I’ve been thinking about the nature of government and why some form of it exists in every territory on Earth. About two years ago, my thinking brought me to oppose the very existence of the state, on the grounds that it is necessarily a coercive institution.
Matt Palmer writes on Mises Daily about Rothbard’s view of the state: Rothbard and the Nature of the State. He brings up a crucial point that I had not fully identified in my own thinking:
The actions of those with the state designation are not directed by constitutions. They are restrained only by the same thing that gives them life: the willingness of the people in their territory to tolerate them.
The point is that government only exists in the minds of the governed. The only difference between a gang of criminals ruling a region by force and a legitimate government is that the region’s residents believe that the government is legitimate (at least enough of them to enforce it upon the rest). External states will also recognize a specific group as the legitimate government of a region. Indeed, regardless of how the governed view their supposed leaders, we’ve got the whole planet mapped out with who’s in charge of each chunk of land.