The socialists with their push for more taxation and state power went so far, it recently became popular to advocate for complete anarchy and removal of the state. Let me explain why I think it’s a bad idea.
First, you can’t have a professional standing army with expensive weaponry without the state. This means that you would be defenseless against any state actor that adheres to the Roman type of state that collects taxes in order to finance a professional army. I call it “Roman” because it was Rome who did it first, and it’s the reason why it was so successful militarily. You see, everybody else could obey the call to arms and fight an enemy, but after a while they had to return to their harvests and other work or they would have starved. Rome, however, could simply wait for that to happen and then run them over, because its legions had no such constraints on them. They were paid from tax money. They didn’t have fields to plough. They could do war all year, every day. So, basically, the idea that you can have a weak state where independent humans will answer the call to arms in times of war was put to rest about the time of Caesar’s Gallic wars, if not earlier. The idea that you can have a free citizen with a gun as a basis for a militia that will defend the country was put to rest in WW1, with the advent of industrialized warfare and expensive, specialized, sophisticated weaponry. You can have an AR-15 at home as a multi-purpose weapon that would serve you well in times of war, but what about tanks, ships, planes and rockets? You can’t really own those as a citizen “just in case”, and they don’t have a legitimate civilian purpose. However, you must take it as a fact that in any modern war, your enemy will be armed with those, because he will have a modern state that collects taxes and funds military industry and a professional standing army.
So, war is the main reason why you need a state. The problem arises once the state is formed, and various assholes start thinking of places where tax money could be “better spent”, and then you end up with socialism. The irony is, the socialist disasters such as Britain eventually end up with so many social programs and such an expensive state, they run out of money for the military. Croatia is an even worse example – the state apparatus is so expensive, there’s no money left for either the social programs or the military, and this state is so inherently hostile to private entrepreneurship, the entire private sector is in ruins. The example of Greece demonstrates that not even the tourism can save such a state from collapse indefinitely, but it can limp along for quite a long time, as a parasite that grew so large, the host can no longer imagine existing without it.
In the end, I’m ambivalent regarding the state, because I fully understand and accept all the arguments that show its inherent corruption and evil, however I also cannot see some problems being solved without it, and I don’t think the alternative to the centralized state is some idealized libertarian paradise. The most obvious alternative to the centralized state is some form of oligarchy with multiple centers of power, and I don’t really see how multinational corporations would be better than the states. For an average person, the difference would hardly be perceivable. Instead of a professional army you would have private contractors, and the degree of influence of the individual upon the system would be as minimal as it is in “democracy”, where the corporate media tells you what to think and then you cast a vote for one of the pre-selected candidates. The way the system went crazy when Trump was elected contrary to its will, as probably the first actually democratically elected president in modern American history, shows what a sham this system normally is.
How to improve things? Well, you can’t do it with weak individuals. Weak individuals will always need to aggregate in greater social groups, and if you follow this far enough you eventually get a modern state. In order for that to stop making sense, an individual would need to have such a degree of power that would make social aggregation a matter of preference and not existential need.
I suspect that you’re not going in that direction regarding improvement of things 🙂 – but what do you think about empowering individuals by giving them some sort of basic income that covers the basic needs (food and shelter), while using automation and technology to actually finance this? The main point being that basic income is a good start in solving weak individuals issue.
For example, and I’m sketching here in a very broad strokes, you could build a cheap food production and delivery network (think Soylent distributed through McDonalds). There is also a bunch of solutions for cheap housing, but you don’t even need those, just figure out an economic incentive to use empty and unrented housing. Then eliminate much of government social programs and bureaucracy, and give people basic income. This could perhaps solve wage slavery, poverty, they-took-our-jobs problem, bloated state issue, and so on.
You could also push states more towards being participants in a free market. If you look at Estonia’s e-residency, things seem to be going towards states becoming more like businesses and giving their citizens certain services in exchange for taxes. Nationality thus becomes less tied to a geographical area and more optional.
Of course, technology is not the problem here, economy and politics are. Even if getting from there from where we are is possible, I’m quite sure somebody could find a way to evolve that into voluntary tyranny or some other perversion.
Let’s test your hypothesis. Let’s say you can have technology that can provide free resources and you can legislate use of that tech in order to provide free food and housing for everyone. Let’s assume people will do what they usually do.
It’s already been done. They tried it with the “war against poverty” in America. The state gave poor people (mostly black) welfare cards, and as a result they remained permanently poor, permanently incapable of taking care of themselves, the women didn’t have any use for men so they never married, but they proceeded to breed like rabbits. The children are raised by the street, they are interested mostly in dealing drugs, fucking and killing each other.
