Quotes from Freedom and the Law

By Bruno Leoni (1961)

• If we admit that individual freedom in business – that is, the free market – is one of the essential features of political freedom conceived as the absence of constraint exercised by other people, including the authorities, we must also conclude that legislation in matters of private law is fundamentally incompatible with individual freedom.#
  Politics
• A purported analogy between scarce things like arable land and abundant things like moonlight has always been a good reason in the eyes of many people for maintaining that the “have-nots” have been “constrained” by the “haves”, that the latter have illicitly deprived the former of certain things originally “common” to all men.#
  Intellectual PropertyEconomics
• We may despise a man who can swim and does not save a fellow man whom he sees drowning in the river, but it would be an abuse of language to assert that in failing to save the drowning man he was “constraining” the latter to drown.#
• It is not easy to establish what renders one law general in comparison with another. There are many “genera” under which “general” laws may be contrived, and many “species” which it is possible to take into consideration with the same “genus”.#
  PoliticsRule of Law
• If the predictability of the consequences is one of the unavoidable premises of human decisions, it is necessary to conclude that the more general rules render predictable . . . the consequences of individual actions, the more these actions can be called “free” from interference on the part of other people, including the authorities.#
  PoliticsPraxeology
• If we leave out of the picture the ambiguities of the text, we are always “certain” as far as the literal content of each rule is concerned at any given moment, but we are never certain that tomorrow we shall still have the rules we have today.#
  PoliticsRule of Law
• The less men believe now in that future world, the more they cling to their present life, and, believing that individual life is short, they are in a hurry.#
  Religion
• I cannot, in fact, conceive of a market actually free if it is not rooted in its turn in a legal system that is free from the arbitrary (that is, abrupt and unpredictable) interference of the authorities or of any other person in the world.#
  Institutions
• The fact that the central authorities in a totalitarian economy lack any knowledge of market prices in making their economic plans is only a corollary of the fact that central authorities always lack a sufficient knowledge of the infinite number of elements and factors that contribute to the social intercourse of individuals at any time and at any level.#
  Economics
• The free market was at its height in the English-speaking countries when the common law was practically the only law of the land relating to private life and business. On the other hand, such phenomena as the present acts of governmental interference with the market are always connected with an increase in statutory law and with what has been called in England the “officialization” of judiciary powers, as contemporary history proves beyond doubt.#
  HistoryInstitutions
• International trade could not emerge as a simple consequence of the theorem of comparative costs, but required some kind of international legal organization to ward off the enemies of international free trade, who, to a certain extent, are comparable to such enemies of the free market within a nation as robbers or thieves.#
  EconomicsInstitutions
• The idea of the certainty of the law cannot depend on the idea of legislation if “the certainty of the law” is understood as one of the essential characteristics of the rule of law in the classical sense of the expression.#
  Rule of LawLaw
• It seems to be a great misfortune of this principle [of the extension of representation to as many individuals as possible] that, the more one tries to extend it, the more one defeats its purpose.#
  Politics
• The choice of a system of individual freedom on the part of educated people as well as of people in general certainly cannot be brought about by economic arguments of which the cogency would be comparable to that of corresponding arguments in mathematics or in several parts of physics.#
• Everyone probably has more to gain from a system in which his decisions would not be interfered with by the decisions of other people than he has to lose by the fact that he could not interfere in turn with other people’s decisions.#
  Politics
• Coercion is more a feeling of intimidation than a physical event, and the identification of coercion is more difficult than we would imagine at first sight.#
• The “golden rule” has only a negative meaning, since its function is not that of organizing society, but that of avoiding as far as possible the suppression of individual freedom in organized societies.#
  Institutions
• The very possibility of nullifying agreements and conventions through supervening legislation tends in the long run to induce people to fail to rely on any existing conventions or to keep any accepted agreements.#
  Politics
• The increasing significance of legislation in almost all the legal systems of the world is probably the most striking feature of our era, besides technological and scientific progress.#
  LawPolitics
• The development of science and technology at the beginning of our modern era was made possible precisely because procedures had been adopted that were in full contrast to those that usually result in legislation.#
  SciencePolitics
• That the legislators, at least in the West, still refrain from interfering in such fields of individual activity as speaking or choosing one’s marriage partner or wearing a particular style of clothing or traveling usually conceals the raw fact that they actually do have the power to interfere in every one of these fields.#
