For the moral case, the government has a right to the proceeds of unimproved land value because it maintains the monopoly on force across the covered territory. That is, at bottom, what a government is, as distinct from other organizations - a group that declares a certain territory as its own and prohibits the use of force by others within it.
For the moral case, the government has a right to the proceeds of unimproved land value because it maintains the monopoly on force across the covered territory. That is, at bottom, what a government is, as distinct from other organizations - a group that declares a certain territory as its own and prohibits the use of force by others within it.
I don't agree. My government doesn't prohibit the use of force within its territory — force is legitimate in self-defense. It doesn't have a monopoly on the use of force even aside from that, since people sometimes use illegal force.
My account of what a government is in Chapter 52 of _The Machinery of Freedom_:
When we talk about a "failed state", what we mean, though there is some nuance, is a state which has lost control of the use of force within its borders. This has other symptoms, like inability to collect taxes, but those can happen without the core failure and not make the state failed. If it has the core failure, failure of the monopoly on force, that is universally judged to make the state a failure. By contrast, though functioning states differ on various spectrums in terms of what varieties of third-party force they permit and how successfully they restrict disallowed use of force, they succeed to a vastly greater degree than any ungoverned area (even the success stories like Kowloon). Preventing other states from invading and preventing warlords and crime bosses from subjecting their citizens to roving pockets of violence is the primary responsibility we judge states on, and the one expense of a state which is never done without. When a state begins to fail severely on this criterion (or at least a plurality is convinced it's failing), the citizens start to toss out other sacred values in service of fixing the failure (see: Duterte)
Regardless of the philosophical underpinnings, then, this is the principal service a state provides; everything else is commentary, from the perspective of the residents of the state. And this particularly stakes out a claim to an area of space, which is then theirs to justly collect rent on by virtue of excluding other claimants and providing the service to their residents of excluding other claimants.
(And then, generally, to take further state actions to try to make that space more valuable to current residents and potential immigrants, and thus increase their own revenue - the government (or several, in the case of a federalized system) that claims the territory is the one whose incentives most align with increasing the unimproved land value of their territory by making it a more attractive place to live. So this matches the economic cost-benefit view as well.)
Prevention of violence is also provided by institutions we would not call states. There are lots of historical examples of stateless or semi-stateless societies, where there was nothing we would recognize as a state preventing people from using violence against each other and yet most people, most of the time, did not find doing so a practical option. My old example is saga period Iceland, but the traditional Somali system would be another, and some of the Amerind societies such as the Commanche. I discuss some of them, and how private, decentralized law enforcement works, in my _Legal Systems Very Different from Ours_, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm.
And, of course, states do lots of things other than control of violence. So I don't think the definition you support works very well, prefer the one I offer.
Consider that in a modern western state, control of private violence, police and criminal courts, represent a tiny fraction of total expenditure. Defense against foreign states is larger, but still pretty small, especially in western Europe — something like 2% of GNP, 4% of government expenditure.
For the moral case, the government has a right to the proceeds of unimproved land value because it maintains the monopoly on force across the covered territory. That is, at bottom, what a government is, as distinct from other organizations - a group that declares a certain territory as its own and prohibits the use of force by others within it.
I don't agree. My government doesn't prohibit the use of force within its territory — force is legitimate in self-defense. It doesn't have a monopoly on the use of force even aside from that, since people sometimes use illegal force.
My account of what a government is in Chapter 52 of _The Machinery of Freedom_:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/A%20Positive%20Account%20of%20Rights.htm
When we talk about a "failed state", what we mean, though there is some nuance, is a state which has lost control of the use of force within its borders. This has other symptoms, like inability to collect taxes, but those can happen without the core failure and not make the state failed. If it has the core failure, failure of the monopoly on force, that is universally judged to make the state a failure. By contrast, though functioning states differ on various spectrums in terms of what varieties of third-party force they permit and how successfully they restrict disallowed use of force, they succeed to a vastly greater degree than any ungoverned area (even the success stories like Kowloon). Preventing other states from invading and preventing warlords and crime bosses from subjecting their citizens to roving pockets of violence is the primary responsibility we judge states on, and the one expense of a state which is never done without. When a state begins to fail severely on this criterion (or at least a plurality is convinced it's failing), the citizens start to toss out other sacred values in service of fixing the failure (see: Duterte)
Regardless of the philosophical underpinnings, then, this is the principal service a state provides; everything else is commentary, from the perspective of the residents of the state. And this particularly stakes out a claim to an area of space, which is then theirs to justly collect rent on by virtue of excluding other claimants and providing the service to their residents of excluding other claimants.
(And then, generally, to take further state actions to try to make that space more valuable to current residents and potential immigrants, and thus increase their own revenue - the government (or several, in the case of a federalized system) that claims the territory is the one whose incentives most align with increasing the unimproved land value of their territory by making it a more attractive place to live. So this matches the economic cost-benefit view as well.)
Prevention of violence is also provided by institutions we would not call states. There are lots of historical examples of stateless or semi-stateless societies, where there was nothing we would recognize as a state preventing people from using violence against each other and yet most people, most of the time, did not find doing so a practical option. My old example is saga period Iceland, but the traditional Somali system would be another, and some of the Amerind societies such as the Commanche. I discuss some of them, and how private, decentralized law enforcement works, in my _Legal Systems Very Different from Ours_, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm.
And, of course, states do lots of things other than control of violence. So I don't think the definition you support works very well, prefer the one I offer.
Consider that in a modern western state, control of private violence, police and criminal courts, represent a tiny fraction of total expenditure. Defense against foreign states is larger, but still pretty small, especially in western Europe — something like 2% of GNP, 4% of government expenditure.
Since we live in world of states those aren't relevant.