How to Build a State
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worksinprogress.co
Monarchs just need to pay armies, and the easiest way to do that was to keep them conquering new territory and paying them off with the spoils.
If I were to start a state today, I would bootstrap it by seizing a small, resource rich area and use the money to subordinate other, remote and small independent territories and then reform them into international financial centres. You will need the tacit support of a super power, so finding a powerful coalition in one of those countries and offering them secure offshore holdings in exchange for political support and holding off competing powers seems like a play. Becoming the offshore banker for the up and coming opposition faction in a super power provides enough cover to continue to pay your army with your natural resources cash. Opposition parties are a goldmine that way, as they need to protect their assets and strategic funding from the ruling party. And the populace? Well, surely there will be enough cash left over for bread and circuses, and you can't underestimate how much loyalty a lottery system that lifts some of them out of poverty will buy. With sufficient randomness or at least a hidden mechanism, they'll keep each other in line so long as they've got hope. Who knows, maybe they'll even make or invent things that provide better income than the natural resources. If the reptilian cynicism of this has given you a wave of nausea, good, you're human. But probably not cut out for being an autocrat.
You "just" have to be one of the greatest military geniuses of all time. Easy.
Actually, this was an insurmountable problem even for Alexander the Great. His army simply got tired of marching all over the world, and demanded to go home.
That's probably a prerequisite, but the issue is, there is virtually 0 unclaimed land on Earth. You need to find some ways to avoid having larger nations stiffle you during the early days. So your options would be:
1. Use a remote island nobody cares about (or create an island in the middle of the ocean). There was an idea to create such a nation for media piracy reasons, I can't remember the name. An outlandish project where they'd buy an island, declare themselves a new nation and have very lax IP laws.
2. Find a political power void. Good candidates are places with little rule of the law and/or weak governments. Ideally a place where there is no well organised force maintaining peace. War-torn areas might seem to fit the bill, but are probably to volatile to work.
3. Go off-planet, if space colonisation becomes a thing during our lifetime.
Also, when it comes to creating a new nation, the CHAZ in Seattle is a great example in what _not_ to do. CHAZ was never going to work, but execution was so bad the problem basically took care of itself with virtually no involvement from the US govt.
The alternative is to hollow out the institutions of an existing state using a movement. Takes about a generation, but you get an intact society with it. Game of Thrones' "Sparrows," are an example of it. You'd need a viral idea that people would seize upon and be willing to sacrifice themselves in service of it. They could teach it to kids so that it's all they ever knew, and as they matured they would inherit the reins of institutional power, and then use them in service of the idea. It's easier to get people to be against something than for it. I can't think of one off hand, but I suppose if you got them to imagine there were no countries, which wouldn't be difficult, and then not believing in anything strongly enough to kill to save or protect, and then no religion either, they could imagine living life in peace.
Anyway, not to solution it. Just saying, it's not as complex as the OP writes.
I don't recall Occupy Wall Street having their own policing task force (maybe they did and I'm misremembering).
The words I use are commonplace and I use the commonplace meanings of them.
The historical stuff in this is tripe. Rome taxed extensively. Tax exemption was a thing tied up with military land grants in the last western empire. And then general taxation and bureaucracy emerged again well before 1500. I have a good book on this, but can't find it on my shelf right now...
Plus there are plenty of places where the governments are not as bureaucratic as they are today. Just not in the developed world.
I, too, was surprised by the article's claim that it wasn't possible to have a mechanism for organizing taxation. If sumerian priests could keep extensive ledgers tracking debt some gajillion years ago, why would a renaissance french king have any issues?
As a warrior at some point you realise that you need "learned men" that can grant you legitimacy through their writings/sayings and who at the same time can help you collect taxes from the masses.
For how things started in Western Europe during the Middle Ages see Adalberon, bishop of Laon [1], and his "oratores, bellatores, laboratores" triad:
> He seems to be famous in French history because of a poem in which he made mention of (the) three orders in society : "oratores, bellatores, laboratores" : the clergy ("praying Church"), nobles and chivalry ("the fighting church"), and, third, the labouring people ("church of toiling"), the last one supporting the others, and all supporting the whole edifice of mankind. This idea was incorporated into the "three social orders" of the Ancien Régime in France.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adalberon_(bishop_of_Laon)
Prior industry revolution, agriculture is mostly a human-labor dominated activity. And the yield of the farm is mostly depends on the climate, and human-labor invested. Any small agriculture nation can easy get destroyed by a famine, or by an external roaming barbarians.
