The West is Ruled by Criminals, for Criminals
Frédéric Bastiat warned in 1850 that once the law is used to plunder rather than protect, every group fights to seize it.
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” — Tacitus
There was a time when Western institutions conceived of justice as fairness, which demanded equal application of the law and impartiality. Unfortunately, this conception is collapsing in real time.
In Canada, prosecutors sought seven years in prison for Tamara Lich, one of the leaders of the Freedom Convoy. Those who organize actually peaceful protests in the spirit of freedom and patriotism face lawfare from the state, while those who organize “mostly peaceful” protests, which really means barbaric, are bowed before in solidarity. In Britain, Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months for a single social media post she deleted within hours. Meanwhile, men of foreign descent who abused minors in the most disturbing ways imaginable are institutionally protected because the acts, if acknowledged, undermine progressive ideology. Non-citizens get their sentences for violent crimes reduced for the express purpose that they can appeal deportation and stay in the country. Indigenous murderers face legal leniency in the name of historical trauma. The list of examples is endless.
A French statesman, Frédéric Bastiat, saw this coming nearly two centuries ago. In 1850 Bastiat published The Law, an essay warning that the rise of socialism was inverting our understanding of what the state, courts, laws, militaries, and police are for. He argued that when the state’s purpose is no longer the protection of life, liberty, and property, and instead attempts to redistribute wealth, punish opposition, and engineer social outcomes, the law itself becomes criminal. “When plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law,” he wrote, “all the plundered classes try somehow to enter… into the making of laws.”
Consider the modern attitudes of “social justice.” Proponents of this worldview do not seek to establish universal restrictions on corrosive behaviour that are applicable to all citizens, such as do not murder, steal, or defraud. Instead, they wish to take opportunity and resources from certain groups and award them to others of their choosing. What we call law today is often nothing more than legally sanctioned theft, favouritism, and political persecution.
This is the fundamental difference between traditional views of justice and social justice. The former views law as the collective use of force to prevent injustice. It is not the creation of morality, the provider of wealth, the arbiter of virtue, or a mechanism for equalizing material conditions. Traditionally, law was thought to be a shield against coercion, rather than a tool to impose dreams.
Bastiat raises important questions and then answers them in a way that helps make sense of the social structures around us. What happens when that force is no longer used to defend, but to redistribute? What happens when the law no longer protects property, but becomes the method for stealing it? These conditions are what Bastiat referred to as “legal plunder.” When this inversion is completed, society becomes divided into two classes: those who live off of others, and those who are extracted from. Parasites and hosts.
An example of this phenomenon was visible in the United States during COVID. In 2021, the federal government created the $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund to rescue businesses getting crushed by ineffective and unnecessary lockdown measures. For its first 21 days, the law ordered that applications be prioritized by the race and sex of the owner. A federal appeals court struck the scheme down, but only after it had been written into law and put into practice. Another instance can be found in the finance reports from the Canadian government, which openly measure how tax policies help close income gaps between white and Indigenous citizens. All of these are ideological formulas based on subjective interpretations of who deserves more than they earn and who deserves less.
Instead of enacting justice, the law’s primary function is now engineering outcomes. According to Bastiat, this is a byproduct of socialism pretending to be virtue. “As the result of its systems and of its efforts,” he wrote, “it would seem that socialism can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association.”
Take the Quebec court that, in 2025, cut a drug trafficker’s sentence after a report supposedly linked his crimes to the racism he had faced. Or Britain, where the Sentencing Council issued guidance that pre-sentence reports, which can steer a judge away from prison, should normally be ordered for offenders from ethnic, cultural, or faith minorities. Only an act of Parliament stopped that specific instance of two-tier justice. However, all of these instances are symptoms of the death of equal justice under law. If one man’s punishment is reduced because of his identity, then another’s may be, and effectively is, increased for the same reason. Two sets of laws for two sets of people is exactly what Orwell had in mind when writing a parody of socialist revolutions where “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
The result of eroding the law in favour of ideology is demoralization. Bastiat warned, “when law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.” Today, citizens across the West are forced to choose between trusting a system that rewards criminals and punishes dissenters, or rejecting the system altogether. Neither choice leads to peace and prosperity.
Your choices are to accept the weaponization of law or be labelled as a hateful bigot who is against solidarity, progress, and the ever elusive and expanding concept of human rights. Except none of this can be considered moral or just. Extraction is not charity. Morality and equality are not born out of the barrel of a gun or the threat of a cage. This is what Bastiat would refer to as “false philanthropy.” Legislators may truly believe they are building a better world but the result is still theft when law is used to take from one group and give to another.
Central planners are not wise and virtuous saints plucked from private life and given authority to rule over public life. However, this doesn’t stop them from believing they can manufacture fairness, equity, and morality from behind a desk with paperwork. In their eyes, citizens are not agents of their own lives but instead raw material waiting to be molded by their own hand. Bastiat ridiculed this mindset, comparing a socialist who sees himself as a gardener and mankind as a tree to be shaped by his blade.
Behind every sentencing disparity and affirmative action policy is this belief. Those seeking material equality will not stop at equality before the law. In fact, they’ll happily use the law to manufacture outcomes they deem desirable. The irony is that in pursuing that goal, they destroy actual justice. Bastiat warned that the attempt to do good with law rather than prevent evil leads to conflict without end. “Depart from justice,” he wrote, “and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty... The law becomes the battlefield for everybody’s dreams and everybody’s covetousness.”
Once law becomes a battleground, the state becomes a prize to be won. Identity groups start viewing the accumulation of power as a matter of survival. Whether those groups are founded on a collective racial, sexual, religious, or political identity doesn’t matter, they all fight to seize the state for their own benefit. These groups only cooperate with one another in an attempt to destroy a mutual adversary, but once the enemy that provided shared purpose is crushed, those groups seek to devour one another.
Meanwhile, the crimes the law exists to stop go unpunished. In Britain, a 2025 national audit found that police, councils, and social services avoided recording the ethnicity of grooming gang offenders for fear of appearing racist. This was such a concern that ethnicity went unrecorded for two-thirds of perpetrators. Young girls were brutally assaulted in town after town while the institutions extracting wealth from their parents in the name of serving them looked the other way.
Why? Because in a regime of legal plunder, law enforcement isn’t about justice but optics and power. The men who should have been punished were shielded by officials more offended by a slur or meme than by a stabbing, rape, or murder… well, so long as those slurs are spoken by white people and the violent crimes done by minorities. This is why prosecutors wanted Freedom Convoy organizers behind bars longer than many violent criminals ever serve, and why German police raided a pensioner’s home over a meme calling a cabinet minister an idiot. They are not being punished for mischief but for challenging the system. Their crime is revealing the corruption and two-tier justice.
What Western citizens are being subjected to is not merely the erosion of law but its inversion, where crime is no longer punished but rewarded. We are living in societies ruled by criminals, for criminals. The way I see it, law has effectively become a robot with a software virus. The preferable response is to reprogram it so that it can go back to fulfilling its original design. However, if the robot continues to misclassify friends and foes, targeting the innocent and protecting the dangerous, then the machine must be unplugged.
The Three Outcomes of Legal Plunder
In The Law, Bastiat not only diagnoses the problem but defines what proper law looks like. The following passages from his essay lay out his case that the law exists to prevent injustice rather than manufacture justice. Also included are the three outcomes that every legal order must choose between and the myth of legislators being superior in wisdom. The view he shares greatly helped inform my essay above.
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