I’ll just copy (with very minor changes) here what I wrote about the article in another thread after reading it this morning:
AJ, thanks for the great Hasnas paper. With lucid writing it very closely describes my intuition about the evolution of societal rules and norms. It is the best reasoned argument for limited government I have read by far. I hope a meaningful discussion develops in this thread.
One caveat that persistently kept popping in my mind while reading it was that the evolution of empirical natural rights (as evolving means toward peace as a primary value) described in the paper is perhaps the typical process of a state formation through history. As technology enabled the spread of commerce beyond the microcosm of a tribe, clan, and a village, the evolution of societal rules and norms was forced to cover larger territories with varying landscapes of micro-evolved rules and norms. The state probably evolved as the means to synchronize these variations into a coherent (thus sustainable) set of rules and norms (i.e. law). Who knows, perhaps – as you describe in your great post (Why Anarchy Fails) – technology (e.g. the internet and the ever increasing interconnectedness transcending the need for physical proximity) may be the force that makes the state’s coherence-inducing ability obsolete. It would be the ultimate irony if the force that historically brought the state into existence (technology and inter-connectedness beyond a village) ends up making it obsolete.
Z.