What is it that makes the state such a terrible entity? It can never do anything right, it seems!
Well, it’s not the state’s fault it behaves like this, some will say, it had a rough upbringing full of wars and rival states trying to take its land and stuff. The state just acted in self-defence against angry civilians or other states, some proclaims. The state is glorious and can’t do anything wrong, yet others will say. The state doesn’t really exist, some argues, it’s comprised of normal people doing normal people things and thus is a reflection of the people living and working for the state.
How the state begins…
I won’t be going into details about how a state is formed but roughly speaking you could argue that the state is what happens when some people concentrates enough power to be able to control its citizens while still allowing them enough freedoms so they won’t revolt (too much). But, what really happens when you centralise things this way? At first things seems to be going great, the health of the people rocket when you create a health care system to pay into and workers are getting universal working conditions. Moral codes are formed into laws that are there to bring justice to those who cannot claim it themselves and to make sure the criminals get a fitting punishment.
Everything seems to be a great success and people are happier than ever. Large operations are conducted that couldn’t be conducted before. Railways across the country are now a reality and every little village doesn’t have to have their own bank, hospital with specialised doctors, police force, etc. People are able to relax and stop caring about those kinds of things and are suddenly able to enjoy life on a larger scale.
The centralisation of power leads to problems…
Everything runs smoothly for quite a while and the economy rockets. More and more people are working directly for the state due to all the citizen’s requirements for bigger parks, more roads, better train tracks and generally more stuff. The state officials are having trouble keeping up with demand and establishes more and more new departments of the state. Every department have its own purpose and thus needs workers with specific skillsets. Soon, the people at the top starts having trouble overseeing all the different departments and establishes departments to do just that.
I believe you can figure out for yourself that this is a downward spiral that won’t stop anytime soon, but will continue to grow until it implodes under its own weight.
The state’s solution to, well, everything is to fund or expand on something. If it funds a private owned company that company could become rather vulnerable to competition once the contract with the state ends. See, the state is not like other market players. No, the state doesn’t earn money the way they do - by offering a better product than their competitors. The state earns its money from taxes, taxes that everyone pays. The company it does business with, the company it doesn’t do business with, the private person in charge of either company, and you and me pays the taxes to the state.
The problem with the state doesn’t start with the theft of resources (taxation) from its citizens, because, at first, it did sell you (or more probably, your ancestors) a product. A good product even. It sold you comfort. It sold you safety for you and your family. It sold you a better world. You didn’t even have to pay that much…
In the beginning…
The same way the state can give its citizens the world, the very same way it can take it away.
What happened after this was that the officials saw its people flourish and patted themselves on the shoulder, and why wouldn’t they? They made it all happen, didn’t they?
They see how much money that are actually flowing through the state’s bank accounts every day, month and year. After a while it’s not even real to them, the money are just bits of resources that exist on a computer screen. It’s not the hard labour of some underclass working man and his family. At first, they start to spend that money on things to actually make a better life for other people but after a while, they throw some money at a friends building company to do some repairs on a playground downtown and they tells themselves that the kids will have a good time and it wasn’t even that much money that the friend received for his efforts repairing that swing.
Fast forward a couple of years and now that whole department understands that there’s so much money in the state’s pockets that it doesn’t matter if both her sister and a couple of cousins got a nice comfy office job paid by with tax money. They really did need that coffee shop coordinator and park bench inspector in their department. Soon there are park bench inspectors in every city and town and the state politicians see this and realise that park benches must be a big deal if everyone is inspecting them. So, the state starts an investigation into what can be done about broken park benches. However, a spokesperson from one of the communal park bench-departments put forward a motion that there must be more coordination between the different park bench departments and suggests a nation-wide department that oversees the smaller park bench departments out in the country.
Let this go on for a few years. Some ideas like the one above will, of course, be so absurd it won’t go any further, but some others will. Another problem of the state is that it’s very reluctant to get rid of employees and departments that doesn’t really contribute anything, and that doesn’t necessarily have to mean that they’re bad at what they do, it could just mean that whatever they’re doing is not worth doing. By anyone. But in a state with the tax flow no one will notice. Yet.
It’s reactionary, not proactive
A decade or two later the state have really started to struggle with its own size. It has grown so much that it employs almost a third of all working people. People have started to ask questions about the high taxes and if they perhaps can have lower ones, but the state points towards the school, health care and police and answers ”Look, we need to have these things, alright? We all agreed that we need good health care, right? Think about the children who won’t be able to go to school if we cut taxes anymore. Do you want crime to rise?” And enough of the opposition quiets down temporarily.
This really doesn’t have that much to do with the high taxes since the taxes easily could pay for all the necessities several times over. So, what is really going on, then?
Since the state have expanded, the head politicians have realised that to keep everything running they have to spend more and more money due to the increasing numbers of people employed by the state and thus even less people in the private sector who actual are able to contribute to the economy more than just by turning paper or making coins change hands over and over.
They can’t really cut of a limb of itself because that would mean uproar from the ones being cut. And besides, didn’t we all agree on that we did need that coffee house coordinator, after all?
The process of choosing a suitable ruler
The leading politicians are chosen by us in a democratic election. They sit on the ”throne” for four years and after that they’re able to apply to be reelected. Although… That won’t be the likely outcome if they’re the ones cutting of limbs right and left. That would upset everyone in the public sector (which is a third of the employed public) who are the ones who are most likely to vote for status quo.
Now, the politician really starts to scratch his greying hair. ”It can’t go on like this. The numbers are clear.”
If we divide the people up in a couple of categories and let’s see what they are most likely to do and think:
The private sector guy definitely pose a large problem to the state so the state decides to try to win some of those people over on its side so it starts a ”marketing campaign” trying to paint the opposition as the bad guy who wants to make all those people unemployed. Soon, the debate isn’t even about those guys getting fired but about park benches and how they should be painted brown for the autumn to match the colours of the leaves and a specific branch of the park bench-department is sprouting out. The autumn comes and no one remembers the original argument but on the other hand the park benches do really look nice brown.
So, why not get rid of the state altogether?
Why do we actually have a state, then? States have fallen and risen our entire life of our species and will continue to do so. Are we as a species just that masochistic? Well, no. I’m not familiar with any society that has managed to survive without forming some kind of state or centralisation of power. Any utopia without a state where people get along fine without someone eventually gaining enough influence to start to centralise (no doubt to make the world a better place, at first) could not exist for long in my mind. I’d love to hear from people with different opinions, though!
What are we going to do about it then?
We have to use our every possibility to oppose the state and its influence on our lives. Not necessarily because the state’s bad in the state it happens to be in but because it very likely will become bad unless we oppose it every step of the way. There are a lot of people working for the state who’s doing a fantastic job and really want the best for the citizens, but for every one of those there are currently several others who’re just in it for the coin.
The state needs a healthy public that opposes it to be able to focus on its core principles and it seems that is what we are very bad at this at the moment in time.
