Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation.
This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat again: These two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.
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Boyes makes a clear reference to the distinction that Hayek makes between law and legislation.
ReplyDeleteLaw is the emergent set of rules that evolves over a period of time. The key to liberty is equality before the law - that is that all citizens are treated equally before this law.
Legislation, on the other hand, is the result of efforts, characterized by Boyes as socialism, to impose egalitarianism upon society. Much, if not all of the legislation that has poured from Federal and State legislatures is an effort to achieve the impossible - equality of outcomes.
Even the most totalitarian of regimes (North Korea of today, Cambodia of 40 years ago) failed in this utopian nightmare to impose equality of outcome.