  Politics
• Just as language and fashion are the products of the convergence of spontaneous actions and decisions on the part of a vast number of individuals, so the law too can, in theory, just as well be a product of a similar convergence in other fields.#
  Politics
• While legislation is almost always certain, that is, precise and recognizable, as long as it is “in force”, people can never be certain that the legislation in force today will be in force tomorrow or even tomorrow morning. The legal system centered on legislation, while involving the possibility that other people (the legislators) may interfere with our actions every day, also involves the possibility that they may change their way of interfering every day.#
  Politics
• Everybody today pays lip service to the Romans no less than to the English for their legal wisdom. Very few realize, however, what this wisdom consisted in, that is, how independent of legislation those systems were in so far as the ordinary life of the people was concerned, and consequently how great the sphere of individual freedom was both in Rome and in England during the very centuries when their respective legal systems were most flourishing and successful.#
  PoliticsHistory
• The succumbing minorities [to a vote], in their turn, adjust themselves to defeat only because they hope to become sooner or later a winning majority and be in the position of treating in a similar way the people belonging to the contingent majority of today.#
  Politics
• No historism and no relativism could prevent us from recognizing that in any society feelings and convictions relating to actions that should not be done are much more homogenous and easily identifiable than any other kind of feelings and convictions.#
  Politics
• The more numerous the people are whom one tries to ‘represent’ through the legislative process and the more numerous the matters in which one tries to represent them, the less the word ‘representation’ has a meaning referable to the actual will of actual people other than that of the persons named as their ‘representatives.’#
  DemocracyPolitics
• No legislator would be able to establish by himself, without some kind of continuous collaboration on the part of all people concerned, the rules governing the actual behavior of everybody in the endless relationships that each has with everybody else. No public opinion polls, no referenda, no consultations would really put the legislators in a position to determine these rules, any more than a similar procedure could put the directors of a planned economy in a position to discover the total demand and supply of all commodities and services.#
  PoliticsEconomics
• In order to restore to the word “representation” its original reasonable meaning, there should be a drastic reduction either in the number of those “represented” or in the number of matters in regard to which they are allegedly represented, or both.#
  Politics
• What we are often confronted with today is nothing less than a potential legal war of all against all, carried on by way of legislation and representation.#
  Politics
• If we contrast the position of judges and lawyers with the position of legislators in contemporary society, we can easily realize how much more power the latter have over the citizens and how much less accurate, impartial, and reliable is their attempt, if any, to “interpret” the people’s will.#
  Politics
• One of the paradoxes of our era is the continual retreat of traditional religious faith before the advance of science and technology, under the implied exigency of a cool and matter-of-fact attitude and dispassionate reasoning, accompanied by a no less continual retreat from the same attitude and reasoning in regard to legal and political questions. The mythology of our age is not religious, but political, and its chief myths seem to be “representation” of the people, on the one hand, and the charismatic pretension of political leaders to be in possession of the truth and to act accordingly, on the other. #
  PoliticsReligion
• The hegemonic bond of the state is not only something to be curbed, but also – and I would say first of all – something we make use of to curb other people’s actions.#
  Politics
• The economists take it for granted that “misproductive” work [i.e., work that is useful for the worker, but not for those for whom, or against whom, he works] is usually against the law.#
  Economics
• A market is no more “natural” than government itself, and both are no more natural than, say, bridges.#

Matthew Hale, “Reflections by the Lord Chief Justice Hale on Mister Hobbes, His Dialogue of the Law“ (1924)

• They that please themselves with a persuasion that they can with as much evidence and congruitie make out an unerring system of laws and politiques equally applicable to all states as Euclide demonstrates his conclusions, deceive themselves with notions which prove ineffectual when they come to particular application.#
  Politics

Ludwig Von Mises, Planning for Freedom (1952)

• The main error of widespread pessimism is the belief that the destructionist ideas and policies of our age sprang from the proletarians and are a “revolt of the masses”. In fact, the masses, precisely because they are not creative and do not develop philosophies of their own, follow leaders. The ideologies which produced all the mischiefs and catastrophes of our century are not an achievement of the mob. They are the feats of pseudo scholars and pseudo intellectuals. They were propagated from the chairs of universities and from the pulpits; they were disseminated by the press, by novels, by plays, by movies, and the radio.#