Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Economic Freedom and Government: A Conceptual Framework

Economic Freedom and Government: A Conceptual Framework The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a theory of economic freedom. In this endeavor, we build our framework on the Hayekian notion of freedom (Hayek, 1960) because it explicitly embodies the obvious link between freedom and the state: freedom is an absence of state coercion except for that which enforces abstract, general rules known beforehand. We derive two propositions from this Hayekian thesis and elaborate on them, leading to a categorization of government actions from the viewpoint of economic freedom in which the criterion against which coercive governmental actions must be evaluated is the rule of law, meaning a government’s reliance on general, abstract rules. As an implication, our framework allows us to argue for the imperative differentiation between “efficiency” and “economic freedom” as two separate criteria against which government actions can and must be evaluated. We also show that our framework may help explain the process through which economic freedom enhances growth. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines de Gruyter

Economic Freedom and Government: A Conceptual Framework

Download PDF
26 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/economic-freedom-and-government-a-conceptual-framework-0aCbsFnydN

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by the
ISSN
1145-6396
eISSN
1145-6396
DOI
10.2202/1145-6396.1228
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a theory of economic freedom. In this endeavor, we build our framework on the Hayekian notion of freedom (Hayek, 1960) because it explicitly embodies the obvious link between freedom and the state: freedom is an absence of state coercion except for that which enforces abstract, general rules known beforehand. We derive two propositions from this Hayekian thesis and elaborate on them, leading to a categorization of government actions from the viewpoint of economic freedom in which the criterion against which coercive governmental actions must be evaluated is the rule of law, meaning a government’s reliance on general, abstract rules. As an implication, our framework allows us to argue for the imperative differentiation between “efficiency” and “economic freedom” as two separate criteria against which government actions can and must be evaluated. We also show that our framework may help explain the process through which economic freedom enhances growth.

Journal

Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines – de Gruyter

Published: Oct 4, 2010

There are no references for this article.