Quote of the Day: The ISIS as evidence to theories of the state’s origins

How does ISIS spend the money it collects? This too sheds light on how a state embeds itself with a population and creates its own particular equation of sources and uses of funds. Every state (and organization of any kind) by definition has this equation: sources of funds = uses of funds.

“‘It’s assumed that ISIS pays the foreign fighters in its ranks, but perhaps it pays all its troops,’ according to Charles Lister. ‘In the areas under ISIS control, the organization subsidizes bread, water, and fuel, and also finances the maintenance and operation of basic public services. All that costs money.’”

ISIS has three main uses of funds: military + goods to the population + support of government administration. The “population goods” keep its subjects quiet. The military provides the force and threat to be able to extract the taxes and other resources from looting. The support of government pays for the government officials, tax collectors and bureaucracies. Every state, not only ISIS, is the same. The equation, in simplified terms as exemplified by ISIS, looks like this:

TAXES = MILITARY SPENDING + GOODS TO THE POPULATION + GOVERNMENT ADMINISTRATION

(TAXES includes all forms of looting, and I’ve omitted charitable giving as a source because it is typically not a continuing major source for states. It can be a significant startup source.)

Since taxes are necessarily higher than goods returned to the population, the subjects of any state continually incur a loss. They supply the funds that go to the military that keeps them under the rule of the state. That and the resources that go to government administration are a deadweight monetary loss. (There are other losses. There is a loss in utility or happiness because the taxes do not go to goods that the citizens want. There are losses from the disincentive effects of taxes and government rules.)

ISIS, now a proto-state and seeking to become a state, began in violence and conquest. This is how states begin according to Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, among others. ISIS provides further evidence consistent with their theories of the state’s origins.

This excerpt is from former economics and finance Professor Michael S. Rozeff at the lewrockwell Blog

Is Anarchism Utopian?

Depends on the definition, if anarchism is defined from the etymology of anarchy or chaos, then it is not even utopian but dystopian.

Let us do away with ideology first and deal with facts.

If anarchism is defined as statelessness, then the utopian claim is false, for one simple reason: the origin of human society had been WITHOUT the  state.

Human society emerged from the prehistoric stateless hunter-gatherer societal relationship

Notes the Wikipeida.org (bold mine)

Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo. As The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunter-Gatherers says: "Hunting and gathering was humanity's first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Until 12,000 years ago, all humans lived this way." 

What characterizes the hunter gatherer societies?

From another Wikipedia.org article (bold mine)

Hunter-gatherers move around constantly in search of food. As a result, they do not build permanent villages or create a wide variety of artifacts, and usually only form small groups such as bands and tribes. However, some hunting and gathering societies in areas with abundant resources (such as the Tlingit) lived in larger groups and formed complex hierarchical social structures such as chiefdoms. The need for mobility also limits the size of these societies. They generally consist of fewer than 60 people and rarely exceed 100. Statuses within the tribe are relatively equal, and decisions are reached through general agreement. The ties that bind the tribe are more complex than those of the bands.Leadership is personal—charismatic—and used for special purposes only in tribal society. There are no political offices containing real power, and a chief is merely a person of influence, a sort of adviser; therefore, tribal consolidations for collective action are not governmental. The family forms the main social unit, with most societal members being related by birth or marriage. This type of organization requires the family to carry out most social functions, including production and education.

In other words, 90% of human history has been about tribal anarchism.

The origin of the government came during the transition from hunter-gatherer to the agricultural age or the evolution towards pastoral societies.

Pastoralism is a slightly more efficient form of subsistence. Rather than searching for food on a daily basis, members of a pastoral society rely on domesticated herd animals to meet their food needs. Pastoralists live a nomadic life, moving their herds from one pasture to another. Because their food supply is far more reliable, pastoral societies can support larger populations. Since there are food surpluses, fewer people are needed to produce food. As a result, the division of labor (the specialization by individuals or groups in the performance of specific economic activities) becomes more complex. For example, some people become craftworkers, producing tools, weapons, and jewelry. The production of goods encourages trade. This trade helps to create inequality, as some families acquire more goods than others do. These families often gain power through their increased wealth. The passing on of property from one generation to another helps to centralize wealth and power. Over time emerge hereditary chieftainships, the typical form of government in pastoral societies.

