread, meat, iron, or cloth. Since everyone trades in law for his own profit, we would like to do the same. We would like to make it produce the right to assistance, which is the poor person’s plunder. To accomplish this, we must be voters and legislators so that we may organize alms for our class on a large scale, as you have organized protection for yours on a large scale. Do not tell us that you will take up our cause and throw us 600,000 francs to keep us quiet, as though giving us a bone to gnaw. We have other claims, and in any event we wish to negotiate for ourselves, as other classes have negotiated for themselves!”
How can this argument be answered? Yes, so long as it is admitted that law may be diverted from its true mission and may violate property instead of securing it, everyone will want to make law, either to defend himself against plunder or to organize it for his own profit. The political question will always be harmful, dominant, and all-absorbing. In a word, there will be fighting around the door of the Legislative Palace. The struggle will be no less furious within it. To be convinced of this, it is hardly necessary to observe what happens in the chambers of France and England. It is enough to understand the question.
Is there any need to prove that this odious perversion of law is a perpetual source of hatred and discord, and that it even tends toward social disorganization? Look at the United States. There is no country in the world where law is kept more closely within its proper domain, which is to secure everyone’s liberty and property. Therefore, there is no country in the world where social order appears to rest on a more solid foundation. Nevertheless, even in the United States there are two questions, and only two, that have endangered political order from the beginning. What are they? Slavery and tariffs. These are precisely the only two questions in which, contrary to the general spirit of that republic, law has assumed the character of a plunderer. Slavery is a legally sanctioned violation of the rights of the person. Protection is a violation committed by law against property rights. It is certainly remarkable that, amid so many other debates, this double legal scourge, the sorrowful inheritance of the Old World, should be the only one that can, and perhaps will, cause the Union to break apart. Indeed, no more astounding fact can be conceived within society than this: law has become an instrument of injustice. And if this fact produces such formidable consequences in the United States, where it is only an exception, what must its consequences be among us in Europe, where it is a principle and a system?
Montalembert, adopting the thought of a famous proclamation by Carlier, said, “We must make war on socialism.” By socialism, according to Charles Dupin’s definition, he meant plunder.
But what plunder did he mean? There are two kinds: illegal plunder and legal plunder.
As for illegal plunder, such as theft or fraud, which is defined, provided for, and punished by the penal code, I do not think it can be adorned with the name of socialism. It is not this that systematically threatens the foundations of society. Besides, the war against this kind of plunder did not wait for a signal from Montalembert or Carlier. It has continued since the beginning of the world. Long before the February Revolution, and long before socialism appeared, France conducted it with all the apparatus of magistrates, police, gendarmerie, prisons, dungeons, and scaffolds. The law itself conducts this war, and in my opinion it is desirable that law should always maintain this attitude toward plunder.
But this is not always the case. Law sometimes takes the plunderer’s side. Sometimes it commits the plunder with its own hands, saving the beneficiaries the shame, danger, and scruple. Sometimes it places all the apparatus of magistrates, police, gendarmerie, and prisons at the plunderer’s service and treats the plundered person, when he defends himself, as the criminal. In short, there is legal plunder, and this is no doubt what Montalembert meant.
This plunder may be only an exceptional blemish in a people’s legislation. In that case, the best course, without so many speeches and lamentations, is to abolish it as quickly as possible despite the outcries of interested parties. But how can it be identified? Very easily. See whether the law takes from some people what belongs to them and gives it to others to whom it does not belong. See whether, for one citizen’s profit and to others’ injury, the law performs an act that this citizen could not perform without committing a crime. Abolish such a law without delay. It is not merely an injustice; it is a fertile source of further injustices because it invites reprisals. If you are not careful, the exceptional case will spread, multiply, and become systematic. No doubt the beneficiary will protest loudly. He will assert his acquired rights. He will say that the state is bound to protect and encourage his industry. He will plead that it is good for the state to become rich so that it may spend more and shower wages on poor workers. Take care not to listen to this sophistry, for legal plunder becomes systematic precisely through the systematizing of these arguments.
And this is what has happened. The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at one another’s expense, to generalize plunder under the pretense of organizing it. Legal plunder may be practiced in infinitely many ways. Hence come infinitely many plans for organization: tariffs, protection, benefits, gratuities, subsidies, progressive taxation, free instruction, the right to labor, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to assistance, the right to instruments of labor, free credit, social workshops, and so on. All these plans, taken together with what they have in common, legal plunder, receive the name socialism.
