Depends on the characteristics of the people and the territory.
I too am tempted to fall back to “environmental” or “exoteric” reasons, but as long as Mises made no reference to different environments, cultural values and the like when he discussed praxeological statement, we too must seek answers to such thorny problem involving the State that are universally valid and applicable, even if Mises himself failed here. So, I’m sure that there must be apodictically true answers to question such as “why does the State exists”.
Cause it was the most profitable venture around…
You have consider the conditions from which most states emerged. Poverty, malfunctioning civil socialites (due to ethical clashes or whatever) under these conditions one can benefit greatly in obtaining booth wealth and security for oneself by becoming a dictator…
If a random bunch of people bring riches and move to some isolated place today there is little reason a state would emerge there. There would not be anyone really motivated to run one cause there are better things to do, people would be in a better position to oppose it and there would be no one that could lend money to launching a state.
Merchants willing to invest in launching states was at least one of the main reason why the nation states of Europe emerged after the middle ages. Gustav Vasa for instance took massive loans from east india companies to kick out the danes and found the first real centralised Swedish government. I am pretty sure many other European nations have a similar story.
You don’t need the support of anyone if you have enough guns. The annihilation and enslavement of various natives should prove this. Ponder what one could do to some primitive farmers with automated armies of robot soldiers coming out of unmanned nano-factories and modern surveillance systems.
If you actually rely on them to do labour oppressing them that much is not really economical though, and if you don’t rely on them to do labour well then you can just exterminate them rather then oppress them.
It is like exterminating animals that get in ones way, it costs almost nothing to gain the profit of whatever they are in the way for. There may also be dount whether this stupid primitive bunch can act civil, of they cant there will never be any benefits of keeping them around at all…
Peaceful co-existence is of course in the long run always the most beneficial solution among human being. I am just trying to imagine the other side here. Also if you go beyond human it becomes difficult to see how corporation could be beneficial in some extreme scenarios of technological superiority. Like if we build a über AI that don’t need us for anything and just want to strip mine the entire planet to expand it’s processing power and make itself capable of space flight or whatever…
This at least should be easy enough once you determine what a state is. It is a gang of thieves writ large.
So there you go. The state exists because we came to believe that some forms of theft are legitimate.
The question is who fooled us into thinking this and how were they able to do it? I do not know, but I know the people who had done it could not have been common criminals, they would have no standing in society and would not ring persuasive. It must had been people who were respected for whatever reason.
indeed. the state has very sophisticated criminals. smooth talkers, making, ie. propagranda, people believe that what they have to offer is special. Undoubtedly somebody or -bodies that were wealthy, calmed people’s nerves, and were outstanding orators. Polite and civil at first. Then power got in their veins and realized they could keep getting more cause they were on top and nobody could stop them now - unless it was an outside force - so now their forms an enemy the game goes on and grew ever-larger and ever the more sophisticated because those in power had to deal with others in power the same way they used to deal with their own countrymen so to speak. But even then, if they had the power and knew it, they could cloak their moves with deception and not even hide it at times without any worries. The injustices are plain as day. So many people see them. But even the Justice Dept. is in on it. They have the power and know it. They know they could stop the boom-bust cycle if they really tried to, but they don’t try to. They don’t think about it. Their minds are on abandoning these little gov’ts now. The meetings are held on the global stage now for all to see.
Before that, is there an apodictically true answer to any non-trivial question? I’ve been looking…
I think individual sovereignty will reign consequently because we all must develop our zombie plans.
I believe there are some contentious points in your arguments.
Let just suppose you, General X, are at the head of 10’000 actual troops and have just established a beachhead in 1492’s Americas (!!!). Willing, your 10’000 troops, armed with all the gadgets of modern warfare, could just kill the hell out of the natives in two weeks, or just force them, at gunpoint, to become slaves. A state is seemingly established…but wait!
