re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat

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I don't want anything from either one of my parents now or after they're gone.

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Hmm...

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I don't want any of it.

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So you are saying you are going to give away anything you get? Not kids college fund, or rainy day fund?

You are going to flat out refuse anything from their estates?

I might abandon Bastiat and read Toward a Theory of Property Rights by Harold Demsetz instead.

Y’all helped me solve Bastiat already.

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Uh...that's the point of society? We cannot congregate together in large numbers, engage in commerce, establish laws, religion, etc. without that.

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We can’t play a game unless we both agree to the rules. And by game I mean any interaction with a perceived shared benefit. Rules of how to interact with each other in a beneficial manner go back to antiquity.

Now, we don’t always follow those rules….

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What came first: laws or rights?

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laws

Without laws, why would the question of rights even surface?

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LSUinKaty

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Yup its the basic question, can you control your assets to give your children a better chance at the world.

The far left would say no, thats evil. (They are overwhelmingly childless)

Everyone else rejects that because it puts an artificial state above one's children or spouse.

Its why communism never works. Even the Soviets, the Chinese, and the DPRK practice extreme nepotism.

In Europe its gone wild where the citizens are taxed at high rates and cant afford children while strangers from the Islamic world move in and have children by the dozen on welfare.

Its a twisted form of anti nepotism driven by a number of weird sources.

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I might abandon Bastiat

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Don't abandon it. It's short enough to finish in a sitting.

It's a genuine classic in the classical liberal tradition, and despite its length covers ground that many longer works don't match for clarity. I've read it multiple times and found something new each time. I tend to skip past the dated examples and focus on the philosophical core, which derives the proper function of law directly from premises about human nature and rights that remain largely defensible today.

Even if you're not sympathetic to classical liberal notions of natural law and negative rights, it's essential reading. The argument is stated so cleanly that it forces you to identify exactly where you disagree and why.

The person who knows only their own side of the argument knows little even of that, as someone, I think Mill, said.

25 pages. Nobody creates a thread like Cubbs. They say they hate her, but in reality, they love her.

Without her, we would be stuck raging over endless rage bait X-threads.

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general desire to be safe

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Safety from what, exactly?

The minute you start talking about the things law can legitimately protect against you are making rights claims.

Safety is not a neutral biological preference. It's a normative claim about what others may and may not do to you.

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Laws can exist without rights, hypothetically speaking

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Anything can exist independently of anything else hypothetically. That's not an argument.

In this case, law without rights grounding is simply the commands of whoever holds power, enforceable by force alone. And that's not a hypothetical, it's a description of every tyranny in history.

The question is whether such commands deserve the name law in any meaningful moral sense, or whether they are merely lawful coercion within an administrative framework.

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But rights, even as a concept, are unnecessary without laws

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THis amounts to saying rights only matter when they can be enforced. But the need for enforcement concedes the point because it presupposes that something worth protecting was already there.

I work in IT. UNO Grad - MS CompSci 1991!

Political philosophy is a hobby of mine, and this thread happened to hit on territory I know something about - although I still have a lot to learn.

"The Law" is a favorite of mine. I would encourage you to finish it. It's essential reading in free market and political economy thinking, and holds up quite well for a book written in the 19th century.