No government leads to people forming organizations…?
eventually leading to people forming organizations that might try to take resources from people?
thus leading to government?
Punishing criminals properly prevents statism.
I guess what I’m saying is…what if a group of thugs got to gether had alot of firearms and started to try to steal some resources from others…
what if it turned into a huge group…a huge group of outlaw guerillas…
this could lead to a small protective government formed among the people…
this is probably how most governments got formed in the first place, no?
i dont know how often groups of people formed agreements to act in a way that wouldnt constitute a government.
if germans who fled the romans that ended up in northern portugal just said that field yours, this field mine…if nasty romans come we fight together, agree??..unga munga ok.
i wouldnt be surprised if there were instances of peacful coexistors around and then a travelling occupying govt comes along, kills the natives and violal!..we have government.
Punishing criminals properly prevents statism.
i guess if you consider statism (whatever you mean by that) criminal, yes.
but i dont know if you are equipped to determine what ‘properly’ is.
if you are personally being agressed against i guess you would take measures that seem necessary to you…i doubt you could go and determine that for others though.
It’s the lack of a culture that promotes the individual’s welfare as the highest good and self-responsibility that promotes the existence and growth of government. Until such a culture begins to form on Earth all attempts to nullify the State will be at best marginalized, at worse its parties murdered.
thats a good point…
there might be small governments that form to fight off other war bent governments…
“It’s the lack of a culture that promotes the individual’s welfare as the highest good and self-responsibility that promotes the existence and growth of government. Until such a culture begins to form on Earth all attempts to nullify the State will be at best marginalized, at worse its parties murdered.”
i dont know. if you have a common language and dress and communicate …i would consider that culture…and it very well may put the individuals welfare as the highest good.
“that field you…this field me, etc here, have some haggis…then leave”
self responsibility may take various forms not necessarily leading to a govt…except over oneself.
“attempts to nullify the State will be at best marginalized, at worse its parties murdered.”
my view then would be to murder back as necessary and at the right time.
The question misses the point that free markets are always superior to statism, especially when it comes to reducing crime and serving justice. Statism becoming anachronistic is going to be a big part of there actually being a free market, so the question seems like a red herring to me. The conditions that make statism possible now will be practically non-existent in a highly decentralized, high technological (virtual reality and nanotechnology for all), highly networked free market of the future.
I understand that no government would be better than gov…
but, there might be people gathering together wheterh to protect themselves or whatever, that you might need to partake with…adn they might want to form a small “government”…and it starts out just taking donations…and then it becomes more mandatory…
maybe thats the human condition…if enough people are liviing together, government will eventualyl form…
If there will be no broad consensus with respect to which group or organization should be legitimately recognized as a government, then it will be extremely difficult for any particular self-proclaimed government to compel and enforce its decrees. Its activity would most likely be recognized as criminal.
The essence of the state is that the population considers that it exists to be legitimate or necessary. The institution which you are describing does not seem to be an institution seeking to acquire such an image.
[quote=“Lysander Spooner, “No Treason””]
But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: ‘Your money, or your life.’ And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat. The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the roadside, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful. The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a ‘protector,’ and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to ‘protect’ those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful ‘sovereign,’ on account of the ‘protection’ he affords you. He does not keep ‘protecting’ you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.
[/quote]
Or maybe the formation of Government on Earth is a purely random outcome. Can you rule that out? Perhaps if we could go back and “do it again” things would turn out differently and we would all be living in a world characterized as ancap. How can you ever know? The problem here is that we do not have any alternate realities to look at to compare to what is happening here, which would then serve as a measuring stick for our analysis. So instead we have to satisfy ourselves with a priori reasoning. But if it is indeed random, what good is a priori reasoning?
random, really? just this one reality?
Yeah, we only have this one reality to go by. And if we look back, people always form governments…
over and over again…
Did all these incidences of formation of government occur in a vacuum relative to each other? If so, then perhaps you are right.
