It's an interesting thing; a trope with a circuit encompassing the entire distance between right and left. Yet the use of the term by those on the side of mere earthlings like me is a mistake twice over; firstly, the phrase "rule of law" is a slippery and untrustworthy grip on two conceptual apices: the coherence of a body of law and consistency of application; secondly, its corruption by hive-minded democrats hinders any acceleration on the individualist premise.
Legal recognition of a right to private property will, when contradicted by a legal provision for democratically sanctioned theft, eventually degrade into incoherence. The unstable mixture of individualist and collectivist principles needs only friction to degrade and eventually ruin the productive power of individuals to drive a society forward.
It is not difficult to simply state that you are in favour of (at least one) body of law cohering around immutable, individualist principles and applied with institutionalized integrity to those same principles. Only a little application of thought to my choice of words was needed to cast a more penetrating light than that time-worn and slippery "rule of law" soundshite.
.... File that under Choice Of Language & Clarity Of Thought.
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
2 comments:
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Pretty good, Mike. The rule of law is always a good trick, because it hides the decision of making or changing laws. So that it usually ends up being the legitimation of a ruling class.
ReplyDeleteBut then you got property rights, which have to be constructed and agreed by some group of people. So do you think we should all just agree on this individualist system you prefer?
Aren't "rights" just as slippery as "rule of law", since both terms try to avoid that what's happening is some rules are being selected to apply to a certain group of individuals? We still are left with how do we decide, change, and enforce rules in society.
"Aren't "rights" just as slippery as "rule of law", since both terms try to avoid that what's happening is some rules are being selected to apply to a certain group of individuals?
ReplyDeleteNo. Political rights must apply equally to all people except for those who have forfeited them (e.g. criminals). The most salient aspect to my "must" in the foregoing sentence is not in fact legal, but social-psychological in the rejection of your "we" as the point of departure to any political decision.