What is Legal Plunder in politics? Definition, Meaning, and Explanation

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From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_plunder

Legal plunder is a pejorative term used in right-libertarian thought to describe the act of using the law to redistribute wealth. This was coined by Frédéric Bastiat, most famously in his 1850 book The Law.

Right-libertarians have described many actions of governments as "legal plunder", including taxation, protectionism, and eminent domain.

Frédéric Bastiat advocated that the law should only serve to implement what he believed were preexisting natural rights: his person, liberty, and property. According to Bastiat, legal plunder is when the law "takes from some persons that which belongs to them, to give to others what does not belong to them."

Bastiat gave many examples of what he considered to be legal plunder:

Now, legal plunder may be exercised in an infinite multitude of ways. Hence come an infinite multitude of plans for organization; tariffs, protection, perquisites, gratuities, encouragements, progressive taxation, free public education, right to work, right to profit, right to wages, right to assistance, right to instruments of labor, gratuity of credit, etc., etc. And it is all these plans, taken as a whole, with what they have in common, legal plunder, that takes the name of socialism.

— Frédéric Bastiat, The Law 1850

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