Robert W. Gordon In its strong versions, the theory condemns almost all the legislative output of Parliamentary democracies as a kind of legalized theft. To summarize, then; The NewRight makes at least three kinds of historical claims. (1) There is a set of basic norms and principles that should be treated as the basic ground-rules of the American political, economic and social system: entitled to authority because they have been historically encoded in foundational legal forms (the original Constitutions, and common-law and legislative “traditions”). (2) At some point in historical time - exactly which point shifts around quite a bit, but the preferred location is the mid-to-late 1 9th century - these basic ground-rules were actually in force, with beneficial results for individual freedom, national prosperity, and social cohesion and morals. (3) In more recent periods (in economic regulation, the 1930s to the present; in race relations, the period of “affirmative action” beginning in 1965; in social policy, the 1960s) the basic rules have been radically departed from, violated or distorted, with predictably horrible effects on freedom, prosperity and morals. In these narratives - to cite the most striking example - the United States’s tragic and bloody history of racial oppression, fromslavery through legally enforced segregation, is interpreted primarily as a misguided departure from laissezfaire principles: that is, as having resulted fromas excessive use of the state’s police power to limit the free market competition that would in short order have eradicated racial discrimination. Often these three claims are combined with a fourth: that there is a longterm historical world-wide tendency towards restoration of a reinvigorated classical liberalism. The story of how “the West” grew prosperous and rich and free through the adoption of a strict framework of legal arrangements protecting “liberal capitalism” - of which the most important component was a regime of “strict property rights” - has become, through its enthusiastic sponsorship by the World Bank and Agency for International Development, one of the USA’s major export commodities. It has been coupled recently with another story about the return to the market - how the world’s societies, after failed experiments with socialism, central state planning, Keynsian redistribution, overregulation and overgenerous social spending are now, under the pressure of global competition, returning to the classical premises. The classical narrative - the escape fromfeudalism and mercantilism into laissez-faire, the qualification of laissez-faire with unsuccessful bureaucratic modification of the framework, the return to basics (what Mrs. Thatcher called “Victorian values”) - is becoming deeply entrenched. 194 See Daniel Farber and Philip Frickey, Laiv andPublic Choice (Chicago; Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991) for an overviewand informed critique of such theories.
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