This essay brought up some good points that Bastiat had mentioned in his essays. I suggest mentioning which essay you received each quote from to make it more coherent to read, as well as block quotes so that the quote stands out from the rest of the information, but I like the quotes you used. Your first quote from ‘The Law’ provided a unique view of society today.
When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negotiation (Bastiat, 2011, p. 64).
From my understanding of the essay, I gathered that the law does not always live up to its expectations of maintaining our natural rights given by God. When I read this quote, I see a similar perspective that you do, in which the law is a negotiation that you either follow to avoid possible risk, or you break and run the chance of getting caught. The law never forces you to follow it word for word, especially when you believe it goes against your natural rights, but by doing this, you are putting yourself in a difficult position of punishment. While you think laws are put in place for order in the world, Bastiat portrays a different perspective that explains that laws create injustice to only protect certain groups while others are harmed by inequalities. You partially showed this view with the quote from ‘Government,’
There is the public on one side, Government on the other, considered as two different beings (Bastiat, 2011, p. 101).
With government being higher up in the economy, they do not always view the ideas of the lower- and middle-class people when creating laws. You explained this well in your essay with the rules on voting. While we may believe we are voting to see a change in our country, our votes are only a mere suggestion of what we want, but we do not always see the impact we are expecting. I also like how you brought up that this in turn has turned us against each other, when we should really be fighting for our rights against the government and not one another.
Lastly, the quote that you used from ‘Petition’ brings about one of the main points of that essay in which humans and nature work together to bring about new products. This essay’s metaphorical view on sunlight and lamps to repeal taxes explains that we should not have to pay for products that have a cheaper alternative provided elsewhere. While you took it literally, which isn’t necessarily wrong because we do take care of plants that in return give us the necessities of life, I believe that it is really saying that our work with natural forces give us things that would be unnecessary and wasteful to buy.
I feel like you had great thoughts to follow Bastiat’s essays, but you were unable to thoroughly analyze a lot of the main parts of them and the messages he was trying to convey. I also feel like the format could have been better to make the essay easier to read, as well as fixing the grammatical errors. I also feel as though the last part of your essay did not really belong to the topics at hand. I like how you tried to add outside information in to connect it to the messages, but the Stanford Prison Experiment does not relate to ending taxation and protecting our natural rights.