The Greatest Gift – Last

So I started part I of this argument with the claim that the British heritage of the Rule of Law – and the respect with which it has been embraced and even refined in the United States – is the single greatest legacy and gift to mankind ever. Of course, to make such a claim is to immediately invite comparison to other great inventions or developments (the wheel, movable type, the combustion engine, the sandwich, Brooklyn Decker and Kate Upton’s bikini maker, etc.), but that form of argument is ineffective in that there can always be something else on the list and then the strained comparison begins. My way of arguing this is instead to simply make the assertion and then buttress it with reference to what one society – and by logical extension – the world would look like without it. I suppose the same could be said for the wheel, or the printing press (or the SI swimsuit issue), but it is hard to conceive that we, as humans, would not have eventually invented the wheel, or sliced bread. In other words, those things appear simply inevitable as a product of human growth and movement. But that we still have societies that do NOT have the Rule of Law – or anything even approaching it – suggests that its growth and development was not inevitable and was, instead, the product of choice, of the deliberative process of more than any one person, and was a cultural outgrowth that has served to make both the British Isles and their progeny, including the United States, and the countries we have touched, prosperous (and “good” I will argue in some later post about American Exceptionalism) beyond any in history.

I don’t have time to address the self-loathing literati who continue to dominate the airwaves and universities and tell us, through the lens of ‘multiculturalism’ that ‘it’s all relative’ and that no society or culture is morally superior than any other. The easiest way of refuting such an idiotic notion is with one instance of falsification (see Karl Popper, who needs a post of his own) – to wit, such a statement would mean that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were morally equal to the United States. Q.E.D. I would like to at least touch on the more recent liberal trope that posits that China’s economic rise is a falsification of capitalism – and, by extension, the entire liberal-democratic tradition (and please note well the different uses of liberal in that sentence: The former is the pejorative modern perversion of the latter, more respectable tradition that advocated individual liberty as preeminent as against the state.)

Let’s just accept that argument on its face, flawed as it is, and address China’s ascendancy as an argument against the claim that the Rule of Law is the most important development in human history. (I’m going to also brush aside the China apologists’ umbrage that the society is not based upon the Rule of Law. It’s not. It’s a communist country and Tianamen Square, the arrest of political dissidents, and state-sponsored counterfeiting of trademarks takes them out of any claim for being a “Rule of Law” country. Let’s move on).

So, does China’s apparent rise – without any real tradition of the Rule of Law – provide the falsification of my claim? I think to answer that properly, we have to first agree on whether China’s apparent economic rise is in fact real, or, instead, if it is like the housing bubble that just popped here – a fraud, a house of cards that will eventually come crashing down. Westerners who live in China and report, rather than the mainstream media, suggest that it’s the latter. And that the cracks in the foundation have begun to show. Most importantly, it may only be a matter of time before the artificially inflated economy has a market-correction. See here – or here. But even if one accepts that China’s economy isn’t artificially inflated, Fareed Zakaria points out that simple mathematics may dictate that China’s economy starts to look like the United States’: here. When you’re growing a $1 trillion economy, if you grow by $100 billion, you have 10% annual growth. But when you’re growing a $5 trillion economy, you need $500 billion in growth each year to match that rate – and that simply becomes almost mathematically impossible, in terms of available natural resources.

Regardless of either, the fact is that a thriving Chinese economy, is a non sequitur in a discussion about the Rule of Law. That is to say – a respect for the Rule of Law may provide the most ideal and moral soil in which to grow a capitalist economy, but the converse that only a Rule of Law culture can grow an economy is a logical fallacy. To be succinct, the Rule of Law may be an excellent precursor for economic growth, but it is not a sine qua non for a thriving economy. China apologists who use this as a starting point to attack western economies and the inevitable failings that economies (ours, specifically) have and are having are committing a logical fallacy. (I’ll also leave aside for the moment the point that we don’t have a truly capitalist economy and the term “crony capitalism” best describes it, with both parties-in-power being guilty of abusing power to reward particular benefactors, whether public employee unions or military contractors.)

I’ll leave this argument for now and perhaps come back to it later, but my experiences in traveling around the world, and visiting countries both within and without of the western tradition of respect for the Rule of Law – and our own events, whether of having a Supreme Court decide a Presidential election and there NOT be riots and bloodshed in the streets – leads me to conclude that what we have here, this grand experiment, is something that depends upon the Rule of Law. And if we lose sight of that, and respect for it, we will have squandered a legacy that is unparallelled in history.

“Well, Doctor, what have we got- a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

The response is attributed to Benjamin Franklin, upon exiting the Constitutional Convention in 1787.