CDZ Should Government be a Monopoly?

grbb

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Oct 15, 2016
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Government is a monopoly. Well, more like oligopoly in the world. People are free to change their government but it's not easy. That allows government to "raise price" or "raise tax" or control goods and service knowing that the population cannot easily get out anyway.

But why is government monopoly? There is this "obey me or else" kind of charisma that government have that other organization doesn't.

Say government tell you to pay tax. You pay it or else.

Say your neighbor tell you to give him money. Rather than paying you are more likely to call cops for attempted robbery.

Monopoly happens due to economic of size. Imagine if the robbers feel it's unfair and challenge government to war.

Well, the bigger organization win.

So the fact that government has monopoly allows "peace" that normal anarchy doesn't give.

Can we have "regulated" oligopoly? That way population get best deals (most security, better infrastructures, at least tax) and still have peace, that the better governed region aren't simply invaded by failed state?

Complex questions isn't it?

A state, or an alliance, must be big enough to challenge other alliances. However, it must be diverse enough so that population have choices.

But who wants populations to have choices? Government officials? no. They want bigger tax so they can pocket it. The populations? No. They want bigger tax so they get more welfare check. Who? What pressures force governments to compete?
 
Government is a monopoly. Well, more like oligopoly in the world. People are free to change their government but it's not easy. That allows government to "raise price" or "raise tax" or control goods and service knowing that the population cannot easily get out anyway.

But why is government monopoly? There is this "obey me or else" kind of charisma that government have that other organization doesn't.

Say government tell you to pay tax. You pay it or else.

Say your neighbor tell you to give him money. Rather than paying you are more likely to call cops for attempted robbery.

Monopoly happens due to economic of size. Imagine if the robbers feel it's unfair and challenge government to war.

Well, the bigger organization win.

So the fact that government has monopoly allows "peace" that normal anarchy doesn't give.

Can we have "regulated" oligopoly? That way population get best deals (most security, better infrastructures, at least tax) and still have peace, that the better governed region aren't simply invaded by failed state?

Complex questions isn't it?

A state, or an alliance, must be big enough to challenge other alliances. However, it must be diverse enough so that population have choices.

But who wants populations to have choices? Government officials? no. They want bigger tax so they can pocket it. The populations? No. They want bigger tax so they get more welfare check. Who? What pressures force governments to compete?
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Government is a monopoly on violence. From this monopoly on violence comes control over individuals and institutions in the society. This true no matter who controls the government, how they achieve their control or how they exercise it. That is the way human governments work. All of them, and a lot of animal societies as well. Get used to it.
 
I am getting used to it. Still governments now is better than before. Now, the richest people are no longer kings and politicians. The richest people are businessmen.

Something is working. And what's work is not the individual governments. What's work is that a few individuals amazing greatwealth free from government intervension
 
Government has competition but simply moving to another country is not that simple. I think it's closer to oligopoly.
 
Governments have the one monopoly that counts more than all others: they have a monopoly on secular law making. There's a reason for that, and I think far too many people naively overlook it. Governance is nothing other than a structured means for people who have resources to manage the societies in which they find themselves such that the resource owners/controllers can peaceably husband and use those resources -- land, capital, labor, and minds/influence -- for the sake of obtaining either entertainment (physical or mental) or more resources. That's always been so; it's not ever going to not be so.

People are free to change their government but it's not easy.

It's actually quite easy to do, but people simply don't do it. Consider the U.S. government. It's divided into three branches, and of the three, the legislative is the most powerful. In spite of that, the citizenry is far more likely to blame the executive branch for what they don't like even though everything the executive branch does is made possible by the legislative branch's laws and the judiciary's acquiescence to them. At most, the executive branch can do only what the very name implies: execute laws within the construct defined by Congress and suffered by the high court.

Because people focus on the presidency more so than on their respective senators and lower house representatives, they tend to continually re-emplace legislative bodies that repeat the same patterns and make similar laws as prior ones. This applies at the state level too. If people want change, it is more critical that they vote into office new national and state legislators, not new governors and presidents.

There is this "obey me or else" kind of charisma that government have that other organization doesn't.

