WHERE MRS. VON DER LEYEN IS WRONG (LIKE ANY OTHER BUREAUCRAT)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52195/pm.v21i2.968Abstract
The European Union was born with the aim of being just a simple trading space without barriers, a common market (a step beyond a mere tariff union; a system of cooperation between states to achieve freedom of movement of goods, capital and people). However, increasingly, bureaucrats and officials (believing that its aim should be different) tend to regulate, overregulate and coercively standardize all aspects of citizens’ lives. There are even those who presume that the comparative advantage of the EU would be precise “regulation” (the bureaucratic regulatory technique).1
In this sense we have chosen or pointed out Mrs. Ursula Von der Leyen as an example of the typical benevolent bureaucrat or technocrat, that however, if you let them, end up hyperregulating everything (convinced of having superior knowledge not only regarding the purposes but also as to the effective ways of achieving them). Along such a line we point out that the main conceptual error of bureaucrats has to do with the consideration of value as an objective reality (fixed and given).2 In front of such a cosmovision, the Austrian School shows how value is instead subjective, ordinal and decided at the margin of human action; market prices, by its side, appear and become informally standardized around spontaneous, non-coercive institutions (which in its turn emerge also from non-coercive decentralized human action itself). The whole process involves a decentralized path of coordination and tentative knowledge in which we all participate.
Therefore, in this work, we will proceed to sketch and summarize the Austrian School’s explanation of the functioning of market processes, their keys, and how they become constrained by coercive intervention in different modalities, and its corresponding effects (regarding all groups of people and regarding all the effects, those that are seen and those that are not seen, or appear later, as Bastiat explained). This approach will allow us to rethink the main problems and objectives involved in the centralized and bureaucratic management of society (and the different options that remain open for this task).
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References
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