begin draft: Anarchy, State & Utopia book review
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title = "Book Review: Anarchy, State, and Utopia"
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date = 2022-05-06
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description = "remove extra.hidden to link this from the index"
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it occurred to me the other day that i don't really have a framework for explaining the state.
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i can give the textbook answers for why separation of powers in US democracy is good,
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and why democracy is better than dictatorship, etc.
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but i have no way of justifying the whole system from the bottom up to the top.
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what justifies any individual in placing restrictions on my own actions?
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what justifies a government in restricting the actions of its citizens?
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i'm not saying these things don't have answers, only that i've implicitly accepted
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that satisfactory answers exist without actually knowing them.
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Robert Nozick seems to have noticed this same thing. he sets out to identify the
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justification of a state in its various forms, and he takes the logician's approach:
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identify a set of axioms, use these axioms to derive
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greater structures like contract law, and enforcement (protection and compensation)
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and then later to prove other structures (redistribution) are incompatible with these axioms.
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by doing this, he outlines the possibilities of a state and concentrates the answer to
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"is this complex system just" to "do you, reader, find these axioms just".
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the end result still has some amount of subjectivity, but the process is illuminating
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and provides some compelling insights. i'm going to document my current thoughts on this
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topic, taken sometimes directly from Nozick's book and other times simply inspired by the book.
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## Purpose of a state
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TODO: utlitarian? tool for coordination?.. no, not everyone can agree on its purpose,
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so we can't derive it in a top-down (end-goal driven) manner.
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