From the above account the protection of private property played a significant role in ushering the state.

There are modern day examples of stateless tribal anarchist societies, Somalia—until recently before the  forced introduction of government through the intervention of the US government—and Southeast Asia’s Zomia.

Now let us inject the ideological philosophical component of anarchist societies. 

According to the Wikipedia.org there are several schools of thought, mutualism, individualist anarchism and social anarchism (which is broken down into collectivist anarchism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism).

There are even several offspring of ideological anarchism. The internet seems like an example of crypto-anarchism.

As to whether these ideological anarchism are utopian or not is beyond the scope of this post.

The bottom line is that anarchism as defined by statelessness has been an integral part of human society. They are anything but utopian.

Quote of the Day: The State Owes its Existence to Civilization

Primitive (“tribal”) societies are primitive not because they don’t have states, but because they don’t have a developed tradition of private property. This necessarily results in economic autarky and extreme poverty. Autarky and poverty in turn result in both inter-tribal biological competition (constant warfare) and the fact that there is not enough wealth to support a parasitic state. It is private property and the division of labor that led both to a decline in inter-tribal warfare and enough wealth in societies for parasitic states to feed off.

The state owes its existence to civilization, not vice versa.  And the wars that interrupt the process of civilization have been made more frequent and more bloody by the encroachment of the state on market-and-civil society.

This is from Mises Institute editor Daniel James Sanchez at the Mises Blog logically refuting the misleading comparison of the levels of violence between state and pre-state societies.

Essay of the Day: Tom Palmer: The Origins of State and Government

A profound essay on the origins of the state and government from Cato’s Tom G. Palmer

Some excerpts: 

People’s savings as the foundation of the state: 

What exactly is a state? The canonical definition was offered by MaxWeber,who defined the state as “that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory.”

In fact, it cannot be the case that all wealth is attributable to the state.

Historically, the existence of a state apparatus required a pre-existing surplus to sustain it in the first place. The state,in other words, would not exist without wealth being produced before its emergence. Let’s explore that a bit further

Why do people have wealth? Charles Dunoyer, an early libertarian sociologist, explained that “there exist in the world only two great parties; that of those who prefer to live from the produce of their labor or of their property, and that of those who prefer to live on the labor or the property of others.” Simply put,makers produce wealth while takers appropriate it…

Predatory nature of the state:

State formation represents a transformation from “roving bandits” to “stationary bandits.” As the economist Mancur Olson wrote, “If the leader of a roving bandit gang who finds only slim pickings is strong enough to take hold of a given territory and to keep other bandits out, he can monopolize crime in that area—he can become a stationary bandit.”That is an important insight into the development of human political associations.

The state is, at its core, a predatory institution. Yet, in some ways, it also represents an advance, even for those being plundered. When the choice is between roving bandits—who rob,fight, burn what they can’t take, and then come back the following year—and stationary bandits—who settle down and plunder little by little throughout the year—the choice is clear. Stationary bandits are less likely to kill and destroy as they loot you and they fend off rival bandits. That is a kind of progress—even from the perspective of those being plundered..

 Incentives of the governing class and the roots of taxation:

What are the incentives of the rulers? Overly simplistic models posit that rulers seek to maximize wealth, or gross domestic product. Scott,however, argues that the ruler’s incentive is not to maximize the GDP,but to maximize the “SAP,” the state-accessible product,understood as that production that is easy to identify, monitor, enumerate, and confiscate through taxation: “The ruler. . .maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.”

