At least it’s a new thought for me, maybe others have written on the same thing. Figured I’d throw it at you guys to flesh out some more, and/or critique
My thought is aside from all the incentives that government interference twists, aside from the inefficiency due to these incentives, aside from the NAP, even if all the people in government and running all the programs were perfect angels it still couldn’t work. Why? Because you can’t have a law for everything and government programs cannot respect peoples rights.
If I send my kids to a private school and they want to have “All green Thursdays” where all the kids must wear green, it doesn’t violate my rights there is no need for a law. I’m free to send my business to another school. If it happens in public schools it violates rights and there must be some regulation determining what the schools can mandate. The same is true for virtually everything the school does, if it doesn’t teach Japanese, or if it does. What construction materials they use, if they can have latex in the school, anything and everything is now a political issue.
You don’t need a law for everything, just things that have been deemed necessary to have specific regulations. Bureaucratic discretion fills in the gaps.
RagnarD, I’m sorry but I don’t understand your argument. Would you like to elaborate on your argument perhaps, so I would get some sort of idea about what you are trying to say?
This argument was utilized by Rothbard in both Power and Market and For a New Liberty.
He claims that the state automatically brings about conflict because control of resources becomes an issue for everyone, as opposed to everyone being able to “do their own thing” and pay for whatever service that they want. In the case of democracy everyone is given partial control over resources, and in any type of government you are forced to pay or consume a service.
With this said I think that your OP and what you call this argument are both confused.
You don’t need a law for everything, just things that have been deemed necessary to have specific regulations. Bureaucratic discretion fills in the gaps.
How is “discretion” any different from not having a law at all in most instances?
Well, I wouldn’t say there is any universal or objective limit to bureaucratic discretion. The extent of discretion is contignent upon a whole host of things, from administrative structure, to mandate, to the bureaucrats themselves, and to more macro aspects like the institutional context and social understandings.
You wrote earlier that “bureaucratic discretion fills the gaps [between/among things that have been deemed necessary to have specific regulations]”. That implies to me that you see no limit whatsoever to such discretion - in other words, that you’d be fine with it applying to anything and everything that isn’t covered by statute. Do I understand you correctly? If not, please point out my error(s).
Not necessarily if you have a principle of a public school he has been delegated some bureaucratic discretion in orer to effectively administer the functions of the school. This does not mean that this discretion is unlimited. He has been delegated some authority and within that mandate he can act.
I figured by “bureaucratic discretion” you were speaking in general, i.e. there is at least one bureaucrat among the set of all bureaucrats that has discretion over a given area. Is that not what you meant? If not, then what did you mean?
You’re really saying (I don’t think you actually believe this) that you don’t see how what you said in this post contradicts the understanding I presented in this post (which you subsequently confirmed)?