Frederic Bastiat Quotes
It is indeed a singular thing that people wish to pass laws to nullify the disagreeable consequences that the law of responsibility entails. Will they never realize that they do not eliminate these consequences but merely pass them along to other people? The result is one injustice the more and one moral the less.
Bastiat, Frédéric. Economic Harmonies. Foundation for Economic Education, 1996.
In some nations like Holland medically assisted suicide us not only legal but is considered a moral course of action. In other nations it is illegal, but most individual physicians will assist a dying patient in terrible pain by increasing the dosage of pain killers which relives pain but also speeds death. In the US the individual states have different laws and rules. What can be a humanitarian action in one state, can be a felony in another. That is what happened to Kervorkian who served a long prison sentence for doing what the family and deceased begged him to do and would be legal and moral in another state.
Note that the two do NOT ALWAYS coincide. There are those who argue that law should be respected, right or wrong. There are also those who argue that law should be respected, only when it is in the right. Note also that “respect” and “obedience” are two different things. Some people argue that law and the courts and government must have respect. Others that they are only due obedience but not necessarily respect when they are in the wrong. Still others, like Thoreau, that obedience even is not required when the law is wrong. There are those who take this to the degree that obedience to a “wrong” law is wrong and there is a DUTY to disobey a wrong law. However, a more nuanced view does not treat all laws as the same importance. I may think a particular tax is unjust and wrong, but obedience does not necessarily have moral consequences. A law that says that people with a certain religion must not be hired, however, is sufficiently immoral that I am obliged to disobey it.
Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was a French economist, writer and a prominent member of the French Liberal School.
