What do you think about entrepreneurs bending the rules when borderline or actually illegal? When is it okay and when is it NOT okay? Quite obviously, many if not most laws are absolutely NOT okay to break. You shouldn’t break laws against murder, fraud, human trafficking etc.
Putting aside social morality and civil disobedience, let's look at rules governing entrepreneurs and markets, most of which revolve around information and its manipulation (fraud in worst case).
1. asymmetric information between seller and buyer - aka the lemon problem
2. front-running ... where the market/settlement mechanisms is not independent
3. moral hazard ... behaviour based on privatising profits and socialising losses (cough GFC).
You have to design specific mechanisms to counteract ... eg the various types of auctions (english/dutch) to try to foster fair and efficient transaction markets. So rules are to shape these economic exchanges for price discovery which is not-distorted and therefore feed into decision making for resource allocation. Bad data (eg hidden inflation) screws up everything.
"Morality" is a vague term that can only be understood in a specific context of time and place, as refers to a specific group of people. So I will intentionally not comment on that.
I'm a positivist that think laws are product of the social contract, so nothing good can come out of just "not respecting them". Laws and regulations are our way of molding the society to our desires. In our democratic society, they are meant to be changed by the majority or at least in agreement with them.
That said, it is not "forbidden" to break the law (there's no uber-law punishing the individual for breaking any law), but breaking it implies consequences that need to happen in order for our societies to function properly.
Now a consequence of breaking a law might be punishment... or the law being changed.
Without the rule of law, there will be other types of ruling, which most of us agree it didn't help humanity as much...
Putting aside social morality and civil disobedience, let's look at rules governing entrepreneurs and markets, most of which revolve around information and its manipulation (fraud in worst case).
1. asymmetric information between seller and buyer - aka the lemon problem
2. front-running ... where the market/settlement mechanisms is not independent
3. moral hazard ... behaviour based on privatising profits and socialising losses (cough GFC).
You have to design specific mechanisms to counteract ... eg the various types of auctions (english/dutch) to try to foster fair and efficient transaction markets. So rules are to shape these economic exchanges for price discovery which is not-distorted and therefore feed into decision making for resource allocation. Bad data (eg hidden inflation) screws up everything.
Very interesting topic!
And something I bang my head against often...
"Morality" is a vague term that can only be understood in a specific context of time and place, as refers to a specific group of people. So I will intentionally not comment on that.
I'm a positivist that think laws are product of the social contract, so nothing good can come out of just "not respecting them". Laws and regulations are our way of molding the society to our desires. In our democratic society, they are meant to be changed by the majority or at least in agreement with them.
That said, it is not "forbidden" to break the law (there's no uber-law punishing the individual for breaking any law), but breaking it implies consequences that need to happen in order for our societies to function properly.
Now a consequence of breaking a law might be punishment... or the law being changed.
Without the rule of law, there will be other types of ruling, which most of us agree it didn't help humanity as much...