Bonus Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on September 26, 2017
… is from page 282 of Bruce Benson’s indispensable 1990 volume, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State (footnotes deleted):
Politically dictated rules are not designed to support the market process; in fact, government-made law is likely to do precisely the opposite. As [Bruno] Leoni explained: “Even those economists who have brilliantly defended the free market against the interference of the authorities have usually neglected the parallel consideration that no free market is really compatible with a law-making process centralized by authorities.” Indeed, it appears that the increasing centralization of law-making has been associated with increasing transfers of property rights from private individuals to government or perhaps, more accurately, to interest groups. In other words, public production of law undermines the private property arrangements that support a free market system.
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