The following thought must be submitted to the public: that the State guarantees security to each and everyone but does not meddle in anything else.

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 382 to 383 (in French)
September 16th, 1849

In this letter, Frédéric Bastiat is upset about the political manoeuvres that he does not describe but are then probably obvious. It may be linked to the attempt to amend the newly minted constitution in order for Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte to remain president of the republic beyond the unique four-years mandate. In any case, he mentioned “seeing all men, one after the other, obviously sacrificing all moral dignity and any spirit of consistency”.

According to him, the best (or is it the only one?) way of mitigating this is to constrain the powers of the government. This is the point of today’s quote. This immediately remind us of the works of James Buchanan a century later who, asserting the issue of public choice, will recommend to limit the powers of government to the minimum in order to contain its capacity to do wrong and the drift towards a dictatorship of the majority, such as the one that we can observe nowadays.