Abstract
The quest to constrain the power of the state has been ongoing since ancient Athens. And the fundamental paradox of governance has been the same ever since, how can we empower government with the ability to govern over men, but also constrain government so it does not abuse the powers entrusted with it. This is the essence of the argument for limited government, and the Constitutional project. “If all men were angels,” they would not have to be governed, and if we could select omniscient angels for government, the question of “who guards the guardians” would be obsolete. Realizing that men are neither perfectly noble nor all-knowing leaves us with the task of constraining those that do the governing. The social contract that defines the rules of the game of governing allows government to limit private predation and limit pubic predation by the government only if it is robust against the flaws of the available agent types.
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Notes
- 1.
From Smith’s notebooks found in the editors introduction to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. (1776, p. xl).
- 2.
- 3.
The other three major trading posts were established at Bruges, London, and Bergen. These four trading posts are known as the Kontore of the Hanseatic League.
- 4.
Schlüter (1911) provides the original text of seven versions of the Constitution of the Kontor in Novgorod.
- 5.
The olderman for St. Peter was subordinate to the olderman of the court and had merely administrative duties (Gurland 1913, pp. 28–19).
- 6.
For a contrary perspective, which sees the problems in Russia for example, as a consequence of a naïve faith in the free market and not enough attention to the role of government see Klein and Pomer, ed. (2001), and especially Stiglitz’s preface and Pomer’s introduction. It would take us too far afield to address this alternative perspective for our present purposes. But suffice it to say that we disagree, and would even disagree with the claim that the failures were a question of bad implementation of good public policy. Our argument is that the rhetoric employed during the era of “shock therapy” far outdistanced the reality, and thus what we got was implementation of bad policies causing the disappointing postcommunist record. As Elster et al. (1998, p. 27) point out, failure in Constitutional craftsmanship results whenever there is an inability to protect the three fundamentals of social order – protection of life, property, and liberty.
- 7.
On April 28, 2010 James Buchanan delivered the Otto A. “Toby” Davis Memorial Lecture at George Mason University and entitled his talk “Constitutions Work.”
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Boettke, P., Fink, A. (2011). Agent Type, Social Contracts, and Constitutional Mythologies. In: Marciano, A. (eds) Constitutional Mythologies. Studies in Public Choice, vol 23. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6784-8_3
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