[sneak]

The purpose of the state is continuity of the state. The state is always the natural enemy of the people - specifically the liberty and privacy of the people.

Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.

[_verandaguy]

This seems like a very one-dimensional take. It's not invalid per se, but it really overlooks why states emerged in the first place (and I'm talking more about large, geographically-cohesive groups of people more than nations as the concept's come to be known in the last 2-3 hundred years).

The economic argument is that with states, you can benefit (to varying degrees, depending on the state's lowercase-c constitution) from the economies of scale. Fixed costs which might make things like electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing prohibitively expensive on an individual basis can now be built efficiently, and with the fixed overhead cost split so many ways, the cost to the individual becomes much easier to swallow.

Almost as soon as systems benefiting from economies of scale arise, you'll want ways to govern them fairly -- the ideal here being a (relatively) neutral party outside of the services' regular users who can manage these services and the policies which surround them. Obviously, this is something we're still figuring out: we're always trying to balance cost, representation, efficiency, and effectiveness, but we've got a good idea of what doesn't work.

I won't belabour the point since I think it's clear where I'm going with this, but to paint the two parties as natural enemies is a bit simplistic IMO. One arose in response to the natural needs of the other.

[pear01]

Odd, I've never seen a theory of state creation that starts with the benefits of scaling "electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing". Those are quite modern benefits, so seem like odd choices to illustrate your point.

I think the comment you were replying to has a better sense of things. Government becomes an entity onto itself, and prioritizes its own existence, far past the original mandate at its genesis. A constitution becomes acculturated as a default, not because each successive generation ratifies and legitimizes it anew, but simply because with its perpetuation comes power that is hard to displace.

This isn't merely cultural. The powerful interests as the head of the state have an interest in maintaining such a thing. Yes there are benefits, but your modern list ignores the true driver, which is far less luxurious. State formation is simply another form of human domination. Dressing it up as economic efficiency might make for good academic papers after the fact, but the reality is they arose out of the need to dominate others or be dominated. Feats of engineering in the ancient world were constructed to revere the state or benefit in wartime. The United States used the same rocket technology it contemplated annihilating the Soviet Union with to put men on the moon. In all cases some benefits do trickle down to the common man, but always the state itself ends up as the highest priority.

I think the issue today is, on balance if you look at the real equation between whose domination do I fear, increasingly it is your own state, there are less trickle down benefits occuring, and far more avenues for such "benefits" - like the phone in your pocket - to be deceptive, ie appear as a benefit while actually being another instrument of control.

Plumbing doesn't spy on you. And it solved a real problem and improved lives. Increasingly today in modern societies people see states with more contrived demand, "bullshit jobs", less external threats, and yet more and more state domination. Democratic checks may prove even more fatal - turn over the ancient apparatuses of domination over to a mob.

So anyway, I just ask you not ignore the obvious. People didn't want states to get cheap electrical grids. They submitted to it because they didn't want to be hacked and pillaged in their own beds. The true "natural needs" of our species are far more dire than any of those relative luxuries you have listed.

[ramblenode]

Economies of scale aren't specific to states. That's something every cooperative group benefits from.

Historically, the formation of most large states was not a voluntary merger of smaller states for the benefit of all but the conquest of smaller states by larger states.

[anonym29]

States are responsible for orders of magnitude more innocent human deaths than every "terrorist" group in human history combined.

[jounker]

They’re also responsible for the preservation of more human life and well being than any other organization.

[tekla]

Man, some people really want humanity to be banging rocks against rocks to scare off the Jaguars again.

[saubeidl]

Sure, but also for y'know, basic civilization and stuff like, idk, food safety, hospitals, roads, disaster preparedness, medicine approvals, building guidelines and all sorts of things that probably end up saving a lot more lives than they cost.

[xyzal]

What alternative do you propose?

[pessimizer]

I've always advocated a proliferation of overlapping "states." Let them keep each other in check.

Instead of having a tree with a king at the top and your local police station at the bottom, be a part of the governance for the river that you live near, for the city that surrounds you, for the grocery store in your neighborhood, for your local fire department, and let all of them have codified relationships with each other that are determined by codified processes.

I believe the limitation on this was technological; that we had to get people into a room, get Robert's Rules out, and shout our way into decisions. Those limitations are gone; we all have phones. We should be able to participate in the governance of everything, or if we really don't want to think about that crap, hand our proxy to someone who does, get alerts on what they're doing with it, and revoke or transfer it instantly.

Let's see some real social networking.

[sneak]

So, the problem with all of these proposed replacement systems (such as IRV, for example) is that "democracy" is a meme. People, en masse, believe in these systems-as-written (for better or worse) - critically - even if that isn't how things actually work on the ground in the real world.

So many people believe that, for example, the stuff written on the paper currency of the United States is legally binding. (It's irrelevant whether it is or not - people believe it, because they hear, believe, repeat, and teach the meme.)

Representative government is the same way. There are much better systems, and anyone can easily think up a few of them. The problem is going from A to B, also known as "the tyranny of the installed base".

No proposed new form of government or representation is worth the paper it's printed on unless it comes with a viable migration path from the status quo.

[xyzal]

> There are much better systems, and anyone can easily think up a few of them

Would you kindly? I really cannot come up with anything.

[okokwhatever]

Because democracy IS a meme

[an0malous]

Well the VCs and tech elite read a lot of Curtis Yarvin and decided the masses are too stupid to have a say in government so in the US we’re getting a CEO/king instead

[stackedinserter]

There's no alternative, it's constant battle for freedoms and liberties.

[phendrenad2]

Let's not fall for the is/aught fallacy: Identifying that something is a certain way doesn't make one in any way shape or form inherently more qualified to say what it SHOULD be like instead.