Posts on Society and Economics

I occasionally post comments to forums or news or blog articles related to society, politics, economics and our collective future. Here I collect some of my better comments and publish them together. Newer comments are posted first. I may sometimes add comments to my posts in the light of new data or changes in my views.

On Dissolution of the State (in response to anarchists and libertarians)

posted at the16types.info, November 8, 2010

If you get rid of the state (assuming that were possible), then power shifts to the hands of the next most powerful entity, defined by who controls the most assets and has the greatest material interests at stake. This would turn out to be the military and transnational corporations. These would become the new centers of power, molding local rules in such a way to preserve their assets and organizational survival and influence.

If the U.S. state were magically dissolved, within a matter of months it would be replaced by quasi-states run by military and corporate elements essentially operating by criminal force, before decentralized democratic structures even had a chance to self-organize. So getting rid of the state would be self-defeating and would only lead to worse things. You would have to first get rid of all large-scale business entities and somehow evenly distribute their assets.

As I see it, the only way to achieve decentralization of power to the degree you describe would be to have absolutely no societal entities with material interests and assets that extend beyond the local community. This is only attainable in a poor country of subsistence farmers, e.g. Bhutan, where there is virtually no concentration of wealth. It is impossible to have large, regional economic entities while only having small, local government. The nature of power is such that it accumulates in the hands of those with the greatest assets. He who owns, or can buy, the biggest stick wins. Thus, local government would retain nominal official power while the real power would be held by non-state entities operating at a regional or national level.

This perspective helps explain the growth of the centralized state in the U.S. over the past century or so. It simply mirrors the growth in power of business entities, which in turn mirror the growth in the nation's overall economic wealth. As economic entities grow in influence, the State "has to" grow as well in order to remain the top dog.

The only countries where central government actually possesses less power than business entities are third-world countries whose governments are bought off by transnational corporations who gain access to their national resources and proceed to exploit them for their own economic gain. If the U.S. State were somehow dissolved by common consent, something like this would happen, either at the hands of U.S. or foreign corporations.