This is a guest post by Paul Mueller, a Program Assistant with the MBM Team. Check out his bio here.

You may know this already, but there is an app, Mint, that tracks your spending and breaks it down by category. As I discussed this app with a colleague who uses it, we began talking about the value of having personal budgets. While some people refuse to spend a penny more than their budget, even if it means going without, others only use budgets as a rough guide for their spending.

We generally agreed that having flexibility was better than being rigidly fixed to a budget.  Then I raised the question, why do we treat personal budgets differently than the Constitution? Both documents are supposed to guide our actions; especially when we have to make tough choices and both documents are based upon judgments of what we should do in the face of an uncertain future.  If flexibility is good at a personal level, shouldn’t it also be good at a national level? But does that apply to Constitutional interpretation and the upholding of the law? Should we treat these as guidelines rather than binding rules?

An excerpt from Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty might be helpful here:

The idea that each conflict, in law or in morals, should be so decided as would seem most expedient to somebody who could comprehend all the consequences of that decision involves the denial of the necessity of any rules….few beliefs have been more destructive of the respect for the rules of law and of morals than the idea that a rule is binding only if the beneficial effect of observing it in the particular instance can be recognized (Hayek 159).

Hayek says that injecting a lot of judgment into whether rules are enforced clearly undermines the purpose of having rules in the first place. In contrast, here is a TED talk by psychologist Barry Schwartz that calls into question whether we should strictly follow the law regardless of consequences. Before this segment he discusses why rules can’t fix the problems in the financial markets and after this segment he talks about a separate court system that has been formed for veterans without mandatory sentencing laws and with more accountability for following up with people after their sentence is served. The segment starts at the 9 minute mark and goes to 11:45:

What do you think? Is Hayek right or is Schwartz right?

Hayek, TED