“Did autocracy and dictatorship develop because of governments or because some folks managed to amass power and harness it to their own advantage?”

States developed because some folks managed to amass power and harness it to their own advantage. There were slaves in the Greece of supposedly pure democracy. The origin of the State is in conquest and confiscation, and its purpose is the perpetuation of the exploitation of one class by another that that conquest makes possible. The American Revolution is not really an exception to that.

I basically favor what I consider to be the essential ideal of the authentic Left — the distribution and dispersal and decentralization of power, both economic and political. Such a world, it seems to me, would be inherently safer and freer than the world in which we live. Of course, if such a dispersal and distribution of power were “achieved,” its preservation would depend on people being vigilant against groups evidencing an intent to amass power for the purposes of conquest. Paradoxically, I’m not opposed in principle to the idea of a one world “government,” so long as that “government” was nothing more than a confederation of balanced powers (to resolve differences between them), which powers were themselves confederations of balanced powers.

I am not with the whole engagement thing. Hard to practice law and do that at the same time. I will talk to designer to see if there is something that can be done.

N

Yeah, I’ve long suspected you were trying to discourage comments.

Your vision – especially the economic part – assumes that given their head people will mostly be cooperative and supportive, that they really will choose to comfort the afflicted even if it means some greater degree of discomfort for themselves, that somehow greed will be balanced (or perhaps prevented) by openness and generosity (or rebellion?), or maybe that we’ll live in an agrarian society where everyone will just agree that nobody owns anything – or that everyone has an equal share or right or something.

That’s probably not being fair to you, but for those of us who share a basically Hobbesian view of the state of nature and human nature, the restraint government can provide on social misconduct through economic greed and manipulation and raw power – and the protections only it can provide and that nobody else is sufficiently willing or able to provide – are not marginal things.

Here’s a question: Did autocracy and dictatorship develop because of governments or because some folks managed to amass power and harness it to their own advantage? In the Greece of supposedly pure democracy, Socrates was sentenced to die for complaining that the system was inherently corrupt. I’m no expert on cultural history or anthropology, but I do know that the myth of the Golden Age is a myth.

You assume without evidence that the world would be better if government got out of the way. I’ve never seen any evidence of a better world, and every instance of which I’m aware that functions (perhaps that should be functioned) even moderately decently is Hobbesian (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”) even if socially somewhat fair. I don’t see much way around that.

Holy cow! Scott Greenfield has stopped blogging??

It sounds like our visions of Utopia are quite similar, though I’m guessing we have different views on whether the State is the avenue or the roadblock to that vision. I think the need for a “social safety net” would be largely obviated by a just tax system, specifically the Georgist “single tax” (which incidentally Darrow also advocated, at least for a while, until Henry George ticked him off), and by the State desisting from all of the other economic obstacles it puts in the way of poor people, and that any residual need for a social safety net would be better met locally. But for what it’s worth, I too think the “social safety net” is more important than investment in the military or the investment bankers.

I added to the post above a link to our last runaround on this subject, which answered somewhat your charge of linguistic malleability.

I’ll be sure to read that guest post by Koehler.