Some remarks on 'anarchy plus (a/the) constable'

자료 1: 'Anarchy plus a Constable' ( By Monty Pelerin, American Thinker, April 20, 2010 )

"Anarchy plus a constable" was Thomas Carlyle's description of classical liberalism. Gerald O'Driscoll, in an "An Economy of Liars" in the Wall Street Journal, discussed the breakdown of honesty and ethics and related it to the current financial crisis.

One of O'Driscoll's points dealt with laws versus ethics. Others have pointed out that the more laws a society has, the less ethical it becomes. Instead of doing what is "right," the boundary becomes: "is it legal or within the law." O'Driscoll described it thusly (my italicized emphasis added):

The idea that multiplying rules and statutes can protect consumers and investors is surely one of the great intellectual failures of the 20th century. Any static rule will be circumvented or manipulated to evade its application. Better than multiplying rules,financial accounting should be governed by the traditional principle that one has an affirmative duty to present the true condition fairly and accurately-not withstanding what any rule might otherwise allow.

Another point dealt with what economist's refer to as "regulatory" capture, a joining of interests between the regulator and the regulated: (...)



자료 2: The Theory of the State: an economic perspective (By Ronald Findlay & Stanislaw Wellisz, September 2003 )
Columbia University Department of Economics, Discussion Paper Series

The principle of laissez- faire, so closely associated with Adam Smith and the classical
economists, should certainly not be considered an endorsement of anarchy as the ideal
form of social order. Despite the theological overtones of divine providence in the
imagery of the “invisible hand”, Smith and his followers did not regard the market and
the price mechanism as a spontaneous form of natural order that would prevail in any
social group. Political organization in some form is necessary to provide the framework
of law and order within which justice could be maintained and contracts enforced. Thus
even one of their harshest critics, Thomas Carlyle, described their system not as anarchy,
but as “anarchy plus the constable”. (...)

자료 3: The Works of Thomas Carlyle ( By Thomas Carlyle, Henry Duff Traill )