“Let me step away from current events for a moment and ask what may seem like an odd historical question: Why did absolute monarchy disappear from the Western world in the 18th and 19th centuries? How did republics or constitutional monarchies that basically functioned as republics become the norm?”
“A large part of the answer is probably that rule of law was a source of strength. That’s the argument of a classic paper by Douglass North and Barry Weingast, Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England. North and Douglass argued that the reduced power of the king and the enhanced power of Parliament ‘allowed the government to commit credibly to upholding property rights’ — including the right of people who bought government bonds to be repaid. Over the long term this was good for economic growth, but even in the short term it meant that England could borrow cheaply to finance its war effort, while France couldn’t.”
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