Naturally, the rulers and residents of agriculture society intuitively feel that larger population is more stable and stronger. You can see this from Chinese people and their culture. They naturally likes mingling with their fellow men more than western people in much larger scale. While at the same time, they actually do not have intimate personal-level relationship between each other, beyond their direct family members.
And to effectively manage a large population, without modern tech, demands a proportional bureaucracy.
Then that's the logic of expanding bureaucracy.
Historical China had always have this population boom and dwindle cycle on a massive scale. Records show in Han dynasty, the peak population is 50Mil, while in the 3-kingdom-era, it's 16Mil. Because the singular structure of the society is rather unable to innovate itself. And often they crack under their own weight, and got slaughtered by barbarians/foreign-invaders in an endless cycle (including the WWII).
And that's one reason a lot of Chinese citizens welcomed Trump's hostility: that's an effective pressure to force the nation to innovate. And we actually see the results, for so many years, China effectively did nothing to catch up the modern IC industry. I am not saying without Trump, China wont pursue the tech independence, though. It's just that the tenancy of the society is not as innovative as the west.
1984 and those kinds of publications were written in an era wherein we were transitioning from 'small government' to 'large state entities'. Because we don't have 'small government' as an example in living memory, it's easy to believe, by default, that 'this is the way it always was'.
Particularly WW1 and WW2 which for the first time required 'the entire states machinery' to be involved, we really started to see what the full capacity of state coordination looked like.
The ultra authoritarian states of the last century - and some of this century, particularly enabled by technology, really have no historical parallel.
Monarchs always had a tenuous position, the rate of taxation was relatively low, mostly involving defence/offence and maybe a few castles here and there.
It should be added, that not until the Industrial Revolution were there enough surpluses to really do that much anyhow.
I wonder how much of our modern idea of kings as supremely powerful dictators is just a result of posturing and good PR by past kings.
As a king, you'd be acutely aware of how tenuous your position was, and you'd be doing as much mythmaking as you could to prevent people from questioning your power.
Depends on how you want to look at it. Kings of ancient times where often seen as gods or god-like beings.
In the West and the Middle East these kings where well remembered through the religious sacred texts. It was part of the common knowledge, much like today Darth Vader.
A story like that of Jude would be known by virtually everyone and do much of what you'd term "PR".
In the Far East however, these mighty kings or emperors where in power in some countries up until very recent times.
And Disney, literally.
As a matter of fact, it was the south that wanted a "free market" economy. They wanted little to no tariffs so that britain/europe would open their markets to their cotton/agricultural goods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...
The Southern economy was pretty much unable to produce any industrial goods, a typical problem for unfree economies.
Who else would you have tariffs on? Yourself?
> Tariffs don't automatically make a country "not free market", any more than taxes do.
Actually, tariffs by definition makes it a "not free market". Especially when it is part of a protectionist policy. What does taxes have to do with anything?
"Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth." --lincoln
> Internally there were no tariffs, it was a free market.
What are you talking about? You can't tariff yourself. It would be like stealing from your left pocket to put it in your right pocket.
> Industrial production boomed in the free North.
Thanks to protectionism and high tariffs which kept british/european industrial goods out of the market. "free North"? Where blacks, natives and women were treated like second class citizens?
> The Southern economy was pretty much unable to produce any industrial goods
The South was an agricultural economy. The land, weather and environment provided conditions for year-round farming. Unlike in the north where we had fall/winter that prevent year-round farming.
> a typical problem for unfree economies.
Well china is great at industrial goods and they aren't as "free" as norway. So using your logic, norway must be a slave owning nation? What are you doing?
You just made up definitions, history, facts and confusingly misused the word "free" ( free as in markets vs free as in non-slave ). Are you alright?
On to substance: You can have lots of things within a country that make the economy "more free" or "less free". Yes, you could have internal tariffs (or, if you prefer, taxes on the movement of goods between states). You could have government-sponsored monopolies, where no other business is allowed to compete. You could have regulations that are restrictive enough to significantly affect the freedom of the market. And on and on.
You seem to have fixated only on the idea of tariffs as the one and only possible restriction on the freedom of the market. I don't think that's correct. I also don't think it's warranted by WalterBright's comment.
And no assumption of good faith towards me?
> On to substance: You can have lots of things within a country that make the economy "more free" or "less free". Yes, you could have internal tariffs (or, if you prefer, taxes on the movement of goods between states).
