More words of wisdom

Claude Frederic Bastiat, a prominent 19th-century political economist, wrote: "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. ... Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve. But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another. ... then abolish that law without delay. No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic."
(quotation courtesy The Patriot Post)