Backup for http://drscoundrels.com/?p=1351 with corrections.

The state is the dominant mode of societal organization in our world today. States are proliferating at a rate of 3.1 additional states per year with the U.N. growing from some 50 members in 1950 to 191 members today (28, The Untied States of America Enriquez, Juan Crown 2005). Eventually, all states find themselves fracturing this way and that, as the myths which they employ to justify their existence no longer suffice or hold up under the scrutiny of independent minds. Despite the hopes of anarchists, the state continues to multiply at an alarming rate; moreover, despite the hopes of nationalists, the state continues to fragment at a staggering rate.

There are many causes for this, but none are more prominent or as easily identifiable as statism’s chief means of promoting or justifying its existence: the myth. The narrative is the most important tool available to states to promote their existence, and to defend their perpetuation. If you can author and control the narrative until it is mortared into history as fact, you will have achieved immortality for your version of the truth. The greater problem is the inevitable bifurcation between experience and claim on the part of those individuals who follow you.

We teach our children that the United States is essentially a good country, and that its government is noble and trustworthy. We equivocate on those difficult truths of our history by acknowledging that we did fail to honor treaties with Indians, and that we also failed to deliver on our post-slavery promises to the newly freed slaves, but (and but is a very important word in equivocation, perhaps the most important word) that was the way things were done back then. What is important to understand is that the way things were is the way things are. Governments routinely promise one thing and deliver its opposite.

This is the nature of those who rule, or those who covet power, to deliver only on those promises which complement their essential objective: the preservation and expansion of their power. Rulers are not interesting in expanding the power of their own subjects if the expansion of power will result in the constricting of a government’s power. The essential flaw of statism is the assumption that in certain forms of statism such as the republic, the individual can maintain primacy above the state. That is to say, the state will selflessly promote the expansion of individual power, liberty, and self-determination to its own detriment as part of its purpose. To pretend that this is possible is to engage in self-deceit.

A government which promises a certain outcome to a certain group and then fails to deliver upon those promises will ultimately establish for itself a precedent: that it may promise certain things to certain people in the immediate term in order to get them to draw back from their adversarial position, only to delay delivery of those promises into the indefinite future. Tomorrow, tomorrow, the sun will come out tomorrow, but when tomorrow becomes today, it will be tomorrow, tomorrow yet again. The state inevitably relies upon the very real differences people feel, whether those differences are matters of religion, race, creed, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or identification, or economic status. You see, we do not object so long as the injustice is done to them rather than us. What is more, the state very often enlists us in their campaign by offering us some of the fruit of their unjust harvesting of the assets of others who were deprived of their property and resources by the government.

The problems in such an approach will inevitably lead to deep fissures and bifurcations at a later date, as Juan Enriquez notes in his book The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future. The reality is that the legal framework upon which such trade-offs are built is often sloppy and careless, and the states which engage in such trade-offs often do so in an extralegal sense, which leads us to the current time, in which we have several hundred legally sovereign nations existing within the United States. That’s right, several hundred. If you wonder at how it is that Indian tribes can open up casinos in states which prohibit the establishment of gaming operations by their residents and citizens, consider this: Indian tribes within those states are not subject to state laws. They are separate entities, sovereign nations, if you will, and they negotiate directly with the U.S. federal government, thereby bypassing the states altogether.

As Enriquez writes, "Each sovereign nation makes up its own rules, has its own police forces, is mostly exempt from taxes, chooses its own citizens, and has its own governing council. That is what it means to be sovereign (93)…" How did we arrive at this destination? Quite simply, the establishment of three precedents, which are as follows:

Land was purchased from tribes that had the status of sovereign nations by colonial governments who realized that real estate negotiations were more convenient and less costly than wars and conflicts to forcibly attain the land’s title. The provenance could thus be legally documented as transferring over from the indigenous tribes to the colonial governments. Implicit within this transfer was the acknowledgment that Indian tribes were the legal owners of the land. Otherwise, why would you need to purchase the land?
Only a sovereign could obtain lawful land title from native tribes. King George III attempted to appropriate control of the of the real estate transactions by establishing this precedent.
Indian nations signed treaties with the U.S. as sovereign entities. This began on September 19, 1778, when, after independence from Britain, the United States entered into its first treaty of alliance with Delaware Indians, which the treaty stipulated were a nation unto themselves (the Delaware nation), and agreed to guarantee the territorial rights of the Delaware nation and their heirs in exchange for free passage through their country by citizens of the United States. As Enriqueze notes, "Through 1871, the United States signed 371 treaties, which recognize Indian tribes as sovereign entities (95)."

