The Legislature

Judicial tenure

Judges … should not be dependent upon any man or body of men. To these ends they should hold estates for life in their offices, or, in other words, their commissions should be during good behavior, and their salaries ascertained and established by law. —John Adams....

Preventing meddling

There already exist some excellent constitutional checks and balances that slow legislatures down. These include the executive veto, limited sitting days, multiple readings and bicameral legislatures. However, as the career of former California governor Gray Davis...

Progress comes from free enterprise

Perpetually, governments have thwarted and deranged the growth, but have in no way furthered it; save by partially discharging their proper function and maintaining social order. —Herbert Spencer. The Sins of the Legislature, 1850. The incredible advances in medical...

The conceit of meddlers

But when I remember how many of my private schemes have miscarried; how speculations have failed, agents proved dishonest, marriage been a disappointment; how I did but pauperize the relative I sought to help; how my carefully-governed son has turned out worse than...

Shun the grand experiment

Today in Britain there are millions living in squalor, poverty, and ignorance on drug and crime-infested council estates. These vast, barren, weed and rubbish strewn concrete monstrosities are an abomination, the worst and most depressing places imaginable to live. Of...

The folly of meddling

As the sum of all human knowledge grows, so does each individual’s relative ignorance The more men know, the smaller the share of all that knowledge becomes that any one mind can absorb. The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual...

The tyranny of meddling

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some...

The injustice of meddling

All government meddling beyond its proper sphere is injustice When the government subsidizes the steel industry, the wool industry and the arts, or builds space telescopes or particle accelerators, or pays for food critics to fly in from overseas and puts them up at...

Laws must be moral

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his...

Debate reveals the truth

Truth has ever originated from the conflict of mind with mind; it is the bright spark that emanates from the collision of opposing ideas. —Herbert Spencer. The Proper Sphere of Government, 1842–1843. When people are required to articulate their thinking, it forces...

Boisterous debate is good

I argued the case for the ideological clash of opposing political parties as essential to the effective functioning of democracy. The pursuit of consensus, therefore, was fundamentally subversive of popular choice. It was wrong to talk of taking the big issues ‘out of...