Power rarely controls itself

Societies often believe that power can limit itself. It is a reassuring idea. It consists of imagining that it is enough to divide the same structure into different offices for each to control the others. However, history shows that incentives rarely work that way. Those who are part of the power often have more interests in common with each other than with the citizens they claim to represent.

The episode that occurred in the Palácio do Planalto brought this issue back to the forefront. At the end of an official event, an open microphone recorded an informal conversation in which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva invited Supreme Federal Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes to have a coffee. The video, broadcast by the official transmission itself, quickly went viral due to the Brazilian political context and the tensions surrounding both the Government and the highest court.

The real debate, however, does not revolve around a coffee. It revolves around a much deeper question. Can power truly control itself?

Constitutional theory answers yes. For this, there is the separation of powers, checks and balances, and institutional guarantees. But practice tends to be much more complex. Judges are appointed through political agreements. The budgets of the courts depend on the State. The competencies of each power are defined by rules created by the state apparatus itself. Those who make up these institutions do not operate in separate universes; they are part of the same structure whose incentives often converge.

From the classical liberal tradition, there has always been a deep distrust of the concentration of power. But libertarian criticism goes a step further. The problem is not only that one power can abuse another. The problem is believing that an organization can simultaneously become the judge and the party of its own limits.

Murray Rothbard observed that the State has a singular characteristic. Unlike any private organization, it claims the legitimate monopoly of coercion and, at the same time, establishes the mechanisms responsible for supervising the exercise of that monopoly. In other words, the State designs the rules by which it will be controlled. This paradox explains why the supposed institutional checks and balances do not always work as theory promises.

From that perspective, the episode between Lula and Moraes takes on another meaning. Not because it demonstrates undue coordination or because it reveals the content of a private conversation. Its importance lies in making visible something that normally remains hidden: the natural closeness between those who are part of the same power structure.

Defenders of the status quo often respond that personal relationships do not necessarily affect institutional independence. This is true. A coffee does not prove favoritism or political agreements. But it also does not eliminate an inevitable question: if the control mechanisms depend on people appointed, financed, and supported by the same organization they are supposed to limit, how far does that independence really go?

Institutions do not fail only when they violate the law. They also weaken when they rely too much on trust in people and too little on incentives capable of containing power. The liberal tradition was never built on the hope of finding virtuous rulers. It was built on the conviction that even the most virtuous rulers respond to incentives.

Perhaps the greatest mistake of modern constitutionalism has been to believe that power can manufacture its own limits. The open microphone in Brazil did not reveal a conspiracy nor did it resolve that old debate. But it reminded us of something that libertarians have been pointing out for decades: when the State controls only itself, institutional independence ceases to be a guarantee and begins to become an act of faith.