Anthony de Jasay, also Despotism

vichy · Subject: Anthony de Jasay, also Despotism Tue Jun 09, 2009 7:59 pm

Quote:

There are two distinct strands in this retreat to the past, or rather to the wishful image that is now made of it. One is technocratic, the other is popular and even frankly populist.

The technocratic view is that the dysfunction that was set off in August 2007 and has since grown to alarming proportions, was due to reckless deregulation of the financial system and more generally to the withdrawal of governments from their controlling and safeguarding role. Since the invisible hand has proved to be unsafe, let us once again put our trust in the strong hands of the state and let us, without procrastination and horse-trading, build a new regulatory framework that will preserve the strengths of free markets while ensuring their smooth working and protecting them from wild stress and strain.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2009/Jasaystressless.html
Anthony de Jasay, living in the democratic mousetrap that is modern France, giving his usual decimation of European political economic idiocy.

Also an interesting entry on Despotism
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1679&chapter=2968&layout=html&Itemid=27

Quote:

The same confusion is found in the writings of Benjamin Constant, who, however, understood the difficulty, but did not seek completely to clear it up. "I do not understand by despotism," he says, "governments in which power is not expressly limited, but those in which there are, nevertheless, intermediaries; where traditions of liberty and justice restrain the agents of the administration; in which authority has regard for custom; and in which the independence of the courts is respected. These governments are imperfect: they are more so in proportion as the guarantees which they establish are less assured; but they are not purely despotic." The absence of all limitation to supreme power, and of independent powers to form a counterpoise, is, according to the celebrated publicist of the restoration, the characteristic feature of despotism. This distinguishes it, it is true; but from what? From constitutional government, but not from absolute power, whose character it is also not to admit of limit nor to recognize any independent intermediary, under pain of being no longer absolute.—"I understand by despotism," continues Benjamin Constant, "a government in which the will of a master is the only law; in which corporations, if they exist there, are only its organs; in which this master looks on himself as the sole proprietor of his empire, and sees in his subjects merely usufructuaries; in which liberty can be wrested from the citizen without authority deigning to explain the reason why; in which the courts are subordinated to the caprice of power; in which their decrees may be annulled; and in which the acquitted may be brought before new judges, instructed by their predecessors, who are there only to convict and condemn the accused." (Cours de politique constitutionnelle)