Thursday, January 15, 2015

On the Origins of the State

They are derived from conquest, war, crisis, subjugation, force, exploitation, fear, and uncertainty. And unless they are checked, the entire thing collapses from within.

1 comment:

dmarks said...

Will: This is the real bloody struggle. What people have had to fight against for millennia. The people have made some gains against the State, such as the US Constitution and Magna Carta.

But the misery of the history of humanity is overwhelmingly due to abusive and over-large state power.

The leftist idea that businessmen, capitalists, people making money by being good at something, etc are the real villains of the era (or this phase in the dialectic of history) is quaint, relatively recent, and not supported even by current events, let alone history.

Which isn't to see that the relatively minor crimes of free enterprise (Bernie Madoff, the Bhopal disaster, etc) aren't bad themselves. But there is something much much much worse going on also.