Those words were written 148 years ago by a French legislator who, in the final year of his life tried to warn France against the evils of socialism into which his nation had drifted and which he insisted was nothing less than a system of legalized plunder. The law, Bastiat wrote, exists solely to protect life, liberty and property. Used for any other purpose, the law becomes tyranny. If a nation were founded on this basis, it seems to me that order would prevail among people, in thought as well as in deed. Later, he extolled the United States as it was in the 1850s as the living proof that such a government could exist and prosper.
Socialism perverts the law, making it an instrument of legalized plunder.
And once that force is put at the disposal of socialist plunderers, liberty vanishes and government ceases to be the servant of free people and becomes, instead, their master. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives. If you cannot reconcile these contradictions, then you must conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education and morality throughout the nation.