The central human motive force – self-interest – can lead either to a harmonious free-market society where a minimal government rigorously protects property rights or to a society where plunder is the norm and is enshrined in the law. Both of these systems, in turn, direct the self-interest motive further to either beneficial or harmful ends. This paper shall next examine Bastiat's understanding of self-interest's function within the systems of free markets and of legal plunder.
 

Self Interest in a Free-Market Society

          Bastiat devoted his 1845 work, Economic Harmonies, to explaining how the market coordinates individual desires and activities to lead to prosperity for all. He observed that a city as populous as Paris can get enough food to sustain all of its inhabitants without any central direction: "Remarkably, that regularity is not designed or maintained by any grand master. It results from the acts of countless individuals looking after their own interests." (Richman, p. 10) Paris can get fed, and all other social needs provided, without government involvement. To convey this idea, Bastiat first needed to expose the conflation – common from ancient times to the present day – between society and government. Instead of the two being equivalent, society is "the spontaneous ordering of people interacting and voluntarily exchanging their goods" (Barry, p. 21). Thus, just because a given service, practice, or commodity is necessary for the survival of a society does not imply that government needs to provide it. Self-interested individuals recognize the importance of the good in question and voluntarily arrange for its provision. Provided that these arrangements are entirely consensual, they are always more effective than government provision: Bastiat believed that "there is an inevitable harmony in the world if only politicians would get out of the way and allow free individuals to coordinate their activities subject to a minimum of rules (derived from natural law)" (Barry, p. 19).

          The power of self-interest as a human motive explains why private economic action is more effective than government action. Self-interested individuals are faced with a world where actions not only have direct and immediately visible primary consequences, but also indirect secondary effects removed in time:
 

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

          To be effective in their actions, individuals must learn to recognize secondary effects. "Two very different masters teach" man to take secondary consequences into account: "experience and foresight. Experience teaches efficaciously but brutally. It instructs us all in the effects of an act by making us feel them." Once individuals have had disappointing experiences due to their failure to take secondary consequences into account, they will change their actions to adjust for what they have learned – because they wish to fulfill their self-interested desires effectively. To ease the pains of the learning process, Bastiat advises economic actors "to replace this rude teacher with one more gentle: foresight." As a teacher of economic principles, Bastiat himself hoped to increase the foresight with which individuals acted to fulfill their aspirations.

          In a free-market system, however, foresight is a natural tendency for individuals – who are free to change their actions on the basis of their improved information about the world. Because each individual is responsible for his own actions on the free market, his success will depend directly on the efficacy with which he foresees secondary consequences: "[u]nder such an administration, everyone would understand that he possessed all the privileges as well as all the responsibilities of his existence." An individual thus free and responsible knows that he has only himself to praise for his successes or to blame for his failures: "No one would have any argument with government, provided that his person was respected, his labor was free, and the fruits of his labor were protected against all unjust attack." The government would not be accused of bearing responsibility for individual misfortunes, any more "than would the farmers blame the state because of hail or frost." Thus, Bastiat thinks that a free-market society would also have a stable and well-respected government to which people would be grateful for its services in protecting against plunder. No considerations besides the effectiveness with which the government protected individual rights would affect the government's reputation or threaten it with overthrow and revolution.
 

In a free-market system, self-interest would lead individuals to prioritize their wants and objectives in a logical manner. We would not see poor families seeking literary instruction before they have 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 the great displacements of capital, labor, and population that are caused by legislative decisions.

          Most individuals will, from experience and foresight, come to understand what is necessary for their preservation and which necessities, comforts, and opportunities of life depend on which others. This prioritizing will lead to the greatest possible prosperity, the most equally distributed prosperity, and the greatest happiness – a claim Bastiat supports with empirical evidence:
 

Which countries contain the most peaceful, the most moral, and the happiest people? Those people are found in the countries where the law least interferes with private affairs; where government is least felt; where the individual has the greatest scope, and free opinion the greatest influence; where administrative powers are fewest and simplest; where taxes are lightest and most nearly equal, and popular discontent the least excited and the least justifiable; where individuals and groups most actively assume their responsibilities, and, consequently, where the morals of admittedly imperfect human beings are constantly improving…

          In The Law, Bastiat considers England, Holland, Switzerland, and the United States during his time to have exhibited the above characteristics. He showed a link between the freedom of the economy in a society and the prevalence of virtue among its inhabitants. Left to their own devices and freed from the threat of plunder by a just government and system of laws, self-interested individuals have every natural impulse to improve morally and to prosper.
 

Self-Interest in a Society of Legalized Plunder

          In a society where plunder is enshrined in the law, however, self-interest will motivate individuals to undertake actions which exacerbate the occurrence of legal plunder. If the law authorizes plunder, wrote Bastiat, the plundered individuals will wish to enter the legislative arena and change the law: "According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it." Bastiat offers a society imperiled by plunder a way out of its predicament through the economic and moral enlightenment of individuals. Absent that enlightenment, however, it is far less costly and more lucrative for these new entrants into law-making to perpetuate the plunder and merely redirect it than it is for them to abolish legalized plunder altogether. If the suffrage is extended to the plundered classes, it will hence result in more plunder, not less – a tendency Bastiat observed in France, where the suffrage was extended to the bourgeoisie after the July 1830 Revolution and to the working classes after the 1848 Revolution while the scope of government redistribution, coercion, and taxation only ballooned. Bastiat explains that "[i]nstead of rooting out the injustices found in society, [the formerly plundered classes] make these injustices general. As soon as the plundered classes gain political power, they establish a system of reprisals against other classes. They do not abolish legal plunder." Thus, legalized plunder is self-reinforcing: it draws into government the plundered classes, who further amplify the amount of legalized plunder.