Forcing a primitive population to work at gunpoint would be, as you point out, uneconomical, for it costs much more to feed the hungry engine of a single M1A2 than the whole Mesoamerican civilization could produce in a month. So you’d be loosing money.
On the other hand you could just kill them away, but this would mean that the labor force would shrink. Assuming that the population level is under-optimal (just an assumption though) you’d again loose by killing them off.
The most economical thing to do would be, I believe, just shut off all gadgets, and start interacting peacefully with the locals. With your capital and labor, and their labor and know-how, everybody would gain. That ios was actually happened with the Brits and French in north-america.
I don’t thing that the State was originated like this. It wouldn’t make economic sense.
The instances you point out of massive exterminations of the natives (ex. The Spaniard in ) happened because the population level was, in those instances, over-optimal. But even in those instances, no state was born, just genocide.
So again, I thing that the state proper couldn’t have originated in warfare and forced enslavement.
Marko and Wilderness,
I agree that your explanations is the best we’ve got and I pray that this is actually what happened. I just don’t find it terribly convincing 100%. But than again, its just a feeling.
Hans Hermann Hoppe in one LRC podcast said: “It is really a miracle that the state got off the ground”
States rely foremost on opinion or propaganda to maintain itself. Violence through taxation is only second in importance because the host is always larger and can choose to overcome the parasite if it knew it had a parasite. I think Robert Higgs and Hans Hermann Hoppe explicated in their books that States grow from crises(may it be natural calamities or war) that cause confusion among people scaring them into following a dominant group. Primitive societies of subsistence level are necessarily anarchic because the host is too small and weak to accomodate a parasite(as a person here argued). Natural elites would be voluntarily acknowledged and become the judges of disputes after many generations like Hoppe argued. However, this is not enough for the creation of a state because neither the competing elites or the masses would ever accept a territorial monopolist of force(that is after all an absurd proposition). Another reason why a state cannot emerge is that being voluntarily acknowledged, the natural elites are morally and intellectually superior. The only way a state could emerge is for a natural elite to be corrupted and cause a war that will create chaos and confusion. This particular elite will then rally the masses behind him against the other elites. This is how monarchy began.
It will be nearly impossible for this scenario to repeat itself after we achieve anarchy because of modern technology and telecommunications infrastructure.
I agree with this, but I think we do not require conspiratorial talk. It is not necessary for the elite to cause the war, to plan in advance to grab power for themselves, or even to be very corrupt for it to happen.
If we are talking about a war a competent and courageous tactician may rise to prominence even from total obscurity. Thus elevated he becomes the person people listening to for instructions on how the war should be fought. During the course of the war the war leader becomes convinced that to lose the war would be ruinous and that forcing those who contribute little to the effort to contribute more would help the effort thus justifying to himself coercion over the people he is defending. His co-fighters and most of the populace (seeing in him their protector and a war hero, being used to listening to him and perhaps even thinking it is only right everyone contribute to the effort without there being free riders) move to carry out his policy and enact something beyond mere societal pressure. And thus a state is born with a warlord chief at its helm.
Now the warlord in our scenario neither schemed to start the war, neither did he desire power for himself. He desired power because he saw it as an end to a goal dear to him that was also dear to a wast majority of people around him.* So we see that he is in a sense a tragic figure, desiring to liberate the people around him but at the same time condemning them to slavery. Willing to sacrifice himself, but also ultimately ready to force sacrifice from others. Not corrupt in a caricatural way, but merely not devoted enough to the ideas of sacred rights of every individual in a testing, crisis situation for him and for his community.
Now we know that actually coercing people to aid a truly just war effort is counterproductive, so it would actually not make sense for the war effort to carry out this policy. But at the same time the argument against this is long winded, complicated and sterile sounding. In a crisis situation this policy will always sound persuasive enough in a rough, crude sense. So in my opinion the best shot to prevent people to in a testing time resort to such measures is a strict, principled adherence to a concept of rights of human beings, regardless of any opinion as to what outcome the other path of action may bring in respect to some greater good however defined.