Next time, I'd appreciate you start with the "substance" and leave out the rest. The generally accepted definition is "between sovereign states".
"A tariff is a tax on imports or exports between sovereign states. It is a form of regulation of foreign trade and a policy that taxes foreign products to encourage or safeguard domestic industry."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff
Tariffs are a foreign trade tool.
> You seem to have fixated only on the idea of tariffs as the one and only possible restriction on the freedom of the market.
Nope. I said no free market can have protective tariffs. I didn't say it is the only restriction of free market.
> I don't think that's correct.
Neither do I. And I didn't claim it. You seem to be creating a straw man here. Attributing things to me that I never claimed.
> I also don't think it's warranted by WalterBright's comment.
Sure it is. WalterBright's assertion was that the north was a free market. This is factually and historically incorrect as I have shown ( with sources ).
Let me simplify it for you.
WalterBright: North was a free market economy.
Me: No it wasn't because a free market economy cannot have protective tariffs.
Claiming that the north was a free market economy is as wrong as claiming that the south didn't have slaves. It's factually incorrect.
And I started with that, because keeping the HN community free from personal attacks (even if they disguise themselves as sympathetic concern) is essential to keeping HN the kind of place where we can have factual discussions.
Since you seem to have totally missed my point, let me try again.
The North had tariffs for its dealings with other nations. That's not free, as you correctly state. But internally, the North was a good approximation of a free market - perhaps as good as there was in western civilization at the time. That matters, too.
As you said, tariffs are not the only restrictions on free markets. And yet, you argued with WaltherBright that you can't tariff yourself, when he clearly wasn't talking only about tariffs. He was talking about internal (non-tariff) restrictions that make a market non-free. I tried to explain that. You responded with a long argument, but you weren't actually responding to my point. (I don't think you were responding to WalterBright's point, either.)
> Since you seem to have totally missed my point, let me try again.
"Even if you think you're saying that in good faith, don't do that here."
> The North had tariffs for its dealings with other nations.
Not the north. The united states. Tariffs are applied on a country to country basis. It's called protectionism in the united states, not northern united states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...
> But internally, the North was a good approximation of a free market.
"Internally", both the north and the south had the same tariff situation because it is ONE country. Tariffs are set at a national level. In the united states, neither the north nor the south had "tariffs" against each other because they are constitutionally prohibited.
And neither the north or the south was a good approximation of a free market because the united states was a protectionist nation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...
> And yet, you argued with WaltherBright that you can't tariff yourself, when he clearly wasn't talking only about tariffs.
"It did have tariffs on trade with foreign countries, that's right. Tariffs don't automatically make a country "not free market", any more than taxes do."
That's what he wrote. He claimed that tariffs doesn't make it a "not free market". But by definition, it does.
> He was talking about internal (non-tariff) restrictions that make a market non-free.
No. Once again, he was claiming that tariffs didn't make a market "non-free". But it does.
I'll leave it here because clearly you guys are just making up your own definition, making up your own histories, making up your own economic ideas, etc. And then moving the goalpost to suit your needs.
My advice, go read my links about "free market", "tariffs" and protectionism in the united states. It's hard to discuss anything when you/him refuse to accept the definitions of these words/concepts/history.
You laugh, but that was a fairly common practice in some places.
Pre-revolutionary France was fairly notorious for it's internal taxes if you crossed provincial borders.
Salt and bread were the most common items, if I remember correctly.
The idea of a cohesive nation-state with an internally free market is pretty new.
The Constitution prohibits tariffs internally:
"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State. No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another."
That clause is in the Constitution for a good reason.
> Well china is great at industrial goods
Only after they switched from communist industry to free market industry.
I'll let the rest of your post speak for itself.
Yes because that's the point of a nation. In other words... tariffs are for foreign nations. All you've done is proven me correct and you wrong. You just debunked your own claim.
> Only after they switched from communist industry to free market industry.
Last I checked they are still communist and they are not a "free market". What do you think the trade war is about? Much of their economy is state owned.
Look at the list of top chinese companies. Notice how a lot of them are state owned enterprises?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...
> I'll let the rest of your post speak for itself.
What else can you do. Everything you wrote is factually false and I proved it so.
The fact that you claimed china is a "free market" shows you simply know nothing about what you are talking about. The idea that china is a "free market" is "flat-earth" level absurd. As was everything you wrote about the economies of the "free" north and "unfree south".
In the sense of 4 million slaves. Slavery is the antithesis of free market.