You’re confusing simple coercion (crime) with legitimized coercion (government). Also, you seem to believe that any organized defense entails legitimized coercion. A government is always a tiny minority of the population it governs. It is not the government’s superior force that gives it power, since the people always have more force than the government does. The government’s power derives from the moral legitimacy of its monopoly on law and force. So long as the public believes (moral belief) that government alone should have the privilege of producing law and security, the government is unassailable.
And, yes, the existence of even one government, especially a democratic government, is a threat to freedom everywhere. Hoppe says something to the effect that, in a private law society, crime insurance agencies would charge higher premiums in areas that are next to government-controlled territory. He reasons that government employees would likely be categorized, for crime insurance purposes, the same as other criminals… it would be difficult for a government employee to live in a decent neighborhood in free territory because no one would want to be neighbors with him because their premiums would go up.
What’s amazing is that Somalia’s recent history has really borne this conception out. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Barre regime, warlords took control of Somalia. The US tried to “correct” this “problem”, through UN agency, via our involvement there during the early 90’s. We got run out on a rail by Aidid culminating in our withdrawal after the tragic Black Hawk Down incident. For some time during the 90’s, UN intervention in Somalia was extremely limited and the Somali economy began to heal, with education rates and nourishment increasing at an extremely rapid pace (check out PT Leeson’s paper on this, Better Off Stateless). In 2006, Ethiopia, then, tried to invade but they were repelled. This resulted in a splintering of the ICU, and the new proto-governmental group called al-Shabaab.
The most recent battles over Mogadishu have been the result of – surprise surprise! – the attempt to impose a “real state” on Somalia from above, by the miserably underfunded AU and its “AMISOM” troops, mostly rerun Ethiopians who got their butts kicked out last time they tried to invade. After months of not being paid, some of the AMISOM soldiers have sold their weapons to buy food, which should give you an idea of the level of willpower the AU has in this mission. The al-Shabaab and other ICU groups smell blood in the water and the AU’s meddling in Somalia has created a “capture the flag” atmosphere in Somalia… each group maneuvering itself to be in the best position to project governmental power if and when a government is “created” - aka “imposed” - in Somalia. But most remarkable is that the Somalis have treated the UN/AU’s “Transitional Federal Government” as a mortal threat rather than buying into the benign administrative cloak with which the TFG has tried to wrap itself. One TFG emissary to the UN said (paraphrase), “They are trying to kill this baby in the cradle. al-Shabaab knows that if this thing takes hold it will become a government and they want to prevent that from happening.” But, of course, it is the local al-Shabaab - not the AU’s Ethiopian troops protecting a tiny garrison in Mogadishu called the “Transitional Federal Government” - who are solely to blame for the killing of innocents in Mogadishu. I’m not saying al-Shabaab gets a cart blanche by virtue of being local… if al-Shabaab kills innocents, that is as immoral as anyone else killing innocents. But al-Shabaab has a perfectly sound justification for going to war against the TFG… it’s a baby government!
Clayton -
after the tragic Black Hawk Down incident.
was this as tragic as the babies pulled from incubators in kuwait?
you’re confusing simple coercion (crime) with legitimized coercion (government).
i dunno…making the cherokee foot it across several “sates” sounds pretty simple and not necessarily legit.
I’m afraid we’re still far from having a praxeologicaly valid knowledge of the creation of the State, hence its functioning. We know paxeologicaly what consequences it has on the healthy economy, but not much more. Mises himself said that, besides economics, other fields of praxeology, whci would include political theory, are almost unchartered. I can only discern Hoppe’s attack on democracy as the only noteworthy ste in that direction since Mises himself (Rothbard, Spooner, etc, with all their titanic merits, seem like making election speeches when talking about the State, not science). So, as I said some time before in here, I really believe that sooner will anarchy be achieved by trail-and-error or perhaps mere accident, than we’ll know praxeologicaly how to achieve it.
What is praxeology?