*Of course it is not necessary that a warlord be of this type. Perhaps a different war leader would be a vain person desiring personal aggrandizement or simply a lazy one desiring not having to work anymore for to act in such a way to bring about a state that would serve this goal of his. But even in these cases the point remains that no conspiracy is required. It is enough that incentives are arranged in a certain way. Everyone is vain and lazy to some extent thus everyone has some incentive to act in such a way to translate his good repute in society into power. In any case the solution remains the same. A principled adherence to the rights of other people by the largest swathe of the populace as possible.
the only way you will know is if you get a time-machine. the logical extension of a gov’t being ‘criminals’ is to understand what a criminal is and what they want. power over another cause that’s a fact of their actions for that’s what they do when they violate another’s property (if they didn’t violate then they wouldn’t be a criminal). how do they achieve this power. criminals meet sometimes in groups. they get alot of weapons. they plan ahead for a goal that power is only the means to, ie. they want the TV, etc…
what do criminals do? and why do they do it?, etc, etc.
Again, I fully agree. My question is how could everybody else allow themselves to be fooled by such deranged criminals. I’ll never buy that this happened by force, for that is uneconomical (as I discussed previously). So, how could normal, hard-working, peaceful people agree to bow to these criminals? Hoppe’s explanation sound good, but I’ve just got a feeling that it ain’t good enough.
If anarchy came tomorrow, and someone asked me to plan a way to recreate the State, I swear that even if a wanted to, I’d have not the least idea of how to even begin doing it. It si almost impossoble. How then, was this trick pulled of in the first palce?
Can we say with confidence that the State as such (that is, the illusion of the necessity of the State) originated back in the time when no more than 2000 humans existed in Africa? Did these people than bring this idea everywhere they went? If not, how can the emergence of the State in almost every known human society be explained?
good questions. i see what you are asking. not so much that they are criminals, but how do the innocents get caught up in the mess. For instance, when two people get in a gunfight and an innocent person gets caught in the cross-fire. Also if some people know the science of say, the Nile river floods periodically and provide reasons dashed poetically with gods, then…
(1) when they do a ceremony (2) the Nile river floods, and (3) people that don’t pay attention/were not taught why it rhythimically does other than the fact that when the priest does this ceremony the Nile river floods (same for Tigris and Euphrates), then in the minds of the people watching those rituals take place it would be as any secret knowledge or expanded knowledge of the universe happens today. And on top of that it’s people, the priests, actually interacting with the river itself and controlling or appeasing the gods to have their ‘mercy’ shine upon the river people to bring the floods that fertilize the fields and sustains the boom of agriculture. Their mythologies are full of this story and how the household benefits from such flooding via the agriculture booming, etc… And yet surely the floods don’t come at times, or famine based on other incidences. Well the priests first showing how their ceremonies work and then this periodic non-flood times happen but the priests can say its not because of their ceremonies. It’s not because they didn’t do it correctly. They can blame it on the people not praying enough or the gods are angry for some reason so they need to add more to the ceremonies. Increase the ritualization. It’s not the Federal Reserve not doing the ceremony correctly, it’s that people accepted the bad housing loans because this is a credit hungry culture, and so the Fed. needs to enhance their rituals and do more and more, ie. not print out less fiat but rather increase the fiat stimulant, to appease the animals spirits of the market cause of course it’s not their rituals that are wrong, it’s that they were not doing enough.
Well if you can use the land for something and the cost of exterminating is null…
But consider the case with natural resources that are cheap to extract. Then I can simply take my band, buy some guns.