Now that socialism is defined in this way and formed into a body of doctrine, what war can you wage against it except a war of doctrine? You find this doctrine false, absurd, and abominable. Refute it. This will be easier the more false, absurd, and abominable it is. Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out of your legislation every particle of socialism that may have crept into it. This will be no small task.
Montalembert has been accused of wishing to use brute force against socialism. He should be cleared of this charge, for he plainly said, “The war we must wage against socialism must be compatible with law, honor, and justice.”
But how does Montalembert fail to see that he is placing himself in a vicious circle? You would oppose law to socialism. But socialism invokes the law. It aspires to legal, not illegal, plunder. Like monopolists of every kind, it wants to make law itself an instrument. Once it has law on its side, how will you turn law against it? How will you place it under the power of your courts, your gendarmes, and your prisons? What will you do then? You wish to prevent it from taking part in making laws. You would keep it outside the Legislative Palace. I venture to predict that you will not succeed so long as legal plunder remains the basis of the legislation within.
This question of legal plunder absolutely must be settled, and there are only three possible solutions:
1. The few plunder the many. 2. Everyone plunders everyone else. 3. Nobody plunders anybody.
Partial plunder, universal plunder, or absence of plunder: among these we must choose. Law can produce only one of these results.
Partial plunder. This is the system that prevailed as long as the electoral privilege was partial. It is the system to which people resort in order to avoid the invasion of socialism.
Universal plunder. We have been threatened with this system since the electoral privilege became universal, the masses having conceived the idea of making law on the principle followed by the legislators who preceded them.
Absence of plunder. This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, reconciliation, and common sense, which I shall proclaim with all the strength of my lungs, inadequate though it is, until the day of my death.
And, in all sincerity, can anything more be required of law? Can law, whose necessary sanction is force, reasonably be employed for anything beyond securing everyone’s right? I defy anyone to remove it from this sphere without perverting it and consequently turning force against right. Since this is the most fatal and illogical social perversion imaginable, it must be admitted that the true and much-sought solution to the social problem is contained in these simple words: law is organized justice.
It is important to observe that organizing justice by law, which is to say by force, excludes the idea of organizing by law or force any manifestation of human activity, whether labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, instruction, the fine arts, or religion. Any one of these organizations would inevitably destroy that essential organization of justice. How can we imagine force encroaching on citizens’ liberty without infringing justice and thereby acting against its proper purpose?
Here I encounter the most popular prejudice of our time. It is not considered enough that law should be just; it must also be philanthropic. It is not enough that it guarantee every citizen the free and harmless exercise of his faculties as applied to his physical, intellectual, and moral development. It is expected to extend well-being, instruction, and morality directly throughout the nation. This is the attractive side of socialism.
But, I repeat, these two missions of law contradict each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot be both free and unfree. Lamartine once wrote to me, “Your doctrine is only half of my program. You have stopped at liberty; I proceed to fraternity.” I answered, “The second half of your program will destroy the first.” In fact, I cannot separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot conceive of fraternity legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed and justice legally trampled underfoot. Legal plunder has two roots. One, as we have already seen, lies in human self-interest; the other lies in false philanthropy.
Before proceeding, I think I ought to explain what I mean by plunder.
I do not use the word, as it often is used, in a vague, undefined, relative, or metaphorical sense. I use it in its scientific sense to express the opposite of property. When a portion of wealth passes, without the owner’s consent and without compensation, from the hands of the person who acquired it to one who did not create it, whether by force or deception, I say that property is violated and plunder committed. I say that this is precisely what law ought always and everywhere to repress. If law itself performs the act it ought to repress, I say that plunder is still committed, and from a social point of view under aggravated circumstances. In this case, however, the person who profits from the plunder is not responsible for it. The responsibility belongs to the law, the legislator, and society itself, and here lies the political danger.
It is regrettable that the word is offensive. I have searched in vain for another, because I would never wish, especially now, to add an inflammatory word to our disagreements. Therefore, whether or not I am believed, I declare that I do not mean to accuse anyone’s intentions or morality. I am attacking an idea I believe false, a system that appears unjust to me. This is so independent of intentions that each of us profits from the system without wishing to and suffers from it without knowing the cause. Anyone who questioned the sincerity of protectionism, socialism, or even communism, which are one and the same plant at three different stages of growth, would have to be writing under the influence of party spirit or fear. All that can be said is that plunder is more visible through its partiality in protectionism and through its universality in communism. It follows that, of the three systems, socialism is still the vaguest and least defined, and consequently the most sincere.
