The State

Officially this post was supposed to be about something different that ebbed out of me with time. And time is what I've taken away from this blog, unfortunately.

So without further ado I plunge into total amazement as to how the state came to be understood in our day and age as a 'player' and an 'agent', an intervening force without which we'd all be doomed.

Now, since before there actually existed any state in the modern sense, literature strove to define what exactly is the nature of the state and how should its mechanisms work. Hence, in contractualist terms, the state arose as a tacit agreement between individuals for a common organization that would fend for them and be careful if anyone stepped out of bounds within another's sphere of individual freedom. Ergo, basically, the state was created in the name of liberty, to safeguard against the harming of individuals amongst each other because in a stateless society (anarchy) everybody would do just about anything that would cross their minds, inferring into the sphere's of freedom of another guy just for the fun of, molesting him, killing him, showcasing him as a slave or a token of war. Pretty but unacceptable.

About a century later, other liberals such as Mills strove to define the relationship between the state and the individual a bit more. What he came up with is that the state should only act (obviously with force) whenever the right of freedom of an individual have been broken by another. So here freedom connects with rights. There are natural rights, called negative ones, which essentially you could say they are no-brainers: to live, to speak, to have intercourse, whatnot. The idea is that these rights are inherent to human beings and any transgression should be met with force and stopped (and/or punished). Since many is more powerful than one, the state metaphysically symbolised the gathering of more against the nuisance of the idiot few that didn't understand respect for other people's freedom.

All this is fine and dandy. However, somewhere along the lines of the last century something went a bit haywire. World Wars, Depression, unwise people taking power (yea, Franklin, you were right) and positive rights. The idea with positive rights is that they are "granted" by the state. Granted by the state. So you see the abomination. The previous set of rights we were to be safeguarded against, they were natural (not to call them divine) and came from the inherrent liberty of the human individual to do whatever he wants and pleases to the maximum of his ability and/or his potential. Now the state is nature, or the state is god or maybe we've even reverting back to absolute monarchism. These rights are granted to you by the state in its magnificent benevolence so you can get a job safely, get money from the government (i.e. the rest of us), for 'equality of chances'. Now this equality nonsense originates in a problem with democracy that shall be discussed somewhat at a later date.

How can one purport that everyone is equal when in reality no one is the same? Simple, by perverting the term and calling it 'of chances'. So we all can start equally. And not to worry, if you're a fast learner and run like hell, the state will surely make sure that everyone has the same chance as you. So instead of setting the mark at your level, trying to improve the idiots, it sets the mark at their level, dumbs you down. From safeguarding liberties to welfare of the naturally unselected I don't know what happened. Maybe it was a generation full of rotten-eggs. So now, far from its original purpose, infers in OUR freedom as it pleases to provide for those that aren't naturally fit to exist on their own. And as Weber put it, a bureaucracy will reach a certain point when all its purposes come into its own sustenance (more or less).

I won't go into alternatives now, nor into economy as I originally intended. However, you can think about this: "Enforced freedom is a contradiction in terms" (Ayn Rand)