Preface: This message is geared towards those who support voluntarism and is a response to "
Are There Any Good Arguments for the State? Tom Woods Video" (So it took me a while to get this out!) This is the first part of a two-part series.
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(RPFs) Arguing against the state can be counter productive towards the advancement of liberty as there are alternate superior positions that can be upheld. The case for the state rests on three points: semantics, voluntarism and messaging.
For our purposes, the merriam-webster dictionary defines a state as "a : a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory; especially : one that is sovereign".
Many who argue against the state generally characterizes this as "a monopoly of power over a defined territory", which functionally matches the dictionary but just puts the terms more bluntly.
Those against the state also argue that in a free society one can own property free from cohesion from a central authority, which is an agreed axiom. But does this point preclude a "state" from existing? What if someone acquired a large piece of property by means of voluntary exchange and then decided to subdivide it out for sale, but with strings attached to each sale. A simple attached string could be that you will keep your property orderly. Other possible and logical attached strings could be that you would limit the use of the property to certain criteria, or help cover expenses for a common security parameter. These are all voluntary arrangements not unlike what many home owners associations use today. The level of strings attached could also be much more significant, even defining its own enforcement agents and dispute resolution system. In sum, the terms could establish a central authority over the property. Of course, if the terms of a deal are unfavorable then there likely won't be anyone interested in buying one of the subdivided pieces of property but that is a matter of personal choice. If this was a voluntarist society then there would be no other authority to claim power over it, and it being a voluntarist society the individuals could agree to whatever terms they wish, regardless of how good or bad they are.
With that, we have the construct for a state based on a free society. This argument undoubtedly can leave some of those who oppose all forms of a state as claiming this isn't a state, which leads back to the issue of semantics. Can the described volunteer construct be considered a state or not? By all accounts, it does match the definition of creating a monopoly of power over the defined territory. Anti-state supporters can still argue however that it's not a state, and effectively have to uphold the position that states can not be voluntary, even though nothing in the definition of a state says it can't be. Ultimately, the matter does comes down to whatever personal semantics one subscribes to, but this leads to the third point: messaging.
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