The inculcation of society for the need of the state

State systems of social control—from military conscription to compulsory schooling—have thoroughly permeated our consciousness.Consider,for example, the passport. You cannot travel around the world to day without a document issued by the state. In fact, you can no longer even travel around the United States without a state-issued document.Passports are very recent inventions. For thousands of years, people went where they wanted without permission from the state.

Laws originated from spontaneous order and not from the state;

Modern states also claim to be the sole source of law. But historically,states mainly replaced customary law with imposed law. There is a great deal of law all around us that is not a product of the state,for law is a byproduct of voluntary interaction. As the great jurist Bruno Leoni argued, “Individuals make the law insofar as they make successful claims.” Private persons making contracts are making law.

The need to educate people in order to free our captive minds from our dependence on the state

The evolution of freedom has involved a long process of bringing power under law. The imposition of force has none the less left a powerful imprint on our minds. Alexander Rüstow, a prominent sociologist and a father of the post war revival of liberty in Germany, meditated on the origins of the state in violence and predation and its lingering imprint: “All of us, without exception, carry this inherited poison within us, in the most varied and unexpected places and in the most diverse forms, often defying perception. All of us, collectively and individually, are accessories to this great sin of all time, this real original sin, a hereditary fault that can be excised and erased only with great difficulty and slowly, by an insight into pathology, by a will to recover, by the active remorse of all.” It takes work to free our minds from our dependence on the state

Read the complete essay here

Quote of the Day: Origin of the State

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive, State known to history originated in any other manner. On the negative side, it has been proved beyond peradventure that no primitive State could possibly have had any other origin.s Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State IS the economic exploitation of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class-State. Oppenheimer defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution "forced on a defeated group by a conquering group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. This domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered group by the victorious group."

Albert J. Nock, Our Enemy the State p.44-45

The genesis of government is from violence and plunder, and definitely not an outcome of attempts at resolving market imperfections.

Archeological Findings: The Origin of the State: War

Sociologist Franz Oppenheimer theorized that the state was born out of war.

From Mr. Oppenheimer

The State, completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first stages of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors."

No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner. [1] Wherever a reliable tradition reports otherwise, either it concerns the amalgamation of two fully developed primitive states into one body of more complete organisation, or else it is an adaptation to men of the fable of the sheep which made a bear their king in order to be protected against the wolf. But even in this latter case, the form and content of the State became precisely the same as in those states where nothing intervened, and which became immediately 'wolf states'." (p. 15)

Recently some archeologists have found evidence in support of Mr. Oppenheimer’s theory.

From the New York Times, (bold emphasis mine) [hat tip Charles Burris]

Some archaeologists have painted primitive societies as relatively peaceful, implying that war is a reprehensible modern deviation. Others have seen war as the midwife of the first states that arose as human population increased and more complex social structures emerged to coordinate activities.

A wave of new research is supporting this second view. Charles Stanish and Abigail Levine, archaeologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, have traced the rise of the pristine states that preceded the Inca empire. The first villages in the region were formed some 3,500 years ago. Over the next 1,000 years, some developed into larger regional centers, spaced about 12 to 15 miles apart. Then, starting around 500 B.C., signs of warfare emerged in the form of trophy heads and depictions of warriors, the two archaeologists report in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…

Dr. Stanish believes that warfare was the midwife of the first states that arose in many regions of the world, including Mesopotamia and China as well as the Americas.

The first states, in his view, were not passive affairs driven by forces beyond human control, like climate and geography, as some historians have supposed. Rather, they were shaped by human choice as people sought new forms of cooperation and new institutions for the more complex societies that were developing. Trade was one of these cooperative institutions for consolidating larger-scale groups; warfare was the other.

Warfare may not usually be thought of as a form of cooperation, but organized hostilities between chiefdoms require that within each chiefdom people subordinate their individual self-interest to that of the group.

“Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it,” the anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley writes in his book “War Before Civilization” (Oxford, 1996).

The primary innate instinct of every state is to establish and preserve political control through violence.