Does Law inform or enforce culture?

If ‘the Law’ is the codification of cultural norms and practices, does the Law then not inform culture?

Policy, social malice and engineering of social outcomes bend these laws into legislative blunt instruments designed to enforce cultural behavioural changes on a grand scale, trouncing the common law of good judgment, neighbourly relations and common sense and thus freedom in their wake?

Within the above question and assertion lies the ‘malice of the free market’; where misguided and misinformed regulation channels behaviour and economic interactions in directions and with outcomes not anticipated or foreseen.  Thus unleashing the ‘law of unintended consequences’.

Take as an example the economic condition referred to as Moral Hazard.

A definition is:

Moral Hazard occurs when a party insulated from risk may behave differently than it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk.

Moral Hazard therefore flies in the face of the principles of personal responsibility and thus accountability for our actions to a wider stakeholder community.

Is Moral Hazard perhaps promoted and therefore amplified by the fact that business leaders are not more formally educated in their fiduciary responsibilities?

Is this a function of weak or inefficient corporate governance structures and frameworks, or merely an oversight that is readily addressed by ‘occupational licensure’ or the professionalization of directors by only allowing formally qualified persons to serve on certain corporate boards?

Would this formalisation process of understanding fiduciary responsibility hinder the spirit of free enterprise and risk-taking or enhance the governance and risk aptitudes in a controlled and more channelled and focussed practice?  Would it have as a positive consequence an amplifier effect for raising the corporate governance and Enterprise-wide Risk Management practices?

theMarketSoul © 2010