Most people don’t have a reasoned theory to understand how the state and politics work. Many believe mythological stories they caught at home or in school. Many think their own country is unquestionably the best in the world, and their intuitions and beliefs flow from that.

We must not disparage ordinary people. The poorer the country, the more they need all their energy to survive and raise families. In richer countries, ordinary people are those who, when they were left free, have formed middle classes that launched and maintained the Industrial Revolution. The problem comes when, through the state, which they don’t understand, they want to get benefits and privileges at the expense of others and dictate how others should live (see my “Princess Mathilde and the Immorality of Politics,” Econlib, April 1, 2024).

The political leaders they follow, and often yearn to obey blindly, don’t necessarily have a more serious theory of the state except as an instrument of their ambitions and power. Nicolás Maduro, who was just, fraudulently from what we know, reelected president of Venezuela, a country he ran to the ground with his mentor and predecessor Hugo Chávez, seems to have a simple theory of the state, which happens to be very convenient for his own self-interest. The Financial Times reports (“Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s Contested President,” August 2, 2024):

Ultimately, his fate is likely to be decided by the powerful military and whether it remains loyal. In the meantime, he is focused on burnishing his image. “I’m just Nicolás Maduro, a student, worker, union leader, constituent assembly member, legislator and foreign minister,” he told the news conference. “And I act out of love.”

A different passage of this report is the journalist’s matter-of-fact statement that “Maduro drew closer to China and Russia and adopted free-market policies.” If “free-market policies” are policies to respect and protect voluntary interindividual cooperation without coercive direction from political authorities, Maduro did no such thing, because it would threaten his power. What the newspaper means is that Maduro recently allowed the circulation of the dollar to deflect the discontent of those whose political support he needs.

In its different manifestations, love is a natural and useful sentiment in private and small-group interactions. But public love from unrestrained political rulers and coercive busybodies is a very dangerous thing. James Buchanan and the contemporary school of constitutional political economy defend a diametrically opposite ideal: institutions that constrain political leaders to contribute to the maintenance of a free society based on an ethics of reciprocity among equally free individuals. In their seminal The Calculus of Consent, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock wrote:

Christian idealism, to be effective in leading to a more harmonious social order, must be tempered by an acceptance of the moral imperative of individualism, the rule of equal freedom. The acceptance of the right of the individual to do as he desires so long as his action does not infringe on the freedom of other individuals to do likewise must be a characteristic trait in any “good” society. The precept “Love thy neighbor, but also let him alone when he desires to be let alone” may, in one sense, be said to be the overriding ethical principle for Western liberal society.