Jim Devine writes: >> Does that mean that Hayek would throw away the US constitution, since >> it is a centralized system of law imposed on the country from above by >> a small minority of society (i.e., rich property-owning white men who >> had chosen the winning side of the war with Britain)?
If I could channel Hayek, I would expect he would be generally supportive of the US constitution, precisely because it did not "centralize" law, but instead incorporated the common law and did very lttle to change existing law as then known. >> In any event, the actual source of the details of the law (centralized >> vs. decentralized) is not relevant to the issue of spontaneous order. >> Whether a law is written into a Code book or is based on precedent, it >> has to be enforced. Unless the law is totally consistent with the >> individual incentives prevailing in the actually-existing society, >> this involves coercion -- and thus cannot be "spontaneous." In a >> capitalist society, the dominant motivation is greed, so that state >> coercion is required to keep people from taking each others' property >> by force, fraud, etc. You want to conflate the creation of law with the enforcement of law, but they really are two distinct categories for the purpose of discussion (which was how law is created). In the overwhelming number of legal disputes in the US, for example, the enforcement of law is never really an issue, because the parties recognize the legitimacy of the dispute resolution process and accept the results and abide by them voluntarily. I absolutely disagree with your statement that "state coercion is required to keep people from taking each other's property by force, fraud, etc.," which is a truly Hobbesian statement. The overwhelming people in my world, for example, are law abiding not because of state coercion, but because most people recognize the inherent "wrongfullness" of fraud and theft and don't act that way. There are always exceptions, and that's why we have enforcement mechanisms, but for most people in the US, they have very infrequent interaction with the coercive elemen! ts of the police and the justice system. David Shemano _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
