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.