Source link: http://archive.mises.org/17610/why-hayek-should-have-been-an-anarchist/
Why Hayek should have been an anarchist
July 6, 2011 by Edward Peter Stringham
In the Spring 2011 issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Todd Zywicki and I ask: Should law be provided centrally by the state or by some other means? Even relatively staunch advocates of competition such as Friedrich Hayek believe that the state must provide law centrally. This article asks whether Hayek’s theories about competition and the use of knowledge in society should lead one to support centrally provided law enforcement or competition in law. In writing about economics, Hayek famously described the competitive process of the market as a “discovery process.” In writing about law, Hayek coincidentally referred to the role of the judge under the common law as “discovering” the law in the expectations and conventions of people in a given society. We argue that this consistent usage was more than a mere semantic coincidence — that the two concepts of discovery are remarkably similar in Hayek’s thought and that his idea of economic discovery influenced his later ideas about legal discovery.
Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice
Moreover, once this conceptual similarity is recognized, certain conclusions logically follow: namely, that just as economic discovery requires the competitive process of the market to provide information and feedback to correct errors, competition in the provision of legal services is essential to the judicial discovery in law. In fact, the English common law, from which Hayek drew his model of legal discovery, was itself a model of polycentric and competing sources of law throughout much of its history. We conclude that for the same reasons that made Hayek a champion of market competition over central planning of the economy, he should have also supported competition in legal services over monopolistic provision by the state — in short, Hayek should have been an anarchist.
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Edward Peter Stringham, Ph.D., is the Hackley Endowed Chair for the Study of Capitalism and Free Enterprise at Fayetteville State University
{ 4 comments }
Makes sense to me. But then, it also makes sense to me that Ayn Rand, by her own principles, should also have been anarchist. Political anarchism is the logical conclusion for anybody who desires political liberty.
He favoured long time social evolution and the gradual development of traditional social institutions, the advantages of which are not always imminent to our limited reason, such as the state, over rationalist social constructivism, like anarcho-capitalism.
Substitute the word slavery in your statement where “the state” is at, and the word abolitionism in place of anarcho-capitalism.
If forced labor is wrong how is forced taxation right? (Not to mention all the other restrictions imposed by the state against your own use of your body).
And if the idea is that the “gradual development” leads to less intrusive government exactly where have we seen that?
Radical anarcho-capitalists do everything they can to scare the rest of anarchism thus preventing the only way sustainable anarchy can be reached, a slow and steady progress based on winning the mind of every individual in the battle of ideas.
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