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begin draft: Anarchy, State & Utopia book review

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