What Friedrich A. Hayek sought with his three volumes of Law, Legislation and Liberty was to propose a legal-political system in which the Rule of Law principle would not be de facto replaced by the rule of men through laws (Rule by Law). To do this, he built a recursive model of a legal system whose initial conditions were the … Continue reading Hayek, or the Recursive Model of the Rule of Law
In a brief autobiographical note, Friedrich Hayek refers to the influence he had received in his younger years from both his teacher Ernst Mach and his distant cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein: “But I did, through these connexions, become probably one of the first readers of Tractatus when it appeared in 1922. Since, like most philosophically interested … Continue reading A few words — and many quotations – about the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein on Friedrich Hayek
Obviously, there is a whole question of information and transaction costs surrounding the game between empirical social norms and positive legal norms. The former are more agile and immediate, better adapted to the circumstances, but at the same time they are not enough to guarantee peace when the interests at stake gain social relevance. There … Continue reading Liberal Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes: The Case for Law Enforcement. (Part 2 of 12)
This essay aims to highlight that the low generalized application of positive legal norms in any legal system, by allowing greater discretion on the part of the public powers, leads to a gradual increase in the levels of authoritarianism, both on the part of governments and of society itself.
François Furet, in the preliminary essay that serves as an introduction to The Past of an Illusion, entitled “The Equalitarian Passion,” highlights that in the Ancient Regime inequality was legally consecrated, while after the French Revolution, inequality persists surreptitiously, of contraband, thus cementing a feeling of vindication in the face of illegitimate inequality. Something similar … Continue reading Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders (Part 8): Inequality before the law, de facto
Federico Sosa Valle fgmsosavalle@googlemail.com Introduction Countries can change their course, they can turn from stagnation towards growth, as it is the case of South Korea in the last fifty years. They can also decline after a boom period. Together with other examples of successes and failures, these are indications that economic performance does not depend … Continue reading Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders
Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson acknowledge that the weakest point of their theory consists of recommendations to “break the mold.” How to change the historical matrix that leaves the nations stagnant in extractive political and economic institutions, or that move them back from having inclusive economic institutions with extractive political institutions to being trapped in … Continue reading Three Lessons on Institutions and Incentives (Part 6): Breaking the mold
When Friedrich A. Hayek referred to the coordination problems among rational agents as a consequence of the dispersion of information in the economic system -and that made him worthy of the Nobel Prize in Economics- he did not refer to an information problem that could be solved with better statistical tools. This is also a … Continue reading Three Lessons on Institutions and Incentives (Part 5): “Spontaneous” institutions
Federico Sosa Valle fgmsosavalle@googlemail.com Introduction There are books that are aimed at a spectrum of readers that are counted within the “well-informed public.” They are not books confined to academic circles, they are not for mass consumption, but they do concern problems that involve entire countries and are written in a register that involves certain … Continue reading Three Lessons on Institutions and Incentives
The first attempt to answer this question should say: “none.” Notwithstanding that this is the correct approach, we can’t help but feel uneasy about it. Libertarians have had to deal with this uncomfortable truth for so long. In respect to my own personal experience, I remember where I was when I read, for the first … Continue reading What sort of “Meritocracy” would a libertarian endorse, if he had to?
Notes On Liberty 