and anyway prosocial parasitism is one of the main roles of the state, their inability to do it is a failure on their part
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the whole point is that the government is supposed to be a mechanism to extract wealth and put it to positive-sum purposes that no one is individually incentivized to pursue
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Replying to @alicemazzy @unhygenicmacro
punchline: government sucks at this almost as much as every other entity. sometimes more
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Replying to @sonyaellenmann @unhygenicmacro
I don't think the problem is "government" in general but the people within a society and the cultural health thereof
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founders made this mistake, thinking it was possible to design a system that guarded against human failings
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or maybe it's just a function of access to outside resources, my ideas about all this are honestly rather conflicted/hazy
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like part of me wants to say people in any time are going to subvert or bypass whatever strictures you lay up and the core question is *what people want to do*, build society/legacy or enrich themselves
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and it wasn't so much that "the system" used to work better than it does now, but that it involved (enough--leeches exist in every time) people motivated by a common spirit more than base desire
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but on the other hand maybe all it is is access to outside resources that can be extracted from non-members, acquisitiveness reigns in all periods, and enrichment of the public is always a mere side effect
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I've been reading about balance of power a lot recently and it seems that the common thread is, when power is unclear and widely distributed, constant conflict over it
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whether by improving internally or subjugating outside parties for the purpose of building one's own power relative to rivals, or warring against rivals to increase one's own power while breaking theirs
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and every period of pax whatevera is always a young empire, secure in its power over all in a position to threaten it, so conflict abates and internal security becomes a given
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and it could be a mix of legitimacy, fear, and skillful application of power that accomplishes this! but it could also just be, coasting on the fresh plunders of said expansion. I'm not sure
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End of conversation
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