The Law by Bastiat made simple:

1. Every person has a natural right to defend their life, liberty, and property. Law is simply that individual right organized collectively – nothing more, nothing less.

2. The moment law goes beyond that — taking from some to give to others — it has stopped being law and become legal plunder.

3. Legal plunder isn’t exceptional. It’s the normal operating mode of most governments most of the time: subsidies, redistribution, bailouts – each one a faction using state force to extract what it couldn’t get by voluntary agreement.
It was all already there in 1850.

4. The test is simple: if the same act performed by a private individual would be called theft, it’s theft when the state does it too. The badge doesn’t change the nature of the act.

5. Two wrong responses to legal plunder: give everyone the right to plunder (socialism), or let the current plunderers keep going (cronyism).
The only legitimate answer is to strip law back to its actual function.

6. Once people see law as a machine for taking rather than protecting, everyone floods politics to control it – because whoever runs the machine can point it at their enemies. This is why Bastiat defined the state as “that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” Lobbying and corruption aren’t aberrations. They’re the logical conclusion of a law that plunders.

7. The title is the whole argument: Bastiat isn’t describing what the law is. He’s describing what it’s supposed to be – and showing, relentlessly, how far the thing calling itself law has drifted from that. Real law protects. Everything else wearing that name is organized force and theft in disguise.