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Is tyranny intrinsic to governments?

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That wealth allowed people to become better in all aspects of life, most particularly in the art of separating private and public affairs, how Ayn Rand describes the process of Civilization.

The concept of frontier plays a key part for it's what allowed that bonus, that advantage best expressed, rather subtly in the wording of this part of one of Ayn Rand's favorite poem:

It is one of the ways wealth can be created. It is not the only way wealth is or can be created.

When the system is statist - it is not surprising that wealth had to be/was gained elsewhere. But there is another obvious to all of us here answer - get rid of statism.

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Is it possible to constrict a state-based government to its just functions?...

I am not saying I know the answer to my question. I do not know the answer, but it is an answer I would like to know. Currently, I believe the answer to be that it is not possible restrict government in such a way and that all statist governments will eventually lead to tyranny and then destruction. It is obvious that this trend could be prevented, theoretically, if the prevailing will of the people were to keep a vigilant watch on the expansion of government, but this has never been the case. In fact, the prevailing will is often the opposite as politicians are able to use the tools of government to achieve legal plunder and reward those who support them.

Well, on the ground level, sweeping philosophical change in favor of an egoist ethics and a free market politics is required to set the stage for any significant restructuring of a government in the right direction. If that is attained, however, it is still a very interesting question as to how to design a governmental structure that is as robust as possible to power grabs and pushes for state expansion. I think the field of public choice economics, which studies the incentive structures set up by various political arrangements, has a lot of empirical work to offer in answering that question, although that is only one of the research agendas in that field (and obviously, not every public choice economist's goal is to figure out how to limit government effectively).

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It is one of the ways wealth can be created. It is not the only way wealth is or can be created.

When the system is statist - it is not surprising that wealth had to be/was gained elsewhere. But there is another obvious to all of us here answer - get rid of statism.

Of course, but a man with a gun a with a huge expanse of land or a vapor machine could not achieve the same than a man with the same ability, but no historic concept of private property or intellectual property, and no gun.

Now I'm sounding like an apologist. So ok get rid of statism (and I assume, dangerously organized religion as well?) Then how? where? personally?

Well, on the ground level, sweeping philosophical change in favor of an egoist ethics and a free market politics is required to set the stage for any significant restructuring of a government in the right direction. If that is attained, however, it is still a very interesting question as to how to design a governmental structure that is as robust as possible to power grabs and pushes for state expansion. I think the field of public choice economics, which studies the incentive structures set up by various political arrangements, has a lot of empirical work to offer in answering that question, although that is only one of the research agendas in that field (and obviously, not every public choice economist's goal is to figure out how to limit government effectively).

So what if we are either not in time to sweepingly change the base, or we are but the message is missunderstood?

What experiment or hypotethical system offers the best empirical data of political systems in action?

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My point is that during the crest of European (as an ethno-linguistic group) hegemony, the new territories that were the Canadian and American praries, the Argentine and Uruguayan pampas, the Cuban and Brazilian plantations, (later Australia, much much later Rhodesia which like Cuba failed miserably and was the last and most extreme example in history of what I'm talking about) were open to civilized settlement, and wealth was rather inevitable.

Your point also seems to be that the only real freedom is found in the absence of government, with frontiers being a prime example that illustrate the thesis. You may also go so far as to agree with the proposition that liberty by law is a contradiction in terms.

The counter-example to the necessity of a frontier for wealth and freedom is the commercial trading empire. Many commercial trading empires end up leveraging their wealth into military power and new physical possessions so the two causes that I want to distinguish get conflated. The only pure example of trading empires not also eventually accompanied by physical empires (that I can think of) was the Italian city-states of the Renaissance.

An interesting recent book on wealth is The Rational Optimist which goes deep into history, actually indulging in some evolutionary psychology behind what enables trading in humans that was not present in pre-humans. A frontier is were an existing trade network expands, but the fundamental is the trading not the frontier. That is why there can be an "internet frontier", it enables trade networks to expand albeit intensively not extensively.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Second contradiction or as I see it PARADOX: Even without the slavery problem, one of the premises of America in the XIXc being a Free Country is the concept of the expanding frontier.

Native Americans were human beings, some where inside the incorporated states but were not given equal rights (trail of tears). Some (most) were outside the States and even had some nomadic sort of sovereignty: certainly the concept of it otherwise they wouldn't have signed contracts which as far as I know, was not them who breached.

The native americans were as guilty I think. besides, they had a very strict socialist system where anyone who "lived like the whites" was ceremoniously burned in thier villages. the tribes did not allow individualism the way americans did

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