Rule of Law Impacts

The rule of law has a clear meaning: the supremacy of law over arbitrary power

Zywick, Todd, "The Rule of Law, Freedom, and Prosperity," Law and Economics Working Paper Series, George Mason University School of Law, 2002, http://www.gmu.edu/departments/law/faculty/papers/docs/02-20.pdf

Commentators on the rule of law often insist that it is difficult to define the concept of the rule of law. This is untrue. Although there may be disagreement over the importance or desirability of the rule of law as a virtue, there is a fairly well-understood core understanding of its meaning. Indeed, the face that the rule of law has spawned so many detractors indicates that its meaning is well-understood among both enthusiasts and detractors.

Since Dicey restated the rule of law in the late Nineteenth Century in application to modern constitutional republics, there has been a general agreement as to the content and meaning of the rule of law. Dicey identified three fundamental characteristics of the rule of law as it emerged in Britain: (1) the supremacy of regular law as opposed to arbitrary power, i.e., the rule of law, not men; (2) equality before the law of all persons and classes, including governmental officials; and (3) the incorporation of constitutional law as a binding part of the ordinary law of the land. Although Dicey spoke primarily to the historical development of the rule of law in Britain, the core understanding of the rule of law that he articulated has remained remarkably stable since he wrote and has been readily generalizable to a universal understanding of the rule of law.

Without the rule of law, there necessarily is tyranny, and under tyranny, anyone can be sacrificed for any end

Zywick

In particular, the rule of law constrains arbitrary action by political actors that is not taken pursuant to established rules and procedures announced prior to the action. Government under the rule of law preserves individual freedom; government without the rule of law is tyranny, in that it leaves individuals subject to the arbitrary will of rules. As one observer has noted, "The rule of law is a solution to a problem, and as the classical tradition has always recognized, the problem is tyranny--the social relationship in which some people can command the lives or property of others at will and in pursuit of discretionary ends."

A free, peaceful, prosperous society cannot exist without the rule of law

Zywick

The rule of law should not be understood as a mere means to a social order predicated on limited government, freedom, and prosperity. Instead, the rule of law is an inherent part of a free, peaceful, and prosperous society. A society organized under the rule of law is a "liberal" order of private ordering and constitutional limits on government; conversely, the rule of law can exist only in such an order. Thus, the rule of law and a liberal order and inextricably intertwined: neither can exist without the other.

Arbitrary government that ignores the rule of law threatens all rights

Bovard, James, author, Future of Freedom Foundation, "Rule of Law versus Unlimited Rule," February, 2003, http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0302d.asp

In recent decades, support for the classical concept of the rule of law has evaporated; instead, competing bands of intellectuals champion the executive branch or Congress or judicial activism or some other fad. Rather than focus on the actual operations of government agencies, political thinking is often characterized by a “Do it now!” philosophy. Discretionary power has been granted to bureaucrats by many laws because congressmen don’t have the courage to say openly what they want the bureaucracy to do, leading to government by stealth.

Arbitrary power is the mirror image of the rule of law. Benjamin Constant beautifully expressed the danger of arbitrary power in his 1815 book, Principles of Politics:

Arbitrary power destroys morality, for there can be no morality without security. . .. Arbitrariness is incompatible with the existence of any government considered as a set of institutions. For political institutions are simply contracts; and it is in the nature of contracts to establish fixed limits. Hence arbitrariness, being precisely opposed to what constitutes a contract, undermines the foundation of all political institutions.
The essence of arbitrary power is government’s refusal to issue clear rules limiting its prerogative to punish private citizens.

At some point, the sheer accumulation of penalties and threats in the statute book fundamentally changes the citizen’s relation to the government. Rather than a government of laws, it becomes a government of threats, intimidation, and browbeating. When the law books reach a certain length, there is little or no difference between laws and arbitrary commands, because few people know what the laws or regulations actually are.

Because there can be no level playing field between the citizen and the state, every expansion of the state means increased subjugation of the citizen. Every increase in the cost of achieving justice from the state is a de facto subsidy for government oppression. The higher the cost of legal self-defense, the more likely that government agencies will abuse their power. Government employees who carry out vendettas against citizens almost never have to pay either the government’s or the citizen’s legal bills; their incentive is to stretch their power as far as possible.

Every increase in the cost of traversing government administrative processes increases the arbitrary power of government employees over every citizen who cannot afford hefty legal bills. Sen. John Taylor wrote in 1822, “There are no rights where there are no remedies, or where the remedies depend upon the will of the aggressor.” And with the constantly expanding power and prerogatives of federal agencies, those remedies depend more than ever before on the bureaucratic aggressors.