The economic case for submitting political power (“government”) to general laws that it must itself obey is, at bottom, simple: to blunt the incentives of rulers to become despotic or tyrannical toward a portion of the ruled. (They can’t tyrannize all the ruled because they need supporters and praetorians of different sorts.) Only those confident that they will be among the exploiters rather than the exploited could disagree with this benefit of the law. Two quotations from two different epochs and political systems can illustrate the point.
The first comes from economist Mancur Olson (in his book Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships [Basic Books, 2000], pp. 39-40):
Sometimes, when leading families or merchants organized a government for their city, they not only provided for some power sharing through voting but took pains to reduce the probability that the government’s chief executive could assume autocratic power. For a time in Genoa, for example, the chief administrator of the government had to be an outsider—and thus someone with no membership in any of the powerful families in the city. Moreover, he was constrained to a fixed term of office, forced to leave the city after the end of his term, and forbidden from marrying into any of the local families. In Venice, after a doge who attempted to make himself autocrat was beheaded for his offense, subsequent doges were followed in official processions by a sword-bearing symbolic executioner as a reminder of the punishment intended for any leader who attempted to assume dictatorial power. As the theory predicts, the same city-states also tended to have more elaborate courts, contracts, and property rights than most of the European kingdoms of the time. As is well known, these city-states also created the most advanced economies in Europe, not to mention the culture of the Renaissance.
As an aside, the executed doge was Marino Faliero (1274-1355). In the Hall of the Great Council where his portrait should have stood among the other doges, a black cloth stands bearing the inscription:
Hic est locus Marini Faletro decapitati pro criminibus
This is the space for Marino Faliero, beheaded for his crimes
The second announced quotation is far from the 14th and 15th centuries and much closer to us. Ours is a time when individual liberty and the rule of law are supposedly better established, but what could happen if the government is permitted to disobey the Constitution? The April 17 scathing decision of three judges of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, signed by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, provides an answer. The Court blames the administration for doing nothing to correct its egregious “administrative error” of sending Albrego Garcia to a barbaric prison in El Salvador, without due process and in defiance of a previous court order. The Wall Street Journal reports (“Court Scolds Trump Administration for ‘Shocking’ Response to Deportation Error,” April 18, 2025):
“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” Wilkinson wrote.
“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’,” he wrote, quoting the Constitution, “would lose its meaning.”
The only way the law can bind the rulers, if there is any way, is that it be interpreted by judges (with an appeal process up to a final court) and that government agents and elected officials, in the executive and the legislative, from the most humble one to the most pretentious, be conscious of their duty to uphold the Constitution and thus obey court orders. Real judges (as opposed to “administrative judges”) are independent and not properly government agents. Their role is purely reactive—they only intervene when a party feels aggrieved and calls on them to apply the law. (Friedrich Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty, especially Volume 1, is essential reading about judges.)
We live in exciting, educational, and dangerous times.
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A doge in Venice followed by his symbolic executioner c. 1400, according to ChatGPT