Once again, you are confusing what "free market" means.
"In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by the open market and by consumers."
Please expand on that.
> So using your logic, the north wasn't a free market either then.
Um, I repeatedly pointed out that the South had 4 million slaves. The magnitude makes the point. Absolutist arguments are pointless because nothing is absolute in real life. So we look at the magnitude.
> you are confusing what "free market" means.
Read the rest of the article you cited. Slavery does not fit with it.
If you don't even know this, why are you making comments here as if you know what you are talking about?
"Even though it excluded areas not in rebellion, it still applied to more than 3.5 million of the 4 million slaves in the country."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation
There were about 500,000 slaves in the north/union when the civil war started. They were outright slaves or were classified as "apprentices for life".
For example, in New Jersey there were still eighteen enslaved people in 1860, although officially termed “apprentices for life.”
https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunderstandings-north-and-slav...
I'm done here. Can't be bothered educating someone who refuses look up basic facts. But then again you believe china is a "free market". Ignorance is bliss.
The rest of the states outlawed slavery and that's where the free market was.
> eighteen enslaved people
18 people in a nation of millions does not alter the character of the market.
If you can show the industrial power of the North was powered by slave labor, that would be interesting.
There was no real central planning, few tariffs, few regulations, nobody was in charge or could make monopolies by fiat.
By the measure of 4 million slaves in the South, it was not free market. Slavery is the opposite of free markets.
No liberty equals no free markets.
Another way to say it is a free market transaction is one that does not include force or fraud. Slavery is force.
You can disagree if you like, but you'll be making up your own definition of free markets.
I like your description of a “free market transaction,” (one that does not include force or fraud), but this is distinct from a “free market.”
At the tier at which free market transactions are possible; that is, at the layer that eg two groups have equal negotiating power with no outside influence, the more their internal economies will tend towards unfree over time, and vice versa. This is necessarily so.
Laws that protect the individual hamper the freedoms of the collective entity. Not saying that’s a bad thing at all. I feel like the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal is a good exploratory case for a lot of these kinds of discussions.
A free market does not grant any special freedom for individuals, not life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. These are necessary for a healthy market, but a free market permits any number of behaviors. To the extent that behaviors are not permitted in the economic system, the market is not free.
That a government cannot infringe on these “inalienable rights” does not in itself guarantee that any of the economic actors within do not yield power that yanks these rights from its individuals.
If you want to add the qualifier of “competitive free market”, “free market with healthy dynamism,” or even “efficient free market” to meet your definition, then I would agree on quite a few different levels that slavery is antithetical to these.
The government is there as proactive guarantor of those rights, not just passively not itself infringe. This is explicitly stated in the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men"
> A free market does not grant any special freedom for individuals, not life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
It does not "grant", as rights are inalienable, but a condition for a free market is those rights are guaranteed.
For example, "either his brains or his signature would be on the contract" is not a free market transaction. So are all forms of slavery.
The Roman tax system used delegation, where tax collectors were given a territory and a target, and any revenue over the target could be kept by the official.
And as motohagiography points out, the military as a bare-bones state can be sustained with continuous conquest where the potential spoils of conquest are used to gain military allegiance.
It's not a coincidence that the Roman Empire entered a period of crisis, that proved terminal, after it stopped expanding.
In fact, Julius Caesar was "dictator in perpetuity" of Rome when he was assassinated.
The Askhistorians book list offers more modern alternatives [1] and I'm sure a classicist would have even more up-to-date references.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/europe#wik...
In short design by committee might be bad but rule by committee helps.
The role of a merchant-friendly parliament is associated with British success in the 1700+ centuries - from hands-off rule of colonies that then can stand alone, to courts that were less under the capricous whim of rulers than many. It all seemed to have helped.
So I kind of disagree with the premise - a parliament based market and human rights friendly nation could have been successful at almost any point post 1500. All it took was to wrench power away from the monarch...
> So I kind of disagree with the premise - a parliament based market and human rights friendly nation could have been successful at almost any point post 1500. All it took was to wrench power away from the monarch...
Which is exactly what Salvatore "Lucky" Luciano did in the early 30s when he had Salvatore Maranzano, the Capo di Tutti Capi, "Boss of Bosses", assasinated and proclaimed that La Cosa Nostra would be governed by a commission.
One other thing worth noting - the members of Murder Inc (Lucky's murder squad) most of them rose to become head sof their own families. The lesson being - the power resides not in the money but the killing
not sure where i am going with that but it's dark