If protection in France were granted only to a single class, to engineers for example, its plundering character would be so absurdly obvious that it could not sustain itself. Thus we see all protected trades combine, make common cause, and even recruit others so as to appear to embrace the mass of national labor. They instinctively feel that plunder is obscured when it is generalized.
However that may be, to conclude that one root of legal plunder lies in false philanthropy is clearly to leave intentions out of the question.
With this understanding, let us examine the value, origin, and tendency of the popular aspiration that claims to achieve the general good through general plunder.
The socialists say, since law organizes justice, why should it not organize labor, instruction, and religion?
Why? Because it could not organize labor, instruction, and religion without disorganizing justice.
Remember that law is force and that, consequently, the domain of law cannot lawfully extend beyond the domain of force.
When law and force keep a person within the bounds of justice, they impose on him nothing but a negation. They merely oblige him to abstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personhood, liberty, nor property. They only protect the personhood, liberty, and property of others. They remain on the defensive and defend everyone’s equal right. They fulfill a mission whose harmlessness is evident, usefulness palpable, and legitimacy indisputable. This is so true that, as a friend once remarked to me, to say that the aim of law is to cause justice to reign is not strictly exact. It would be more accurate to say, the aim of law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is not justice but injustice that has an existence of its own. Justice results from the absence of injustice.
But when law, through its necessary agent, force, imposes a form of labor, a method or subject of instruction, a creed, or a form of worship, it is no longer negative. It acts positively on people. It substitutes the legislator’s will for their own will and the legislator’s initiative for their own initiative. They no longer need to consult, compare, or foresee; the law does all that for them. Their intellect becomes useless baggage. They cease to be human beings and lose their personhood, liberty, and property.
Try to imagine a form of labor imposed by force that does not violate liberty, or a transfer of wealth imposed by force that does not violate property. If you cannot reconcile these things, you are bound to conclude that law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.
When a politician surveys society from the seclusion of his office, he is struck by the inequality before him. He mourns the sufferings that fall to the lot of so many of our fellow human beings, sufferings made still more sorrowful by their contrast with luxury and wealth.
Perhaps he ought to ask whether this social condition has been caused by the plunder of ancient times through conquest and by the plunder of later times through law. He ought to ask whether, given everyone’s aspiration toward well-being and perfection, the reign of justice would not be sufficient to produce the greatest possible progress and the greatest degree of equality compatible with individual responsibility, through which God assigns just consequences for virtue and vice.
He never considers this. His mind turns toward combinations, arrangements, and legal or artificial organizations. He seeks the remedy by perpetuating and exaggerating what caused the evil.
Apart from justice, which we have seen is only a negation, is there any one of these legal arrangements that does not contain the principle of plunder?
You say, “There are people who have no money,” and you appeal to the law. But law is not a fountain that fills itself and supplies every stream independently of society. Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen or class unless other citizens and classes have been forced to send it there. If everyone draws only the equivalent of what he contributed, your law is not a plunderer, it is true, but it does nothing for people who lack money and does not promote equality. It can be an instrument of equalization only insofar as it takes from one person to give to another, and then it is an instrument of plunder. Examine in this light tariff protection, incentive prizes, the right to profit, the right to labor, the right to assistance, the right to instruction, progressive taxation, free credit, and social workshops. At the bottom you will always find legal plunder and organized injustice.
You say, “There are people who lack knowledge,” and you appeal to the law. But law is not a torch that sheds light of its own. It operates over a society in which some people have knowledge and others do not, some wish to learn and others are willing to teach. It can do only one of two things. It may allow this kind of transaction to operate freely, letting this need satisfy itself freely. Or it may force people’s wills in the matter and take enough from some of them to pay professors commissioned to instruct others without charge. In the second case, there must be a violation of liberty and property: legal plunder.
You say, “Here are people who lack morality or religion,” and you appeal to the law. But law is force. Need I say how violent and absurd an undertaking it is to introduce force into these matters?
As a result of its systems and efforts, socialism, despite all its self-satisfaction, can scarcely avoid perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It cleverly disguises the monster from others and even from itself under the attractive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association. Because we do not ask so much of law, because we ask it only for justice, socialism supposes that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association, and it brands us individualists.
We can assure its advocates that we reject not natural organization, but forced organization.
Not free association, but the forms of association they would impose on us.
Not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity.
Not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility.
Socialism, like the old politics from which it comes, confuses government with society. Thus, whenever we object to something being done by government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education, so we are against education altogether. We object to a state religion, so we would have no religion at all. We object to equality produced by the state, so we oppose equality, and so on. Socialists might as well accuse us of wishing people not to eat because we object to the state’s cultivation of grain.
