On Innovation and the Rule of Law
Creativity is suppressed in the absence of liberty. Everyone suffers.
by Rod D. Martin
May 2, 2015
When the arbitrary rulings and regulations of legislative tyranny push around the citizens, it isn't just freedom that suffers. It stifles creativity as well.
Creativity thrives on innovating within constraints. But physical constraints -- like the sound barrier -- are objective, unchanging problems for great minds to solve. Legal constraints are subjective: they change when men change them. The entire idea of the Rule of Law is that those constraints should be as unchanging as possible, so that everyone can count on the constraints being consistent. When they are not -- when government changes them frequently or arbitrarily, like so many referees changing the rules on every play -- the added unpredictability makes innovation needlessly difficult, if not impossible. It also gives government virtually dictatorial power.
It is not impossible to thrive in this chaos, but the number of people who can is far more limited than if there's predictability in the system…