The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die Read Free Page A

lobbyists and campaign contributions? Do governments play an active part in economic life, through subsidies, tariffs and other market-distorting devices, or through regulation? What is the right balance to be struck between economic freedom and government regulation? Chapter 2 will address these issues. The specific question I ask is how far very complex regulation has become the disease of which it purports to be the cure, distorting and corrupting both the political and the economic process.
    A crucial institutional check on both political and economic actors is the rule of law. It is inconceivable that either democracy or capitalism could function without an effective system of justice, where the rules devised by the legislature can be enforced, where the rights of the individual citizen can be upheld and where disputes between citizens or corporate entities can be resolved in a peaceful and rational manner. But which system of law is better: common law? or some other form? The rule of
sharia
is clearly very different from the rule of law as the English political philosopher John Locke understood it.
    In some ways, the key to comparing different codes of law is what might be called ‘the law of rules’: the way that law itself is made. In some systems, like Islam, the rules have been prescribed in considerable detail, for eternity, by a divinely inspired prophet. According to the stricter schools of Muslim thought, they cannot be changed. In others, like the English common law, the rules evolve organically, as judges weigh up the competing claims of precedent and the changing needs of society. Chapter 3 will ask the question whether one system of law – in particular, the common law – is superior to the others. I will also ask how far the English-speaking world still enjoys an advantage in this respect. In particular, I want to warn that the rule of law is in danger – at least in parts of the ‘Anglosphere’ – of degenerating into something more like the rule of
lawyers
. Are Americans really better served by their legal system than Englishmen were by theirs at the time of Dickens’s
Bleak House
?
    Finally, there is civil society. Properly understood, it is the realm of voluntary associations: institutions established by citizens with an objective other than private profit. These can range from schools – although in modern times most educational institutions have been absorbed into the public sector – to clubs dedicated to the full range of human activities, from aeronautics to zoology. Once again we encounter the importance of rules, though here they may seem trivial, like the obligation on members of most London clubs to wear ties and keep their jackets on at dinner, even on a sweltering-hot evening.
    There was a time when the average Briton or American belonged to a startlingly large number of clubs and other voluntary societies. It was one of the features of the English-speaking world that most impressed the great French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville. But in Chapter 4 I shall ask why that is no longer true, and how far it is possible for a truly free society to flourish in the absence of the kind of vibrant civil society we used to take for granted. Are the new social networks of the internet in any sense a substitute for traditional associational life? I shall argue that they are not.
    Why Institutions Fail
    If we are like bees in the realm of politics, playing our assigned parts in an essentially hierarchical hive, we have more freedom of action in the economic sphere. There, our institutions recall the wildlife of the Serengeti, the ‘endless plains’ of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. Some of us are wildebeest, grazing as we move in the herd. Others of us (rather fewer) are predators. I am afraid there are some scavengers and parasites, too. The whole thing is an ecosystem in which Darwinian forces are constantly at work, naturally selecting the fittest from the unfit.