Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 1 of volume 1 (“Rules and Order,” 1973) of F.A. Hayek’s brilliant trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (footnote deleted):

When Montesquieu and the framers of the American Constitution articulated the conception of a limiting constitution that had grown up in England, they set a pattern which liberal constitutionalism has followed ever since. Their chief aim was to provide institutional safeguards of individual freedom; and the device in which they placed their faith was the separation of powers. In the form in which we know the division of power between the legislature, the judiciary, and the administration, it has not achieved what it was meant to achieve. Governments everywhere have obtained by constitutional means powers which those men had meant to deny them.

DBx: Looking only at the United States, the country that I know best, who can reasonably deny Hayek’s conclusion? The administrative state is a malignant cancer, having grown for decades to finally, today, leaving Congress supine. The U.S. president now rules in very much the same way a monarch ruled 300 years ago: issuing arbitrary decrees utterly detached from any process that can with a straight face be said to be consistent with the rule of law.
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Hayek was born on this date, May 8th, in 1899.