Summer Reading

Over the weekend I stayed at a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend’s cottage on Torch Lake, vacation destination to, among others, Tom Selleck and Geoffrey Fieger. Two-hundred feet of frontage with 60-year old cabins ready to be razed at a moment’s notice would fetch $2.5M on Torch Lake, the water of which bears striking resemblance to the turqouise shimmer of the Caribbean.

I’m ashamed to admit that I only finally got around to reading Bastiat’s “The Law,” although I had previously read most of it in the original French. It amazes me still, how relevant that short pamphlet seems, even today – almost every passage remains as relevant now as it was in 1840.

The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.

How has this perversion of the law been accomplished? And what have been the results?

The law has been perverted by the influence of two entirely different causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy.

Also, among the bookshelves of the cottage, I picked up some (arguably) lighter reading: a very weathered paperback version of Kurt Vonnegut‘s “Player Piano.” Having read “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Cat’s Cradle” in high-school, it caught my eye. Unfortunately, we left yesterday morning before I could finish it, although I only had about 40 pages left, and the plot was reaching its climax, suffice it to say, I couldn’t put the book down. Vonnegut was a Socialist, although it’d be hard to prove it from this book, where he condemns communism as slavery. I intend to read the rest of it at a local bookstore later this week, after which I’ll have a bit more to say.