I’ll add something else, since I think I have a similar philosophy to the OP.
Governments didn’t arise out of some theoretical intellectual theory about pooling labor and/or sharing risk and reward. No, the most basic model of government were gangs of men with horses and bronze weapons who demanded a share of the output of their neighbor’s farms in return for not bashing said neighbor’s heads in. And those gang members taught their children how to hit farmers in the head, and those children taught their children. Of course, most of the time gang members didn’t have to fight farmers…they mostly fought other gang members over the ownership of the farmers. Local gangs were often more tolerable than foreign gangs, since local gangs usually wanted a guaranteed income from working farmers, rather than a one-time looting that murder of all the farmers would provide.
But it did no good for the farmers to rise up and wipe out the gangs. If they got rid of the local gang, then a new gang was sure to attempt to move in. Or the fighters who wiped out the local gang would set themselves up as a new gang. And so on and so on, read any history book.
Concepts of taxation, private property, and duty to the state come from this tradition. Sure, nowadays we use the taxes our ancestors had to pay to their feudal overlords for things that, in theory, are supposed to benefit us. But the idea that we owe the state a portion of our earnings…just for the privilege of not getting our heads bashed in…comes from this. Sure, those taxes can be used to pay for public goods. But why are we obligated to provide anything?
Now, to step back a bit. Our current system of liberal democracy evolved out of this feudal state. It succeeds pretty damn well, all things considered. And I think the evolution is a big part of that success. We didn’t redesign society from first principles…we threw out things that were unfair and replaced them with things that were less unfair. Things that just grow often function better than things that are designed. Spontaneous order is very often stronger than imposed order.
Things like property rights or political rights don’t spring up from first principles…they are tools that enable societies to function better. A society with no political rights will fail. A society with no property rights will fail in a different way. A society unable to resist agression from outside gangs of men with horses and bronze weapons will become the slaves of those men.
So even though there literally millions of things that can be improved in our social/political/economic system, I don’t advocate radical transformation of society like most libertarians seem to. We have a global society today that is more fair, more just, more safe, more free, more interesting, and provides more wealth for more people than any other society in history. Complaining that we live under tyranny seems to miss the point. Yes, things could be better. But lets not lose sight of the fact that our society today WORKS, to a greater or lesser extent. And we got to this point from bipedal apes roaming the african savannas to hunter-gatherers to neolithic farmers to bronze age serfs to medieval peasants to renaissance subjects to industrial age citizens. I wouldn’t trade my place in today’s world with anyone from the past.
We are not living under tyranny today in the US, we are not slaves. Any so-called libertarian who claims that we are slaves or sliding into slavery, but somehow we are all too stupid to realize it is just blowing smoke. If most people really are too stupid to tell the difference between freedom and slavery then liberal democracy won’t work, and authoritarianism really will turn out to be the correct theory of government after all.
