Faith & Spirit Quote by Frederic Bastiat

Bastiat’s line is less a pious benediction than a legal grenade with a fuse labeled “limits.” By rooting defense of “person, liberty, and property” in a “natural right” endowed “from God,” he’s doing two things at once: elevating individual claims above the state, and narrowing what legitimate government can be. It’s a rights argument that preempts policy debate by moving the battlefield to first principles. If rights arrive pre-political, then politics can’t vote them away.

The specific intent is to justify a thin, protective state: force is moral only when it repels force. Bastiat wrote in a France repeatedly remade by revolution, restoration, and upheaval; in that churn, “law” could mean stability or sanctioned theft. His subtext, developed most famously in The Law (1850), is that the state’s tendency is to convert defense into redistribution and patronage. Once the law goes beyond protecting persons and property, it becomes “legal plunder” - taking by statute what would be criminal by private hand.

The triad matters. “Person” and “liberty” sound lofty, but “property” is the load-bearing wall. Bastiat is signaling that economic freedom isn’t a secondary privilege; it’s a core right, on par with bodily security. Invoking God isn’t mere religiosity; it’s rhetorical ballast aimed at a 19th-century audience wary of arbitrary rule. He’s borrowing sacred authority to make a secular point: the state is not the source of rights, and any government that behaves as if it is has already crossed into illegitimacy.