The main idea of Bastiat in "The Law", his famous 1850 pamphlet, is to demonstrate why and how the law has become a source of plunder, that is, a means of creating privileges, situational rents, and fiscal arbitrariness.

What is the true nature of the law?

Bastiat begins by laying the natural anthropological foundations of the law: life, liberty, and property.

The institutional system of natural freedom is one in which society, individuals, and property exist prior to the establishment of laws and regulations. In this system, Bastiat adds:

Every man is allowed to defend his life and to use his faculties. And the law is the collective organization of this legitimate defense. The law defends justice. Not a positive justice that would organize fraternity and solidarity, but a negative justice that limits itself to preventing one person's rights from usurping another's.

However, when the law ceases to be negative and becomes positive, the feeling of inequality increases in society and generates conflicts. If we indefinitely expand the domain of the Law, that is, the responsibility of the government, we open the door to "an endless series of complaints, hatreds, disturbances, and revolts," he writes.

False philanthropy, Bastiat says, is one of the major causes of the perversion of the law. Some men consider themselves above the rest of humanity and capable of making better choices than others.

They know better what is good for others and will impose their conception of good on everyone; these are the philanthropists. They have created false rights, which are now referred to as social rights. Social rights are essentially rights to the labor of others, rights to dispose of one's property, and the fruits of one's labor, including the right to housing, health, education, work, and a minimum wage.

What is plunder? It is the exact opposite of property, Bastiat tells us. To plunder comes from the Latin spoliare, which means to strip. We have seen that man can only live by appropriating things, by applying his faculties to things, that is, by working. Alas, he can also appropriate the product of the faculties of his fellow man, that is, to plunder him.

The entire mission of the law is to prevent this extra-legal plunder, that is, to defend property and freedom, two inseparable things.

As soon as it is admitted in principle that the law can be diverted from its true mission, that it can violate properties instead of guaranteeing them, it necessarily follows a class struggle, either to defend against plunder or to organize it also to one's advantage.

Instead of defending natural rights, the law becomes a means of protecting corporate and categorical interests. Plunder is organized by the law, for the benefit of the classes that make it and their friends or clients. Bastiat thus anticipates the public choice school in the 20th century, for which the law is the result of a "political market" by which groups of individuals seek to satisfy their interests at the expense of others.

For him, the purpose of the Law must simply be to "put an end to all plunder." If the State does not intervene in private life, individuals are effectively owners and responsible for their lives. They make their own happiness. They bear the good or bad consequences of their actions.

They are certain that their natural rights are guaranteed and untouchable. Secure property rights give people the ability to make long-term plans because they know their assets are safe from plunder.

Bastiat wrote the above sentence in The Law, some time before he died.

A century after the death of Frédéric Bastiat, legal plunder is clearly evident in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, notably in its articles 22 ("everyone has the right to social security"), 23 ("everyone has the right to work"), 24 ("everyone has the right to rest and leisure"), 25 ("everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being"), 26 ("everyone has the right to education").