Plunder & Blunder

“When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” Frederic Bastiat

Legal plunder is a concept in libertarian thought which describes the act of using the law to redistribute wealth. This was coined by Frédéric Bastiat, a French economist, writer and prominent member of the French Liberal School, most famously in his 1850 book “The Law”.

While libertarians have described many actions of governments as "legal plunder", including taxation, protectionism, and eminent domain. Bastiat advocated that the law should only serve to implement what he believed were pre-existing natural rights: personality, liberty, and property. According to him, “legal plunder is when the law takes from some persons that which belongs to them, to give to others what does not belong to them."

Bastiat gave many examples of what he considered to be legal plunder and may be exercised in a multitude of ways. Hence come infinite 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… It is all these plans, taken as a whole, with what they have in common, that took the names of capitalism, socialism, and communism.

Plunder however justified, is nothing more than an act of stealing or taking various amounts of money or goods from individuals, or small firms that are often seen as ripe for corporate, economic, financial plunder.

Plunder, often used to refer to the roving of soldiers through recently conquered territory in search of money and goods. 'Pillage' describes the act of stripping a conquered city or people of valuables. As pirates are not soldiers, they would pillage, but should they be reckoned soldier-like they could also be deemed to plunder.

The ways of statecraft are indeed wonderful. Heads are so swollen with conceit that eyes are shut in from a view of the excellencies of other nations, whereby “Hindsight, is better than foresight.”

According to Dean Baker, an American macroeconomist and co-founder, with Mark Weisbrot, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., for the second time this century, economies are sinking into a recession due to the collapse of financial bubbles. The most recent calamity will lead to a downturn deeper and longer than the stock market crash of 2001.

Baker's ‘Plunder and Blunder’ chronicles the growth and collapse of bubble economies, explains how policy blunders and greed led to a catastrophic, but completely predictable, market meltdowns.

“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Blunder is when those in charge act or react blindly, stupidly, or without direction or steady guidance. The term gaffe has been used to describe an inadvertent statement by a politician that he believes is true while the politician has not fully analysed the consequences of publicly stating it.

A Kinsley gaffe, named after American journalist Michael Kinsley (b. 1951), who drew attention to the phenomenon. occurs when a political gaffe reveals some truth that a politician did not intend to admit. Kinsley said, "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."

Food for thought!