Via its abolition.
But how do you piece the state back together after abolishing it?
Why do you think we need a state?
I don’t.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61P21D20100306
Looks like an improvement to me.
See? It’s not so bad when you are in the majority!
But it is possible to abolish it. People just stop voting.
Encourage enough anger, cynicism, and hopelessness about the process and it will work wonders. And it already is.
In statist United Kingdom, 75% of the people thought it to be their fundamental duty to vote back in thw 1980s. The number now has already dropped below 20%. And this change has happened all the while Britain has become more aged in its demographics, and thus with a greater number of wise and experienced people. And if this generation teaches the next accordingly not to vote, then we can slowly start seeing future collapse of the coercive British state. It will prevent new legislations, but the remaining part of the job would be to dismantle the giant British bureaucracy and public sector. And that’s another interesting thing - reports show that the British are become more fiscally conservative. So they don’t want more taxes and public spending, although they are still married to welfare.
In short, all you need to do is educate the public a little and instill the understanding of how dangerous the legislative and democratic process is. And the effect will slowly come of its own throughout the years.
Yes. It is called the Constitution. It delegates national levels down to the state levels.
It requires an active participation.
But until we can rectify public goods, the scenario breaks down.
How do you rectify the commons?
I actually think the socialist will (try), by nature they are more organised then us lol
I highly doubt that changing the political system into a monarchy will be better. Hoppe’s conception of a monarchy needed certain conditions that cannot be replicated today. For example, monarchies usually develop from natural elites. Bush or Obama is definitely not a natural elite so making them monarch would just equal dictatorship.
The shitty thing about monarchy is precisely the fact that it is natural: it cannot be created by changing the constitution. Sure, you can install a guy as a king but he’ll lack the authority that makes a king such. So one cannot just install a monarch but can only hope that a strong-enough leader will come along. There is only one thing that can be done: reduce the physical territory of states; no human being, no mater how strong, can become king of 300 million people: monarchy is always a local phenomenon.
The next best thing to abolishment would be government by unanimous consent. John C. Calhoun developed the idea of concurrent majority, which is based on this idea, during the decades leading up to the Civil War as a way to protect the minority interests of The South. I have done a little reading about it and have always been intrigued.
Most people that I have discussed this with say “oh that would never work, the government would be paralyzed”, but in my mind that is the point. No legislation is passed unless virtually everyone agrees that they will benefit. It would make it close to impossible for one group to feed off others, unless the others have agreed to it.
It doesnt address all the problems of government but it would be an improvement on what we have today. Any political science majors here read or studied about a concurrent majority?
Well that is an intriguing thought isn’t it. Would it be too audacious to go from here and say that likewise the next best thing to a government by unanimous consent is government by a super-majority and that the next best thing to that is government by a simple majority? As opposed to rule of minority.
Is it not harder to pass oppressive measures if they need to be passed by a majority of the electorate at a plebiscite than if they only need to be approved by the power elite?
Wouldn’t going from representative democracy to a direct democracy represent a (small) step away from the rule of the power elite towards rule by unanimous consent?
Something similar to that has been implemented before:
Not such a good idea when surrounded by Prussia, Russia, and Austria!
The downfall of Poland is something I have longed planed on looking into. At the first glance you would think that its story should be more like that of Britain - internal liberalism empowering the state vis a vis its competitors in the international arena. But by all accounts it was just the other way around.
I suspect that in reality Poland was not really a case of a state that was internally liberal but merely one that was segmented instead of consolidated. So rather than there being more freedom for the average peasant or a craftsman it was just that instead of being expropriated primarily for the benefit of the central authorities (as was the case in absolutist Russia) they were being expropriated for the benefit of the whole chain of authorities from the central to the most local one.
Calhoun used Poland as an example of where the idea had been tried before. I’m not sure that any nation, powerful centralized government or not, could have resisted the concerted efforts of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. I know very little about the partition of Poland but I am willing to bet that most of your local nobles went along with the partition and Im sure that most recieved handsome new titles, fat land grants, and positions of power that were denied to them under the Polish system.
With that said, it was a stable system that worked for over 100 years and preserved local authority, which is exactly the point of creating such a system. It did not collapse from its own weakness but from external pressures. I dont think the US has to worry about Canada and Mexico carving sections of the country up. Unless the locals wished it to happen and in that case I say more power to them.
In any case we must take care not to confuse greater power for small oppressors with freedom for the populace at large. For example giving unions veto power over any new labour related legislation would actually entrench oppression albeit it would at the same time reduce the power of the legislature.
Some good points, Marko. Your analysis seems to make sense, but I think there may even be another factor contributing to this system failing in Poland, which I will incorporate into my response to Southern.
This is a good point, and illustrates a facet of the US that may have been lacking in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; a unified national identity. Although the state propaganda machine was responsible for drilling into people’s skulls, that doesn’t necessarily mean national pride may be a bad thing for a true confederation to take advantage of. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was just many small nations aggrandized into a largely decentralized whole, much like the Holy Roman Empire. Long seated ethnic and religious conflicts roiled within, making pan-regional solidarity a very difficult accomplishment. The US lacks much of that millenniums-long history of regional rivalry. We are all Americans first (at least the immigrants who arrived before the “melting pot” became the “tossed salad”) which makes pan-regional voluntary alliances and “national” militias much more easy to imagine, IMO.
It would be impossible to guarantee that every tribe be free, other than coercively enforcing your aesthetic values onto said tribes.
Lithuanian nobility had Polonised early on so the whole of the state-forming class was Polish. Their desire for autonomy represented desire to protect their privileges against the crown rather than to protect regional or ethnic identities.
Internal conflict in Poland was between serfs and nobles (and arendators). It is true that in the east the serfs were Ruthenian and the nobles were Polish, but then in the west both the serfs and the nobles were Polish. In 1846 there was an uprising in Austrian partitioned Poland pitting both Polish and Ruthenian peasants against local Polish magnates.
Poland was no more ethnically diverse than Prussia and less so than Austria (where even nobility was heterogeneous) jet these two did not find themselves partitioned.