Publisher's Synopsis
Friends of the free society judge a social order by whether or not it promotes personal liberty. This volume?the third in the series Values and the Social Order?distinquishes between voluntary orders, like the market, and coercive orders, like the state, and examines the thesis that the market order based on private property, the choice example of a spontaneous and voluntary order, is prior to the state. Property breeds order, not the other way round; order is not created by law. The nature of law has a feedback effect on the means required for its enforcement: convention and custom rely on informal and decentralized enforcement, statue law on centrally organized enforcement, with evident consequences for the resulting political and social order. Increasingly mobile sources of wealth-creation and technological innovations enhance the role of market-generated institutions. The state?s coercive power will shrink relatively in a world of competition. Competition is the best remedy against coercive power. We live not only in states (coercive orders), but also in an ensemble of voluntary, spontaneous orders, with international commerce as the paradigmatic example. The contributions to the volume address the various aspects of this problem cluster.
