Institutional checks are needed because human nature is limited and fallible.
Sowell's 1987 framework in A Conflict of Visions. The constrained vision expects trade-offs and designs checks; the unconstrained expects solutions and designs mandates, and they talk past each other.
In practice
- One board member asks what the proposal gives up and another asks why it does not go further, and they have been in different arguments all afternoon.
- Two people arguing about a policy while holding different visions are not disagreeing about the evidence, which is why the argument does not resolve.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works