The State has arisen...

 Last week there was a long discussion following the Lib Dem Voice "Saturday debate" slot about "equality of opportunity" versus "equality of outcome".  I don't want to rehash that all here.  I was thoroughly frustrated in trying to get a fellow in the debate, apparently from the remnant Liberal Party, who was promoting some kind of "universal inheritance" policy funded by confiscating more of the inheritance of the wealthy, to understand that real liberalism needs to look at the causes of the disparity they seek to redress, and where it is already created or protected by the state, the preference should be to repudiate whatever interference causes such inequity before compounding one injustice, the accumulation of vast wealth at the expense of others, with another, the confiscation of that and further interference in peoples' economic lives.

Anyway, that's not what this is about.  He kept nagging me about what, as an "anarchist" would I "construct" instead of the state!  Well what a silly question.  I would not "construct" anything, if by that he implies that I might have some utopian blueprint that I would impose on everyone else.  That would not be liberty.  That would be a state.  But what I did say to him was that I was confident that humanity was sufficiently advanced for institutions to "arise" naturally to meet common needs and provide solutions to social problems.

His rejoinder was that the "state has arisen" in the past.  And, by implication, "why on earth do you think it would not arise again? " And I have to admit that that stumped me for a while.

And so thanks to The UK Libertarian blog I found this video by Stefan Molyneux about the origins and ends of states:

And the answer to my soi-dissant "Liberal" correspondent became obvious.  The state only originated in an act of aggression for which there were no structures to prevent or punish.  Why is it that people who oppose the idea of not having to kow-tow to governments feel that we have not developed one iota beyond the end of subsistence farming that prompted the first expropriation by a bigger neighbour?  The entire point of a market-anarchist no state society would be built on institutions arising to uphold two particular, natural and founding laws - of self-ownership and non-aggression.  A state, in such a system, could not commit that original act of aggression, conquest and confiscation with impunity.