What the great French economist would have said to the civil rights organization.
Two cheers to Mitt Romney for his performance last week at the NAACP convention in Houston. "Any policy that lifts up and honors the family is going to be good for the country and that must be our goal," Romney said. "As president I will promote strong families -- and I will defend traditional marriage." That was the big-applause line. More tellingly, however, he also told this potentially hostile audience: "As you may have heard from my opponent, I am also a strong believer in the free enterprise system. I believe it can bring change where so many well-meaning government programs have failed. I've never heard anyone look around an impoverished neighborhood and say, 'You know, there's too much free enterprise around here. Too many shops, too many jobs, too many people putting money in the bank.'"
Even so, this was -- as NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said -- "a missed opportunity." It was a missed opportunity to deliver a crushing blow to the intellectual claptrap that passes for enlightened thinking in the NAACP -- and not just there, but in the larger nexus of elitist thinking to be found in our nation's college campuses, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and, not least, the Obama White House.
Who better to deliver that much-needed blow than Frederic Bastiat, the great free-market French economist who loved liberty and spoke out against "socialism" -- which he defined as "legalized plunder"? Bastiat died 162 years ago -- on December 24, 1850. But his words are as timely today as they were back then (two years after the publication of Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto"). Long before Hayek, Bastiat recognized government as the greatest single threat to liberty. He wrote:
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole -- with their common aim of legal plunder -- constitute socialism.
Bastiat hated the arrogance of the progressive (i.e. progress as defined and controlled by government), let's-play-God mindset: "Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations. To them… the relationship between persons and the legislator appears to be the same as the relationship between the clay and the potter." And again he said of the do-gooders' belief in exalted government: "Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
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