Friedrich August von Hayek CH (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992), was an Austrian and British economist and philosopher known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought. He is considered to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century. Hayek’s account of how changing prices communicate signals which enable individuals to coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics. (from wikipedia)
He was also awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974. He is one of the most important conservative economists of this century (the title probably goes to Milton Friedman, who said he considered Hayek his most important influence, and Ayn Rand had a wider influence). Hayek’s classic the Road to Serfdom, first published in 1944, remains as topical as ever.
In it, Hayek makes the case against ambiguous legislation. He argues society is underpinned by the Rule of Law. “[The Rule of Law] means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand – rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of knowledge”.
He discusses one way in which the Rule of Law is degraded, “When we have to choose between higher wages for nurses or doctors and more extensive services for the sick…nothing short of a complete system of values in which every want of every person or group has a definite place is necessary to provide an answer…[A]s planning becomes more and more extensive, it becomes regularly necessary to qualify legal provisions increasingly by reference to what is “fair” or “reasonable”; this means that it becomes necessary to leave the decision of the concrete case more and more to the discretion of the judge or authority…One could write a history of the decline of the Rule of Law…in terms of the progressive introduction of these vague formulas into legislation and jurisdiction, and of the increasing arbitrariness and uncertainty of… the law and the judicature, which in these circumstances could not but become an instrument of policy.”
This point is quintessentially non-partisan. The passage of ambiguous legislation leading to policy decided not by elected representatives but by bureaucrats, or left to judges, would seem to define the last 60 years no matter which party dominated politics.
