This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… Is it "Life, Liberty, & Democracy", or Is It "Life, Liberty, & Property"?Democracy’s failure modes in the age of the Shadow Docket. Trump gives new life and force to the fears of Friedrich von Hayek. Spite-dictated tariffs and funding whims now discipline America’s...
Democracy’s failure modes in the age of the Shadow Docket. Trump gives new life and force to the fears of Friedrich von Hayek. Spite-dictated tariffs and funding whims now discipline America’s barons. That silence you hear? It’s power learning fear. We used to litigate before we confiscated; now we confiscate, then maybe litigate. Try unscrambling an egg after ten months of executive tantrum. Liberalism prizes dignity and citizenship, but without secure property, freedom collapses fast. Hayek saw the sequence; today’s Shadow Docket proves it…
Liberalism’s hierarchy—human dignity, self-governance, then prosperity—works only if prosperity and property are secure enough to sustain speech and safety. Hayek’s uncomfortable worries are now empirical: with SNAP suspended and tariffs weaponized, freedom from want, fear, and even speech depends on market stability. The Shadow Docket has short-circuited process, letting executive whims disrupt organizations before courts adjudicate laws and equities. Democracy’s failure modes—majoritarian cruelty, minority vulnerability, personalized spite—are live. When property becomes contingent on presidential favor, America’s barons learn to be quiet. The question isn’t socialism versus markets; it’s whether any rule-of-lawframework survives executive confiscation by Shadow Docket. Mike Brock wants a “classical liberalism” that centers democratic self-governance and treats economics as instrumental. But since January 2025, short-run judicial indulgence via the Shadow Docket has turned tariffs and appropriations into levers of personal dominance by whim. For-profit corporations, non-profit universities, and many others now face existential risk if they cross the executive’s mood, even if they have solid contractual rights to the money flows they had relied on. And so the barons of American society have discovered silence. The old rule-of-law sequence—authorize, regulate, enjoin, adjudicate—has become reverse-engineered into “act now, litigate later.” If the court reverses months on, the egg is already scrambled. Thus we need to register, once again, Hayek’s reply to civic-first liberalism is sharp: without solid property and predictable markets, freedom from fear and want dissolves, and speech will follow. Yes, property-first liberalism requires an equitable distribution of property to avoid falling into different failures modes. But is quite clear right now what the most concerning failure mode is. What should “liberalism” bw? Mike Brock has a view:
What do I think? I think Friedrich von Hayek would have a good reply: Without a market economy with private property dominant, you cannot have freedom from fear, and soon will not have freedom of speech, and—as we see now with the suspension of SNAP—freedom from want requires prosperity, property rights, and equitable property distribution even with formal rights to life and liberty, and to democracy. Just look around you! Well-distributed property and prosperity is not secondary, but primary to human dignity meaning anything. And democracy has failure modes that keep it from being a sufficient guarantee, as all minorities know in their bones, and as majorities occasionally find out, when they discover that their elected leader is Plato’s Werewolf. Look at Donald Trump: the corrupt Republican Supreme Court and the supine corrupt Republican House and Senate caucuses have, so far, given him the power to take the functional property of our large organizations and those who rely on them at whim, and out of spite. Laws that create money flows to organizations—good laws—are executed at his whim, and the organizations know that if they anger him they are in crisis. The globalized value-chain economy has created a world in which tariffs can destroy the profitability of almost all large- and medium-sized corporations, and corporations know that if Trump reacts to any of their words or deeds with spite, they too are in crisis. And as a result it turns out that Donald Trump has astonishing power to enforce acquiescence and silence upon the barons of American society. Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to DeLong's Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. A subscription gets you:
|
Is it "Life, Liberty, & Democracy", or Is It "Life, Liberty, & Property"?
Sunday, 9 November 2025
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment