INSTITUTIONS IN A NUTSHELL (elegance from Peter Boettke) “I argue that in assess

INSTITUTIONS IN A NUTSHELL

(elegance from Peter Boettke)

“I argue that in assessing the workability of utopian schemes we must first subject them to a coherence test, and then a test of their vulnerability to opportunism. Schemes that are incoherent are deemed impossible; schemes that are coherent but vulnerable are impractical; and only schemes that are both coherent and invulnerable should be considered in the feasible set of workable utopias.”– Peter Boettke

I’ll translate that into propertarian language as: the minimum requirement for any theory of cooperation requires internal consistency, and external correspondence, where external correspondence is defined as increasing cooperation without increasing the potential for criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, corrupt and conquest behaviors.

In practice I suspect that Peter would argue that he covers all forms of free riding in his definition of opportunism, But I think it is possible to constrain criminal, unethical, and immoral behavior while preserving conspiratorial behavior (corruption. ie:statism)

So, given the permissiveness that socialists grant to bureaucrats a more granular definition is required in order to address both private and public actors with an equally pejorative prohibition.

At the very worst, my definition educates the reader with a more rigid test.