Dependency requires control.

This simple truth is at the heart of politics. The cities depended on the rural areas to supply them with food, and so feudalism. The sick and infirm need care, and socialist schemes seek to provide for them.

The highly interdependent nature of the current form of the market “requires” massive control. It does not produce nearly as much free choice as one might expect, largely due to invisible mazes of regulation, many of which work against consumer safety, choice and price.

The common assumption seems to be that we need better, fairer, more equitable ways of dividing up the control. Or we need to find ways of having non-control approaches to the same high degree of interdependence.

I’m not there. I think the key point of attack is the interdependence. If people are largely independent of each other, why control? Some say the decline in marriage is directly caused by economic independence among women.

The Nation State, on many levels, is like a bad marriage held together “for the children.” Not because any individual citizen really feels the arrangement suits their best interests, but because everybody is sacrificing their freedom and autonomy for the benefit of everybody else. Is anybody winning?

My approach, therefore, is to de-collectivize areas like electricity supply. And I do not mean simply replacing a state-owned monopoly with a series of private companies. No, I mean push this all the way down the hill, to the point where everybody has their own power generation capacity.

This is, of course, the chain of thought which leads some people to stare at digital fabrication as the answer to everything. Maybe. Maybe.

In the areas where technology supports de-collectivization and individual autonomy, I think we should be moving as rapidly as possible towards that goal. I must re-emphasize that resource sharing by market mechanisms is still collectivization – customers are sharing the costs of running the company between them. Instead of having democratic control, they have market control – not “vote for A or B” but “buy A or B” – neither form represents anything like freedom.

In this respect, I find myself to be an autarchist.

The problem, of course, is “no force, no fraud” is a lousy set of ground rules. The idea that some form of free market whatever can somehow produce and dispense efficient justice is clung to be libertopians (and, yes, propertopians) of all stripes. But the rule of law is at some fundamental level a descendent from the Divine Right of Kings, and embodies many Christian and Jewish religious principles at nearly every level.

There are no ground rules. The attempt to artificially create groundrules, or to suggest that those groundrules exist, ignores a fundamental truth: law is paid for by those who benefit from it, and no others.

All power flows from the barrel of a gun.

What hope, then, for freedom and dignity in the world? Once again, and as always, we come back home to the armed population which cannot be oppressed to the point where they will retaliate and tear the State apart. In Europe I find my skin crawls at being amongst a population that saw Nazism and does not insist upon its arms. In America, I found a quiet and unconscious reassurance at the prevalence of arms, although the sheepish trust of the population in its increasingly fascist government is nauseating.

In the modern age, how much “government” – out of control, autocratic force – do we need? Enough to:

* combat organized crime and prevent warlordism
* provide some civilized recourse for the powerless

Past that?

The tragedy of Libertarianism is that the peasants are shot by hired subcontractors if they dare to farm the gardens of the rich for food, and this is called Justice. The tragedy of Communism is that all men are each other’s slaves. Anarchy will, I believe, inevitably be soluble not in the free market, but in organized crime, and this leaves what?

Armed anarcho-syndicalist collectives, with an emphasis on independent infrastructure? Does anybody really believe we have the space to even think of trying this? Isn’t this just another version of the tribalism which is so common in lawless and high-suck parts of the world?

I think that the crux of this is twofold:

* the insistence that rule of law be a subclass of collective self defense
* the acceptance that social constructions like “property” may change from situation to situation

This, to me, begins to resemble a framework which could be built up from Mad-Max Lowest Common Denominator Rule Of Force into a civil society. It is the externalization of the responsibility for maintaining the rule of law and self-defense against incursion from organized enemies that forms the genuine core of the taxation-or-death politics are the core of the modern nation state.

Firearms ensure relatively equal access to lethal force, which prevents some of the worst excesses of the Rule by the Sword typical of warlordism. Is it in our best interests to ensure our neighbors are armed?

Yes, I am asking if the militia is the fundamental political unit.

I am also suggesting that the law is whatever anybody is willing to bring armed people together to enforce. Whether that be hiring a sheriff, or an army, is only a question of scale.

Always, always, the place where the political system at work is laid bare is the point at which violence is applied. Backtrack from the violence through the chain of cause and effect, and you have your answers.

I think this is the core question of the day: how to model the human decision to use violence to enforce “law” in a way which gets new thought on this topic.

Upon which, more later.