A rule for creating rules for organizing a Libertarian society
2007-10-25 by julianmorrison
I’m reading Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”. I haven’t got very far in yet, but I’m at the part where he describes the early shift from economic liberalism (at its most successful peak) to socialist hubris. He explains that 19th century economic liberal “rules of thumb” were crude and overbroad, and their manifest problems caused their claims of perfection to be punctured, resulting in abandonment. He suggests that instead, they ought to have been improved.
However, people thought planning was an improvement. Nowadays, they think regulation is an improvement. To anyone who wants liberty and progress, they plainly aren’t. (Their modern defenders are forced to fall back on the moral nobility of poverty as an excuse.)
How can a rule for making rules be structured to avoid the magnetic attraction of coercive means? Non-coercion is a necessity but not a heuristic. So how about this:
Every solution must be structured as a set of rules that are only meant to be applied by the individual to himself.
Interestingly, the first rule of libertarianism, non-aggression, can be structured in this form, thus:
I choose never to initiate force, although I reserve the right to return it.