Justice & Law Quote by Isabel Paterson

Paterson’s line is a libertarian trapdoor: it flips the comforting civics-myth that law is a tool we hand to “the people” and insists it’s always a tool we hand to the state. The phrasing is surgical. “Private persons” sounds almost legalistic, deliberately unromantic, as if she’s stripping politics down to its smallest units: individuals with property, choices, and boundaries. Against that, “government” arrives as a single consolidated actor, a machine that can accumulate and wield force. The imbalance is the point.

The specific intent is not to deny that laws can protect individuals; it’s to deny that protection is a power grant to citizens. If a law “helps” you, in Paterson’s view, it does so only by authorizing someone else to act on your behalf: police, courts, regulators. Your benefit is indirect, contingent, and mediated through institutional coercion. That’s why the second clause is absolutist: “every law transfers power.” She’s forcing readers to confront what polite politics often disguises: rights talk is also enforcement talk.

The subtext is a warning about moral outsourcing. When reformers demand legislation, Paterson hears a request to convert private persuasion into public compulsion. In the mid-20th-century American argument over the New Deal’s expanding administrative state, this is a crisp piece of ideological counterprogramming: skepticism toward “solutions” that arrive as statutes, because statutes don’t empower you to act so much as empower officials to act on you. It’s cynicism with a civics lesson embedded inside.