We will either borrow some money or raise some fast doing something illegal like smuggling drugs or guns. We use the money to kidnap your children, we give them guns and indoctrinate them to fight for us. Then we go into another states territory and establish ourselves for a while extracting the resources. Best if it is something really expensive that can be taken right out of rivers…
This is exactly how “states” comes into being all the time in Africa right now. These warbands don’t live very long they just go in and take the resources and get out, making the warlord very rich. But that is not because the warlords would stop there on there own and don’t build empires if they where left unopposed. It is because there is opposition from other warbands, regular armies and even possibility of UN interventions that make long term operation to costly. Some fellow farmers that say perfected military discipline and tactics in say Italy sometime about 700-500BC would not have this same problem with opposition against there warband…
This activiy makes a lot of economic sense to the warlord and his lenders…
If there aren’t these type of natural resources around you will ,as I said before, need to reduce the cost of oppressing people somehow. They need to believe that they can make most people fall in line with mostly less costly non-physical means (such as bribes, manipulation or coercion) for them to believe there is any gain in being the government.
I only challenge one detail in this otherwise very correct analysis of the current African situation: people don’t agree to this. They don’t bow their heard to the first thug that comes by. True, perhaps the thugs are many and fighting them of would be stupid right now, and a community might have to pay them off, but in the long run this community would arm itself and resist. This is what happened with Viking raids in the early middle ages. If no one sees legitimate action in what the “would-be State” does, that it can’t be a state, just a small gang, and ultimately it shall be defeated. Gangsters only set up States in Africa because people excpect to be ruled by someone, and thus they agree to bow to the strongest faction. An anarchistic community would see no legitimacy in such acts, and no State could spring up.
Well normally if they believed the competiton was such that they could build something permanent they would start with offering “protection” to the people in the area. After that they can expand into arbitration, maybe run some social facilities…
The condition given here was just a stateless community like in Lost. The interesting part here is not that particular scenario but under which conditions a state is least likely to arise.
Ideologically rooted opposition against authorities is very useful, but I don’t think we need to go that far for anarchy to be stable when starting from statelessness (I mean when society has been uprooted in more ways then just the state having dissapeared).
I think that as long as people have lots of firearms that with today’s technology that would be enough to stop a permanent state from forming. They would still be vulnerable to plundering and slaughter on a less permanent basis though. But it is difficult to do crowd control with battle tanks and bombers…
With some time they would develop voluntary armies that can withstand such treats though.
Also small communities probably tend to function more like families and the rights of the individual get suppressed. But you can always leave such a community and you probably don’t own more land then your sleeping space anyhow cause if you did it would have started to develop a stronger individualism already.
Since it is often impractical to strictly enforce property rights in small communities like that the line between someone’s rights being violated or if they are just voluntarily paying a very high price for the benefit of co-operation (due to very low supply of people to co-operate with) becomes blurred.
Alas, the blurry line between Misesian secession and anarchy.
Interesting thought about weaponry.
I would again like to reference Hoppe on this. He says in “Parasitism and the Origins of the State” something like cannibalism was the most primitive form of statism. But then people, in their rational self-interest, realized that turning a potential human meal into a slave would be more profitable in the long run. So cannibalism was replaced with a lesser form of statism which was slavery. The same thing happened with slavery when people realized that in the long run they would be better off dealing with free men than with slaves. So slavery was abolished. The question I’m asking is whether we will develop the low-time preference required to realize anarchy is most profitable in the long run. I think this is very difficult to achieve. It might also be the reason that Hoppe promotes cultural conservatism because it encourages people to be responsible, independent, hard working, protective of their property and all those other attributes that resist the temptation of statism. Hoppe believes that it is the culture that will most likely have the chance to reclaim natural individual sovereignty against the state.
Regarding the Lost scenario, they will probably never develop a state because those are civilized people who know how to cooperate. The first form of statism(cannibalism) emerged because of primitive instincts combined with the need to eat. And some humans were more physically powerful than others so cannibalism happened. The people in the Lost scenario are intelligent and civilized human beings so they will never develop a state.
I find this idea of time preferences blocking the transition to anarchy very alluring. If indeed it is so, than only slow evolution can help.