Basically, socialism sucks. You really need to make a system where the lower 10% percent will die without any kind of a safety net, and then the upper 90% will get their shit together. The inferior part of the population really does need to die.
Besides, it’s not really a problem you can solve by feeding the hungry, because that’s been tried in late Pleistocene, with the invention of the spear-thrower. Suddenly for the first time food was abundant, and what happened, everybody’s children survived and the population grew exponentially. With more population came more hunting and suddenly the entire Pleistocene megafauna went mysteriously extinct. With population in jeopardy, people figured out agriculture and cattle farming, and then there was the second population explosion, when they learned to exploit the natural phenomenon of self-fertilizing fields near the great rivers. The next population explosion came with improvements in industrial farming and especially with the invention of the Haber-Bosch method.
So if there’s anything to learn from history, it’s that feeding the hungry doesn’t work, because people always keep breeding until they exceed the food supply. They never match it, they exceed it, and the only way to solve the problem is to be completely indifferent to hungry children.
Wow, Americans really like calling everything a war.
Actually, I agree on your indifference to hungry children point in a latter comment, but how can anybody get people to accept such a system where bottom 10% have no safety net though? People are generally reluctant to throw away safety nets, there’s always somebody that cries “think of the children”, rich people generally tend to think of themselves lucky and feel better giving some of their wealth away, and average people like the fact that there’s somebody poorer then themselves.
I mean, I might be overblowing the argument, it’s not like there’s a lot of safety net for most of the population, it’s just that I can’t see how the idea of not stubbornly trying to eliminate poverty could take a hold in modern “civilized” society.
I would actually expect basic income to help not as a safety net that catches everyone, but as a way to give people options to change their current situation. Once you have some amount of income every month, you can use it all to buy cigarettes or gamble, or you can feed yourself and afford to negotiate your salary even when you qualify only for burger-flipping kind of jobs. Or even start a business of some kind.
The irony is, the most effective proven system for minimizing poverty is capitalism combined with Christian ethics. Socialism always points to that 10% or whatever on the losing side of capitalism and says it’s going to fix things, but in the process reduces 90% of the population to the level of those bottom 10%, essentially making everybody dirt poor, unless they are in the central committee of the communist party, then they get to win.
Capitalism is like evolution: in order for the species to thrive, you need to allow the least successful specimens to either starve or be killed and eaten. If you try to prevent that, you fuck up the species and it goes extinct.
As for the universal basic income, what that actually does is allow people to survive by not trying. If you don’t try, you don’t get to succeed, ever. And the majority is actually going to succeed if they try.
That’s actually the best argument against UBI I’ve heard; thanks. 🙂
When discussing the safety net I notice that there are actually two different issues at hand that people mix together and then things get needlessly complicated. The first issue is whether or not people should be weeded out and the short answer is ‘yes’ (elimination based on economy just being one of the possible criteria). The second issue is “what to do in the case of an exception”, and the short answer to that is “the same thing we (should) do in case of any exception”.
The problem of safety nets and social programs only exists because people make rules for the exceptions. Yes, one can end up on the street for whatever reason. But contrary to the popular belief of poor people being just like anyone else except.. well, poor – my experience is that for the vast majority of poor people the poverty is the least of their problems. These people would end up at the bottom 10% by just about any other criteria.
The thing is, everybody can choose to take a homeless person to their home if they like them. They’re homeless exactly because nobody likes them that much. Poor people are poor because nobody values what they have to offer.
>In order for that to stop making sense, an individual would need to have
such a degree of power that would make social aggregation a matter of
preference and not existential need.
Man, I’d love to see that.
It exists, and is called the astral world. In fact, it predates this one, which was created by an asshole who had a problem of not being all that great a person on his own, so he invented a few modifications that would presumably change that.
Well, we better see some of those laws working here. Would be a nice change of pace.
Nice, so he was an asshole before, now he’s an even greater, more hated asshole. Worked out great for him.
But of course, I concede that the argument in favor of the state is essentially that it’s a very efficient way of inflicting damage and enslavement, and the best known way of defending against one is to have one of your own. Also, the history of Roman empire’s economic failure should serve as a warning: initially Rome was a low-tax state since it could finance its legions by robbing other people. Once it could no longer grow, this model was ineffective so it had to levy heavy taxes, which in combination of slavery (free labor) destroyed its agrarians and manufacturers. Dilution of monetary mass proved to be self-defeating since the army refused to be paid in diluted currency, and the whole system collapsed.