| | There is, however, the underlying problem of "justice." Freedom is not "free." Let's take the paradigm that Tibor presents and do a little deconstruction. Let's say that there are a bunch of people living in proximity reasonably peacefully, doing primitive farming as well as hunting and gathering. Meanwhile, another tribe that lives exclusively by hunting and gathering has run out of resources or been run off its land by somebody even nastier, and the farmers are easy pickings to seasoned hunters, used to killing big game. So, initially they kill the farmers as needed or for entertainment and steal their produce. After all, if they don't do it, then there are other hunting tribes who likely will.
But that's only a short term fix. Because there are probably other hunting tribes competing for a share of the action, a longer term solution is for a smarter hunting tribe to offer "protection" to the farmers in return for a set share of their production. That way the hunter/warriors have a fixed resource and the farmers won't simply be wiped out by a series of predatory groups.
The thing to note here is that without someone providing protection, the farmers will simply be wiped out, as the farming lifestyle does not really prepare one with the proper skills and resources for fighting. Secondly, while the random predators care little about the long-term success of any particular group of farmers, as someone else will pillage them anyway, without protection, the gang that has made a deal for a share in return for protection does indeed have a vested interest in the productivity of all the farmers under its wing, both long and short term.
As an anarchist, I feel a bit uncomfortable providing what appears to be a justification for the coercive state, as you might imagine. However, my take on this has long been that the elimination of the state, both total and piecemeal, is an evolutionary progression. Moving from pure predation to mutualism, as in the above paradigm, was the first stage. And, just as the percentage of people involved in farming itself has fallen exponentially over time, due to better technology and better economic systems, so the number of people and resources needed to provide protection should also be falling.
The fact is that you either grow your own food or you trade with farmers. Similarly, you can try to provide your own protection, but unless you specialize in that field, you are in the same situation as an amateur farmer. The problem is that because the state has exerted a monopoly control over basic aspects of protection, it is able to inflate its prices almost without limit, without any corresponding increase in the value of its services.
As Rothbard demonstrated in his classic Power and Market, the optimum price point for any good or service is set by the supply and demand curve. This applies whether there are many competitors or a single monopoly. However, this point, while valuable in arguing for unfettored free markets, may obscure the fact that the producers of that good, if they are a coercive monopoly, like the state, may not be responding well to the market signals. They may, in fact, have other priorities, such as a dog-eat-dog competition within the state for raw power, a competition that can easilly degenerate into a resource eating black hole that can destroy the host society.
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