Reviews for Supplemental agreements to the North American Free Trade Agreement

The average rating for Supplemental agreements to the North American Free Trade Agreement based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-05 00:00:00 John Topaum "Simple Rules" is Richard Epstein's overview of legal theory for non-lawyers. It presents a theory of law animated by a basic idea of a tradeoff between administrative costs and incentive effects in a legal system. The ideal legal system minimizes administrative costs while maximizing incentives for welfare-improving interaction. Epstein's theory starts from a presumption of simplicity. The simplest legal system--complete lawlessness--has zero administrative costs. From this starting point, legal rules are introduced if their benefits to welfare exceed their administrative costs. These administrative costs, importantly, include the costs of error and mistake, which gives transparent and predictable rules advantage over complex ones. The resulting theory organized around six basic concepts (autonomy, property, contract, tort, necessity, and just compensation) that resembles the common law and justifies a classical liberal state. There are clear affinities between Epstein's argument and F.A. Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty", especially Hayek's claim that a modern economy requires clear and simple rules. This counter-intuitive but far-reaching idea does most of Epstein's analytical work. In general, an economy or society with greater degrees of complexity must increasingly rely on its particular members to coordinate their own activities. This reliance demands rules sufficiently simple that ordinary individuals can depend upon them.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-11 00:00:00 Lonnie Lloyd What I especially appreciate about Epstein is the he can argue so clearly for his principled approach, without having to resort to ranting about specific examples. Richard Epstein explains how simple concepts of law have been subverted by complex rule-making, resulting in economic inefficiencies driven by ambiguity, defensive tactics, and poor allocation. x: "But how seriously can one take a legal system that devotes more of its intellectual ingenuity to identifying and correcting market failures resulting from asymmetrical and imperfect information in employment than to containing violence on the street?" The 6 simple rules are: Individual self-ownership, 2. first possession, 3. contract, 4. torts, 5. necessity, coordination, and just compensation, and 6. take and pay (and the 7th for tax law would be "flat tax").