Democracy's best defense is not that it delivers the will of the people. It does badly at that. it's that it allows government to proceed while still getting rid of offending and perhaps even tyrannical leaders. That is, it allows for the peaceful removal of bad guys (as well as good guys) from office.

Similarly, so, with the state itself. The best defense of it is not that it promotes justice and establishes peace. It's very bad at doing that: it's states that carry on mass slaughter, and injustice is riddled throughout society because of the structure and machinations of the state. What the state accomplishes is a modicum of justice and peace sort of as a side-effect of providing partisan services to groups of people all trying to live at the expense of others.

It is obvious that anarchists are wrong to argue that the state is nothing other than a criminal band of robbers, thugs, thieves. Robbers and thieves do not regularly provide justice and peace to whole sectors of society. The state does. But it also engages in acts of very much like robbery and precisely like mass murder. So we should acknowledge the services it provides while reminding ourselves that it does so only in the course of dealing in grave injustice, as well.

Some might be tempted to refer to this defense of the state as an unintended consequences approach. But that would be incorrect. States do not provide justice services spontaneously, without planning, or even as an afterthought.

States provide justice as a loss leader. It is the part of their job that justifies, in the popular mind, all their other activities, and spreads a patina of respectability on their other, more lucrative enterprises. States are in the business of moving wealth and people around, for the benefit of those nearest to state power. Justice is something it provides in hormetically small doses to justify everything else.

So call it The Loss Leader Defense of the State.

Leave a comment

Comments:

No Comments for this post yet...

Leave a comment:

Name:

Email:

Your email address will not be displayed on this site.

Site/Url:

Your URL will be displayed.

Comment text:

Allowed XHTML tags: <p, ul, ol, li, dl, dt, dd, address, blockquote, ins, del, span, bdo, br, em, strong, dfn, code, samp, kdb, var, cite, abbr, acronym, q, sub, sup, tt, i, b, big, small>

Options:

Auto-BR (Line breaks become <br />)
Remember me (Set cookies for name, email and url)
Allow message form (Allow users to contact you through a message form (your email will NOT be displayed.))

Pingbacks:

No Pingbacks for this post yet...