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That's pretty much the point I was trying to make. A society without a government that monopolizes force can't really exist, or at least not for long.
by PhasmaFelis 9y ago
That's pretty much the point I was trying to make. A society without a government that monopolizes force can't really exist, or at least not for long.
- mtgx 9y agoI think you've just crushed a lot of libertarian dreams. But you're right. If there is no official and relatively accountable government, it would be just some war lord of some other type of bully taking over and demanding their own "tax" to let you be in any given area.
- pdonis 9y ago> A society without a government that monopolizes force can't really exist, or at least not for long. This is falsified by many historical examples. I gave one upthread (some of the American colonies, such as Pennsylvania in the early 1700s). Another would be saga period Iceland, which existed for several centuries with no government that monopolized force. I think history does show that societies without a government that monopolizes force are vulnerable to a failure mode which basically consists of an outside entity being willing to invest enough resources to overwhelm the force available within the society, and thus establishing a government by takeover. This is what happened in both of the examples I gave above (Iceland was taken over by the King of Norway, and Pennsylvania ended up caught up in the general tightening of everything when the British decided to get tough on the colonies after the French and Indian War). In other words, any time a group of people try to set up for themselves a place where they can live the way they want to, interfering with no one else and with no one else interfering with them, it doesn't last; someone else always ends up coming in and taking over and trying to tell them what to do. I view this as a bug, not a feature.