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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @alt 15 Apr \ parent \ on: Is intellectual property legitimate? AskSN
You've made two assumptions here - one is that in the absence of the state, all people become individual actors, incapable of acting outside of their own immediate interest. Communities can form where people protect each others rights and property, without enabling a privileged few to monopolise violence.
Secondly, you seem to be ignoring the potential (or inevitability) for the state to become the most powerful violent entity. The state is not benevolent, they are simply the extreme form of "law of the jungle", where one entity becomes so much more powerful than the others that it can take whatever it wants, from whoever it wants. If the law of the jungle is bad, according to you, then so must be the state, because the two are fundamentally the same.
Communities forming to protect mutual and collective interests are governments.
In order to function there will be a hierarchy and concentration of power and authority.
IE government.
The state can be benevolent or malevolent- history clearly shows this.
What is also clear is that the efficient securing of property rights and rule of law is central to what the state is and why it forms...and in this function the state can provision the conditions to promote and foster wealth and prosperity, much more so than where rule of law and secure property rights are not present.
As you suggest in the absence of a government people will quite logically and swiftly act to build one!
This is because a government can more efficiently and effectively protect peoples claims to property and establish rule of law which enables investment and economic development, than an anarchic lack of government can.
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