Thoughts?
People choose to live under a state appartus and many don’t mind giving their money to a central power in return for services. I find it strange that whenever a government in Europe talks about austerity, people immediately take to the street to protest.
I think Doug Casey calls it “Psychological Aberration”.
Tradition - much like religion, it has a monopoly on one of our first attempts at creating societies so it is evolving, but very slowly. Humans have resistance to change.
“Broken Window”-esque Fallacy - on a much grander scale, we have a tendency to see what is there and not what could be. Most people aren’t even aware of the things that capitalism could produce and they assume that jobs are the end-all-be-all of an economy. Economic maleducation, basically.
Holistic Thinking - markets are emergent and these people don’t understand how it can work. We see intelligence where there is none. Just like how evolution can explain life on Earth without the need of a “central planner”, most people are uncomfortable with the idea of having problems solved by an emerging order and think a central authority and overseer is necessary to let society function.
I found Ryan Faulk’s take on this interesting.
I basically stole my third point from him
Ryan Faulk once spammed thousands of people on this forum, and it took days to clean it up. He’s an ass.
I’d rather we didn’t reward that guy with backlinks from here.
Haha, really? I never knew that. That’s pretty douchey of him, but I still think he makes some good points. I’ll keep that in mind though if you’d rather I didn’t post links to his site.
Lol, people who suppose the state are now insane.
I haven’t read this, but… http://www.libertymind.com/
Government schooling.
And indoctrinated…
Conditioning, historical, media, parents, etc.
In my experience, the main factor that contributes to the legitimacy of the state is the notion that without the state, we would have chaos, that everyone would be killing his or her neighbor until only one person is left standing.
I can easily show that the state is illegitimate, and therefore a criminal organization and that it creates crime by creating black markets. Yet this is not enough to convince most people, because they think for some reason without the criminal organization called the state, that we will have even more crime.
People who suppose that institutionalized violence and theft are necessary for society are (in my opinion) insane.
I think it should be obvious, that there is no one ultimate answer. Furthermore, even OP didn’t imply that (mentioned factors, not “a factor”).
So yeah, public schooling plays a role, tradition (culture), religion, parenting etc..
Yes, I’d count thoughts.
ha ha. Seriously…
(1) patronage…goodies for the kids.
(2) paternalism—fostering the myth of government-as -protector against:
(a) human nature (i.e. government as moral steward);
(b) big business/monopoly/worker exploitation [off topic: this seems to be John Stewart’s view of government btw—I can’t bring myself to watch].
(3) pageantry—government as spectacle, government officials as celebrities (100K for a dinner date to NYC? ru serious? Oh, I see that you are.)
(4) myths which foster patriotism/unquestioned devotion to state authority—America as beacon (of freedom, is it?); America’s founding fathers as near saints
(5) institution of fiat money—constant reinforcement of the myth that government is necessary for the proper functioning of an economy (indeed, beginning with money itself). edit: perhaps more importantly: fiat money = myth of government as WISE arbiter of things economic.
(6) glorification of war & soldiering
(7) (of course) manifold myths perpetuated in academia (re: history, economics, ??, etc.) which describe the necessity of the state
@Lewis S.
I said something to this effect in my macro class a few years back, to a U of Chicago-trained professor. Her response…silence. We were using a Ben Bernanke textbook too, btw.
Here’s Rothbard:
“…under the guise of “democracy,” education has become mere mass drilling in the techniques of adjustment to the task of becoming a cog in the vast bureaucratic machine [of the military industrial complex].”
M. Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty”, in Egalitarianism as A Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, p. 43.
@liberty_student, I’m sure if I met Ryan in person I really wouldn’t like him because of how immature he comes off as being. But I gotta be honest, his anti-State stuff is some of the best amateur work floating around out there that I’ve come across.
I think a big part of it is also that statism is what we already have and what people grow up in. It sets the norm for how people think about society and most people don’t seem particularly imaginative with regards to alternative methods of social organization. It “works” so why change the status quo and potentially end up worse off?
One example of this is the frequent objection about “public” goods. How would the roads get built? What, you mean we’d have toll booths everywhere? What about the fire department, you’d just let people burn in their houses unless they paid? What about the police, who would protect the poor? Who would make laws?
Most of the people on this site have probably read and thought about this and can describe alternatives to the current model, but it just sounds crazy to people who really aren’t too fussed about things like privatizing the fire department when it seems to work well enough. In their minds they’re concerned about far more important things than academic theorizing of things with dubious merit.
As an aside, I recently got around to reading the Harry Potter books and I was somewhat amused with the inclusion of a Ministry of Magic. The state is such a backdrop in the author’s mind that even in a world where most people have magical abilities there ends up being a monopoly of legitimized aggression.
One funny example is Ministry regulations. One of the characters prepares a report for some Ministry trade bureau regarding minimum cauldron thickness. Apparently it didn’t occur to any of the witches or wizards, or the author, that if consumers were having a problem with cauldrons leaking they should just buy thicker cauldrons. No, see, we need the state to rein in those greedy, unscrupulous business wizards who sell cheap, thin cauldrons for massive profits.