1. One family member reads this quote aloud.
Have copies for everybody if you wish.
“It is not because men have made laws,
that personality, liberty, and property
exist. On the contrary, it is because
personality, liberty, and property exist
beforehand, that men make laws. . . .
Nature, or rather God, has bestowed
upon every one of us the right to defend
his person, his liberty, and his property,
since these are the three constituent or
preserving elements of life. . . .” (page 2)
• From what you know in the Genesis 2
story, who gave Adam his freedom to
farm and his ability to farm? Did a
government teach Adam to talk and to
name the animals?
• Genesis 9: 20 says that Noah in the
new world after the Flood grew a vineyard. Did a law tell Noah what kind of
work to do? Do communist governments or other governments that you
know of in history tell people what
work to do?
• Do you know a politician or anybody
who thinks the government should
find a job for everybody?
• Read Bastiat’s quote #1 again, silently
or aloud. Try to tell in your own words
how you know that laws do not give
individuals life, liberty, and property.
2. “If every man has the right of
defending, even by force, his person, his
liberty, and his property, a number of
men have the right to combine together
to extend, to organize a common force
to provide regularly for this defense.
Collective right, then, has its principle,
its reason for existing, its lawfulness, in
individual right . . . .” (page 2)
• Read quote #2 aloud.
• From where did each person first get
the right to defend his person, his
liberty, and his property?
• From whom does a group get the right
to defend those three rights?
• When the law says that people cannot
injure you or murder you, what right
of yours is it defending?
• When the law says that people cannot
steal your belongings, what right of
yours is it defending?
• Read quote #2 again, silently or aloud.
Try to tell in your own words what the
law should do.
3.“Unhappily, law is by no means
confined to its own sphere. It has done
more than this. It has acted in direct
opposition to its proper end. . . . [I]t has
placed the collective force in the
service of those who wish to traffic,
without risk and without scruple, in the
persons, the liberty, and the property of
others; it has converted plunder into a
right, that it may protect it, and lawful
defense into a crime, that it may punish
it.” (page 4)
• Read quote #3 aloud.
• Plunder is a word that means
“stealing.” Do pirates plunder? Do
bank robbers plunder? Who else can
you think of that plunders?
• Can the group that made the laws
sometimes plunder? If it is lawful, do
you think that makes it right?
• Does God’s Word tell us what is right
and wrong? Does the law tell us what
is right and wrong?
• Read quote #3 again, silently or aloud.
Try to tell in your own words what the
law should do about plunder.
4. “[Law] 2 should be in favor of property,
and against plunder. But the law is
made, generally, by one man, or by one
class of men. . . . It is easy to conceive
that, according to the power of the
legislator, it destroys . . . property by
plunder.” (page 6)
• Read quote #4 aloud.
• When the law takes money from some
people and gives things to other people,
can that be called plunder?
• Lawful plunder destroys what right of
the people?
• When a politician speaks, listen and
see if he (or she) proposes a plunder
law. Who would be plundered? Who
would receive the plunder?
• Read quote #4 again, silently or aloud.
Try to tell in your own words how the
law gets used wrongfully.
5. “Hence come an infinite multitude of
plans for organization; tariffs, protection, perquisites, gratuities, encouragements, progressive taxation, free public
education, right to work, right to profit,
right to wages, right to assistance, right
to instruments of labor, gratuity of credit,
etc., etc. And it is all these plans, taken as
a whole, with what they have in common,
Drop your ancient history or colonial
history or whatever else you’re doing and
study this little book for a month or two.
