Ron Paul cite Bastiat

[Bastiat]

http://www.pr.com/article/1110

PR.com: In your book (The Revolution) you mentioned the concept of “legal plunder” and it just seems to apply so perfectly right now. You define legal plunder as “any use of government that enriched one group of people at the expense of another, and which would be illegal if private individuals tried to carry it out themselves.” Do you define this bailout package as legal plunder?

Ron Paul: Oh absolutely, but that’s been around for a long time. I wish I could claim [to be] the originator of that concept. But, that’s something that’s been talked about for years.

Bastiat talked about it in the 1850s and he was a Frenchmen worried about the same thing back then.

Yes, it is legalized plunder if you and I can’t do it. You can’t steal from your neighbor. We would still go to jail for that. But, if we send the politician to your neighbor with IRS Agents and a bunch of guns they would pretend this was moral, ethical and constitutional, and it’s none of those. So, we’re involved in that, but that’s how we got here because of this assumption that the government has the right to redistribute wealth and regulate and serve special interests. And now they’re doing it wholesale, they’re doing it to try to bail out the people who had benefited for so many years by this system. Now they’re in trouble, and now they want to really get bailed out and dump out all the bad debts on the innocent people. Those many who benefited over the years on Wall Street and in these financial areas now want the average person to buy up all this bad debt. So, we could start off, and I said this on the House floor, it’s an immoral act, it’s an unconstitutional act that makes no economic sense either.