Rule of law in the third world


Without protections for individual rights, the rule of law means tyranny. This article shows why.
Peter F. Schaefer has a fantastic piece at TCS Daily on the rule of law in the third world.

Cory was not especially corrupt; actually her moral character was higher than that of almost all third world leaders. The fact is that all developing countries are governed by autocrats, even when they are elected. Some are thugs, some are benign, even well-intended reformers, but all are autocrats. They have no choice because it is impossible to govern by the rules if there is no rule-set.

In fact, it is nearly impossible to get elected without systemic corruption; so in a way, our emphasis on democracy often contributes perversely to a rise in corruption. This prevails for two reasons. First, the nearly total disconnect between people and the government means they don't much care about the election, and so their votes are for sale. But secondly, election technology is now worldwide and high tech. TV is about as expensive in Manila as it is in New York and someone must pay. Every dime in fees that James Carville is paid by a politician in a poor country is money stolen from the mouth of some poor person, directly or indirectly.

Rule of law, adjudicated by even-handed justice, simply does not exist anywhere in the developing world and this is the real culprit that stifles development and condemns the poor to live in zero-sum societies. All developing countries are failed states to one degree or another and most of their citizens are miserably poor. In fact, calling them "developing" is misleading because it suggests an upward spiral. But these people are the great grandkids of folks who were poor a half century ago when we started giving out foreign aid in large chunks.

Without laws -- and the institutions to administer them fairly -- people make up their own rules. Society requires predictability to function and so absent national law they create informal rule-sets. But rules without the force of law can only be sanctioned through bribery or physical force. If the beat cop has no rules, he follows the local norms, the neighborhood rule-set. But to use his monopoly of force on behalf of the neighborhood rule-set he will extract a price. A bribe.

I've touched briefly on this subject before when I posted about the works of Hernando de Soto. This is what makes capitalism something other than the might makes right.

Without a uniform system of law to recognize and protect individual rights, law gets corrupted by whoever is calling the shots.

These days it's not exactly fashionable to talk about individual rights, but I will point out that in a society where group rights trump individual rights, whatever rights you have are yours solely at the whim of the mob.

This is another case where good intentions lead to disastrous result. Mr. Schaefer points out that much of the U.S. foreign policy and foreign aid has only strengthened tyranny. At first I think we were doing it to contain Communism, and then we were doing it because we felt guilty for being powerful. I will be reviewing a book that touches on this subject in the next few days.

Long story short, we screwed up and the Islamists (not all Muslims are Islamists) and the mess in the Middle East is the direct result. Not to mention thirty or forty other trouble spots that haven't quite exploded in our face yet.

Our real goal in Iraq isn't oil, but the uniform rule of law.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - July 5, 2006 at 09:29 PM  Tag


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