If so, I guess, thats one thing the free market produces that’s very bad.
Government is a criminal enterprise; free market activity respects property rights. I don’t see how government is the creation of the free market.
I was thinking the same thing : the State existed ever since private property existed. So maybe humans being are too stupid to understand that this state is not necessary and au contraire a bad thing and the negation of freedom, natural laws etc.
@OP: No. Both markets and states are instances of the Austrian concept of spontaneous social order. But, as Guido Hulsmann says in an online lecture somewhere, there can be good spontaneous order as well as bad spontaneous order. Street gangs and states are examples of bad spontaneous social order, they apply the division of labor and specialization to the production of bads. Markets and market-driven industries are examples of good spontaneous social order.
Clayton -
the State existed ever since private property existed
False. Property rights predate the state by millenia.
I would argue no. Assuming the definition of the free market includes: free exchange and property rights, the government is by no means a creation of the free market.
If the free market is synonymous with “a state of nature”, then everything that man creates, good or bad, is out of the free market.
Not really. The really, really early governments (if they could be called such) were either for defending lone farmers from raiders (No one farmer could hold off a gang of thugs) or for looting and pillaging richer places. The free market doesn’t really come into it.
I would argue yes the state is from the market, specifically it grew from an information asymmetry that stemmed from the alliance of intellectuals and rulers. From there the whole history of the world was the history of unravelling and demystifying the state and the state striking back. I’m not entirely sure why though, the anarcho-capitalist model of society hasn’t totally dominated as a system of government yet though. Perhaps it is a lower equilibrium situation where the free have an incentive to abide by the laws of the statist since the opposite move would lead to less freedom.
I have a theory though about the conditions necessary for a decisive swing towards anarcho-capitalism: a world-wide collapse of the state. This would only occur in the context of a coarsian alliance of all the states of the world and a similar closeness of anti-statists gone global. This leads the state very little latitude for further growth and if a major economic collapse ensues, BAM, anarcho-capitalism wins.
Sorry had to get that off my chest.
Did the state come from the “market”, perhaps. Did the state come from the “free market”, no. The state is the antithesis of a truly free market.