Actually, there is one confederated entity that is vastly more "obey me or else" than are any democratic or republican governments: the church. The power of the pulpit greatly transcends that of any government for it controls the hearts and minds of the people who elect governments, work in governments, and so on.

The church isn't any single body, yet its confederacy of leaders separately as one control the mores and motivations of far more people than nearly every government on the planet. Furthermore, the church dictates what its adherents are to think and how they are to behave, both in general and with regard to certain issues. Lastly, the church brokers no objections to its dogma. In governing parlance, the church is authoritarian dictatorship that offers only one choice in the face of vocal opposition -- conform or leave -- and depending on the time and "temple" in question, to leave is to leave behind the mortal coil. Only secular governments have enough power to temper the authority of the church such that apostates and heretics can without physical harm non-conform to ecclesiastical dicta.

Say government tell you to pay tax. You pay it or else.

Money is a construct of convenience, it's what we use to quantify the relative value we place on a variety of things. If one doesn't value what a government delivers, one may choose to live under a different government. There are national and state governments, for example, that levy no income tax. About half the ones that don't are Muslim run nations, the other half are not.

Say your neighbor tell you to give him money. Rather than paying you are more likely to call cops for attempted robbery.

Really? Are you seriously asking us to ponder an analogy that establishes a conflict between two individuals, each of whom have sovereignty over only themselves, to a government, or any other institution, for that matter, that has agreed upon authority over individuals? Reductio ad absurdum and false comparison. Your scenario is better (though not well) suited to a disagreement between two governments, not between a government and an individual.

Monopoly happens due to economic of size.

Sometimes yes. You'll need to consider the nature of a natural monopoly

Well, the bigger organization win.

Winning is a matter of maintaining the ability to match supply with demand. Organizations, no matter their size, that do not continually do that perish.

Complex questions isn't it?

No. There's a lot to understand, but is the content itself and its application particularly complex? No.

What's complex? Stuff that we haven't yet figured out and stuff that is indeed really complex, even though we've figured it out. Some examples:
Lots of stuff has been figured out but it seems complex to folks who've not endeavored to get up to speed on the nature and extent of what has been figured out in those disciplines. That doesn't make the topics complex; it merely makes them as-yet-undiscovered/unexplored by the individual in question.

To wit...This looks simple, but what's actually going on is really quite complex, yet we do understand most of it.

krebs_cycle.jpg


This on the other hand looks, to most people I suspect, complex, but it's simple, even though it's not the simplest way to achieve its objective.



Even simpler is this, so simple that it's explained by a child.

Now the topic you've broached here -- integrated notions of governance and economics -- and at the level that I suspect you want the discussion to ensue, isn't at all complex. The ideas (at the level you've introduced) are well understood -- though hotly debated, here at least -- but they are more lengthy to discuss than they are complex for one needs to draw upon the not terribly complicated ideas of several philosophers -- Aristotle, Plato, Locke, de Toqueville, Machiavelli, and a few others -- and closely study whatever "principles of macro and microeconomics" textbook suits one so long as it goes to the level of detail that one will find most convincing (some folks insist on seeing and understanding the math behind the general principles; others don't). All of that has to do with volume of information, not the complexity of it.

A state, or an alliance, must be big enough to challenge other alliances.

Why? Why must there be any challenge at all? Is the notion of collaboration unacceptable to you? Comparative advantage is all about collaboration. Apply the principle and there is no call for any secularly driven challenges.

But who wants populations to have choices? Government officials? no. They want bigger tax so they can pocket it.

It's the people who have abundant resources who want to limit others' access to them. The people who take up the reigns of government are who desire to constrain the breadth and availability of opportunities available. It's not so much that they overtly aim to keep others from getting resources. Rather it's about ensuring that as others discover new resources or new means to obtaining them, the folks who already have them are not excluded from obtaining those same new resources or using those same means of obtaining additional existing resources or creating new ones.

Put another way, governance is about ensuring that if one has obtained "a place at the table," one does not lose that place. Making the table larger so more folks can sit at it is fine, but creating a situation whereby existing resource owners can easily or do routinely lose their place at the table is not at all fine. That distinction is subtle, but it is the distinction.
 

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