Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page xx of Roger Michener’s Foreword to the 1982 Liberty Fund edition of Albert Venn Dicey’s soaring 1885 Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (emphasis added):

By the rule of law he [A.V. Dicey] means: 1) the absence of arbitrary or discretionary power on the part of government; 2) every man is subject to the ordinary law of the land administered by ordinary and usual tribunals; 3) the general principles of law, the common law rules of the constitution, in contradistinction to the civil law countries of Europe, are the consequences of rights of the subject, not their source.

DBx: Contrary to today’s near-unanimous consensus, neither law nor legislation creates human rights; instead, law recognizes and protects natural human rights. (The contradictory belief is nonsense on stilts.) Increasingly, these rights are threatened by legislation masquerading as law.