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Quote by Antony Davies

“In both the public and the private sectors, one can find people who are altruistic, selfish, smart, stupid, capable, incompetent, and just about every other description. They are all drawn from the same mass of people in roughly the same proportions. What is true of all of these people is that they pursue what they believe will make them happy, and they respond to the incentives that surround them. When those incentives are tied directly to their job performance, people’s quest for happiness encourages them to behave in ways that satisfy the people for whom they perform their jobs. But when people’s incentives are tied to something else, like voters avoiding the cost of becoming informed, or politicians attracting more voters, or bureaucrats making their jobs less difficult, the outcomes that emerge can be very different from the outcomes people had in mind when they empowered government to pursue those outcomes in the first place. Consider the typical experiences with the Post Office versus FedEx, Amtrak versus Southwest, applying for a driver’s license versus applying for a credit card, or applying for federal financial aid versus applying for a bank loan.”

Quote by Antony Davies

Book:Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
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Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics

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Antony Davies

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“From the fact that the rule of law is a limitation upon all legislation, it follows that it cannot itself be a law in the same sense as the laws passed by the legislator. Constitutional provisions may make infringements of the rule of law more difficult. They may help to prevent inadvertent infringements by routine legislation. But the ultimate legislator can never limit his own powers by law, because he can always abrogate any law he has made. The rule of law is therefore not a rule of the law, but a rule concerning what the law ought to be, a meta-legal doctrine or a political ideal. It will be effective only in so far as the legislator feels bound by it. In a democracy this means that it will not prevail unless it forms part of the moral tradition of the community, a common ideal shared and unquestioningly accepted by the majority.”

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Book:القرآن الكريم
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