          A government that legalizes plunder attracts a variety of rent-seekers. Bastiat noted that "[b]ecause of its power to tax and coerce, [the state] became the main agent of plunder, and it naturally attracted people who wanted an extra-market income" (Barry, p. 21). Once the government engages in redistributive activities, the rent-seekers see an opportunity and grasp it. The rent-seekers – including associations and combinations of industries, workers, and other special-interest constituencies – wish to direct the law "to prevent rivals from competing, to restrict the domestic and foreign trading opportunities of other consumers in the society, and therefore to steal the wealth of one's neighbors" (Ebeling, p. 30). The rent-seekers advise government to engage in such regulation, and government officials are all too eager to oblige. Roche cites Bastiat on this tendency: "Alas! The state is only too ready to follow such diabolical advice; for it is composed of cabinet ministers, of bureaucrats, of men, in short, who, like all men, carry in their hearts the desire, and always enthusiastically seize the opportunity, to see their wealth and influence grow" (Roche, p. 147). In a redistributive state, the government officials can increase their own power over men by indulging the rent-seekers; they will follow their self-interest to do so where the law allows them.

          Any time the law and the scope of government are extended beyond the essential protective functions of the minimal state to pursue the goal of "equalizing" the distribution of property, rent-seeking will result, since "[t]he law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder." The law can either protect the property rights of all, or it can deprive some of property to fulfill the positive ambitions of others; the second function necessarily undercuts the first. For Bastiat, the test for seeing whether legal plunder occurs is simple: "See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives 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."

          The consequences of legalized plunder for social and political stability are devastating: "The sources of our existence are made uncertain and precarious by these state-created displacements. And, furthermore, these acts burden the government with increased responsibilities." If government involves itself with ever more areas of human existence, it will also be ever more vulnerable in the event that misfortunes, errors, and failures occur in those areas. A minimal state would not be faulted for mistakes in the production of grain, poor quality of education, or sub-optimal workplace safety standards – because it would be clearly recognized that the state's function does not extend to these spheres. On the other hand, an interventionist, redistributive state would involve itself in these areas and incur the blame if it does a poor job – greatly increasing the likelihood of social unrest, upheaval, and even revolution. Bastiat recognized that if "the law is responsible for all individual misfortunes and all social inequalities – then the door is open to an endless succession of complaints, irritations, troubles, and revolutions."

          Bastiat also recognized that a society of legalized plunder will direct individual self-interest toward immorality. In the first place, a government-planned society eliminates the need for individual foresight and initiative:
 

It substitutes the will of the legislator for [individuals'] own wills; the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives. When this happens, the people no longer need to discuss, to compare, to plan ahead; the law does all this for them. Intelligence becomes a useless prop for the people; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their liberty, their property.

          If individuals are no longer free to act upon what experience and foresight teach them, then experience and foresight cease to have a direct link to individual economic success or failure. The criteria that government regulators use to determine who gets taken care of and who does not are not the natural criteria of the free marketplace, but rather artificial criteria which have little to do with prudence or virtue and which often conflict with them. Yet still, it is in the self-interest of individuals to meet the government's criteria so that they can get taken care of. In this way, legalized plunder "erases from everyone's conscience the distinction between justice and injustice," since people must now appeal to the apparatus of coercive redistribution and rights-violation to acquire their subsistence; it is not clear to them anymore what justice is if they must resort to injustice to survive.

          Furthermore, individuals' ethical expectations are adversely affected by the redistributive state: "The basic immorality involved in coercion of men soon corrupts not only the wielder of such power, but those over whom the power is wielded. Soon all men come to expect that their lives should be rendered problem-free by an omnicompetent state" (Roche, p. 150). Instead of striving to be autonomous, creative, and active, individuals become passive and dependent on government handouts. The person who retains a sense of morality and of the wrong entailed in coercing and expropriating human beings is put in a double-bind: he "has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law." The law in a redistributive state conflicts with morality and often is used to punish the moral people who seek to protect their own property: "It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense." Such a system gives self-interested individuals the overwhelming incentive to abandon morality and prudence and give in to the temptation to partake in the plunder; in the long run, of course, this tendency will devastate the society.
 

Conclusion

          Bastiat's analysis of self-interest's economic role does not classify self-interest as either wholly and universally good or wholly and universally evil; self-interest, motivated by different incentives and constrained by different circumstances, will produce vastly different results. Bastiat is not a naïve optimist about the ability to isolate the beneficial consequences of self-interest from the harmful ones: while it would seem that a law strictly confined to the protection of property will fulfill this task, attaining such a law is immensely difficult. The very adverse facets of self-interest against which just laws must protect motivate the lawmakers to pervert the law and legalize plunder. Not only is this phenomenon possible, but it has been more prevalent than not throughout the history of human societies and governments – as Bastiat recognizes. Bastiat does not despair, however, over the difficulty of achieving liberty and justice – a task to which he devoted his entire life. He hints at a way of doing so when he states that the plundered individuals who are also enlightened will seek to control the law not to perpetuate the plunder, but to stop it. Thus, enlightenment seems to be the means by which individuals might recognize the harms which a redistributive state inflicts on everybody and the inevitable failure of such "an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else."

          Furthermore, Bastiat's wish that foresight rather than experience were the primary guiding force of human learning illustrates his understanding that foresight among most of his contemporaries was insufficient to notice the ill secondary effects of government redistribution, protectionism, and regulation. This lack of foresight is true of our time as well, as the scope of government and its redistributive activities increase while far too few voices point out the danger and inevitable harms of such trends. Increasing individual foresight through the dissemination of sound economic ideas, then, can be a powerful means of combating legalized plunder and informing self-interested individuals of the benefits of peaceful production and trade over coercion and redistribution.