The Law

The Right to Property

Bastiat Economic Thought

The Right to Property

By property, we should not understand land in this context. It means "the right of a worker over the value he has created through his labor." Bastiat specifies:

I consider that the right to property consists in the freedom to first dispose of one's own person, then of one's labor, and finally, of the products of one's labor, which proves, moreover, that, from a certain point of view, freedom and the right to property cannot be distinguished from one another.

Having established this point, to understand the moral foundation of property, Bastiat begins with a simple anthropological principle: from the beginning, man must work to live, and the fruit of his labor is an extension of his faculties, that is, an extension of his person.

Personality, Freedom, Property, — that is man. It is of these three things that one can say, without any demagogic subtlety, that they are prior to and superior to any human legislation.

Understood in this sense, the right to Property is among those rights that do not derive from positive law but precede it and are its raison d'être. Indeed,

The law is the collective organization of the individual right of legitimate defense.
The Law

Its mission is to defend the person and their property.

Therefore, the right is not the same thing as the law. The right is not identified with the sovereign's word, nor does it depend exclusively on his legitimacy. It is the product of a tradition, a legal order prior to and superior to the law, which imposes itself on the legislator as much as on any of the ordinary citizens.

The right "is not created". It is not invented from an ideal vision of what the laws of society should be; it is discovered in the nature of man and in the rules of civility, transmitted by the wisdom of customs. Individuals have natural rights that preexist the law: Property, Liberty, Personality. The role of the Law should be to preserve these natural rights of the individual. Consequently, the State must be limited. Today, we would say that Bastiat is an advocate of the minimal state.

In Rousseau's system, which we discussed in a previous course, the legislator's mission is to organize, modify, or even abolish property if deemed appropriate. For Rousseau, property is not natural but conventional, just like society itself. This idea stems from Roman law, with which Rousseau was deeply familiar.

Robespierre, in turn, posits the principle that "Property is the right of every citizen to enjoy and dispose of the portion of goods guaranteed to him by law."

For Rousseau, property is not prior to law; it is merely a convention established by the general will and within the limits it decides. As a result, there is no freedom or right that exists independently of society and the goodwill of legislators. But if one dissociates the right to property, it easily justifies false rights, which are only acquired by violating the rights of others.

For example, the right to work or the right to housing.

For me to acquire something for free, someone must pay on my behalf. And if it’s the State that pays, since it does not produce wealth, it can only do so by taking a home from someone, or its equivalent, to give it to me.

This idea that the right to property is a creation of the law thus leads, according to Bastiat, to opening an unlimited field to utopians who wish to model society according to their plans.

In the system of natural freedom, there exists a natural law, independent of the whims of legislators. It is valid for all men and predates any society. And it is the government's duty to ensure the natural rights of each individual. A just society is one in which property rights are fully respected, meaning protected against any interference from others.

Here, Bastiat aligns himself with the legacy of the Physiocrats and, beyond that, with the tradition of the philosophy of law of Cicero and Aristotle. The law does not create rights. Its mission is to defend them and thus to defend property, both the property of oneself, the integrity of the person, and the property of the fruits of one's labor.

Quiz

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Why, according to Bastiat, are the right to property and freedom inseparable?