Reposted by Jacob T. Levy
Trump Rages, Rages Against the Dying of the Light talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump...
talkingpointsmemo.com
Trump Rages, Rages Against the Dying of the Light
Donald Trump’s manic building and naming spree has been a core feature...
![Why should it matter so much that power can be lost? One answer can be found in the work of the economic historians Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast. In their sweeping and ambitious book, Violence and Social Orders, they argue that for most of human history, communities have solved the problem of social violence by means of what they call a “limited access order.” A coalition of elites agrees not to fight, and that agreement is held together by privilege. Only members of the coalition may hold certain kinds of property, enter certain trades, or form certain kinds of organizations. “The creation of rents through limiting access,” they write, “provides the glue that holds the coalition together.”
This is precisely the world of chartered monopolies and guild privileges that Adam Smith attacked in The Wealth of Nations. But it wasn’t just the economic logic of Smith’s critique that brought that world to an end. In the countries that made the transition to “open access,” economic and political openness arrived together, “within relatively narrow windows of historical time.” General incorporation laws replaced corporate charters that had required “an explicit grant by the legislature [or] the crown.” The reform occurred during the same era that competitive political parties formed and the franchise began to widen. This was no accident. On North, Wallis, and Weingast’s account, the two kinds of openness depend on each other. Closed economies and closed political systems propped each other up, and economic openness could be sustained only alongside political openness.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:uz23le2kxydwxfhdml455iqg/bafkreidesgdx5lxn2ccs42q6nxgeevgmltlzolffdwrqgt3efqvl6tq6xi)
