The money quote (guaranteed to make anarchist heads explode)...
...This process was brutal. Whether it was the Romans in Britain or the British in India, pacification could be just as bloody as the savagery it stamped out. Yet despite the Hitlers, Stalins and Maos, over 10,000 years, war made states, and states made peace.
Another quote...
American attitudes toward government are therefore not just some Beltway debate; they matter to everyone on Earth. “Government,”? Ronald Reagan assured Americans in his first inaugural address, “is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”? Reagan’s great fear — that bloated government would stifle individual freedom — shows just how far the continuing debates over the merits of big and small government have taken us from the horrors that worried Hobbes. “The 10 most dangerous words in the English language,”? Reagan said on another occasion, “are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”? As Hobbes could have told him, in reality the 10 scariest words are, “There is no government and I’m here to kill you.”?
Last edited by Ad Orientem on Mon Apr 28, 2014 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Trumpism is not a philosophy or a movement. It's a cult.
I think the article is poorly titled and the emphasis is on the wrong points. Suggesting that organized mass killing is a good thing is pretty hard to swallow. On the other hand I would concur that there has been a major drop in violence, largely attributable to the rise of the modern state, and the gradual acceptance that the state has a monopoly on the use of deadly force in all but the most obvious cases of personal self defense.
Trumpism is not a philosophy or a movement. It's a cult.
He assumes wars are a necessary part of the process of civilization. To some degree, they may be, or at the very least an unavoidable one, but he seems to be drawing a very false dichotomy.
"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