These 371 treaties, and many that followed, continue to have legal consequences to this day. They are, under the law, legally binding agreements between the federal government (which is empowered by the Constitution to enter into treaties which bind is member states and citizens under Article II, Section II, Clause II of the Constitution; a power which is denied to states by Article I, Section X, Clause I) and the sovereign nations which the United States negotiated with way back when, in these cases, the various Indian tribes, or nations. The Indians have legal standing to obviate the seizure of their lands by various states like Massachusetts under the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790, which established that states could not appropriate land from the Indians without federal authorization.

Today, the Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard have successfully challenged the incorporation of the town of Gay Head, which is now called Aquinnah (ibid, 105). In New York, the Oneida Indians lost 99% of the land they were granted by their treaty, and were eventually confined to thirty-two acres. New York wasn’t receptive to their pleas, so the Oneida went to court and attempted to regain control of the 270,000 acres that they argued they had been legally guaranteed under the 1784 Treaty of Six Nations. In 1985, the Supreme Court upheld their case over 900 acres, and by 1998, the Oneidas were on the precipice of challenging the rights of twenty thousand property owners in New York, which had over time transferred property which it did not legally or rightfully hold claim to under the law to various owners, which led to the rather murky provenance of the current day, and which holds out the promise of rendering twenty thousand Americans hold on their land tenuous at best, thanks to the wonders of statism and its blatant disregard for the very law states ostensibly exist to establish and uphold in order to prevent just these sorts of problems from arising (ibid 106-107).

As you can see, the state perpetuates the myth that it exists to promote order and stability, to prevent abuse, but it is often at the forefront of the very sorts of abuses it purportedly exists to prevent. The net result is that individual purchase land and base their lives around property which they do not rightfully own through no fault of their own, but through the fault of the state which they trust and believe exists to ensure equality and fairness before the law. It’s a dangerous delusion to hold, and anyone who bases their life around trusting a government inevitably will find that the foundation of their existence is made up of shifting sand. They can lose their home, their land, and their livelihood for trusting a state. Just look at what happened to the Indians, who routinely entered into treaties with the U.S. government in good faith, only to find that the government routinely trampled the law and the contracts thereof with impudence and impunity.

If you wonder why it is that our nation no longer works, consider the above, and consider this: "In 1976, Carter vs. Ford, 26.8% of voters lived in a landslide districts (60%+ for one candidate). In 2000, Bush vs. Gore, 45.3% lived in landslide counties. In 2004, less than one in fifty congressional races was for real (ibid 37)." You see, the state has engineered districts to such a degree that the incumbents are all but assured of reelection no matter what they do. Elections are mere shams, as the fact that 3,140 counties yielded less than 65 total where the difference between Bush and Kerry in 2004 was less than 1%. The University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Nathaniel Persily claims that turnover in Congress is lower now than it was in the Soviet Politburo. In the past 47 years, the rate of reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives has never dipped below 85% (http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php). It has only dipped below 90% in five of the elections over that time frame.

The overwhelming tendency in our electoral process has been one of constant reaffirmation, despite the fact that public sentiment for the job that Congress has done has been on a precipitous downward spiral. During the past 40 years, we’ve had 40 consecutive years of deficits at the federal level. The advertised deficit has been lower than the real deficit in 25 of those years, given the fact that the Social Security surplus is automatically loaned by law to Congress, whose members use that surplus to artificially reduce the reported deficit. Under the GAAP standards which Congress requires privately held companies to report their own statements in, our deficit from 2007 would have been an astonishing $4 trillion as opposed to the officially reported sum of $163 billion (2007 Financial Report of the United States Government).

Under the aforementioned report, the net worth of the U.S. federal government under GAAP standards was $54.3 trillion, with an unfunded obligation of $59.8 trillion. Simply put, we are bankrupt. Any private company which ran 40 consecutive years in the red would have long ago been recognized as insolvent. The pernicious feature of the state is that it can extend its accounting abuses well beyond the threshold afforded to private entities, owing to its monopoly power of coinage, the law, and the accepted practices by which it publicly discloses its own liabilities. The federal government’s greatest asset is not money, nor monopoly power over money and law, but monopoly power over self-reporting.

The set of numbers reported to the wider population is largely engineered to reflect a sunnier fiscal outlook than the reality. This is true of deficits, national debt, unfunded liabilities, and unemployment. The federal government cherry-picks the information it reports in order to make itself appear far less fiscally insolvent than it actually is. Despite the fact that CEOs and executives are required by Sarbanes-Oxley Section 302 to certify and approve the accuracy and integrity of their companies’ financial reports, the Comptroller General of the United States will not do the same with the finances of the U.S. federal government, due to "the federal government’s inability to demonstrate the reliability of significant portions of the U.S. government’s accompanying accrual basis consolidated financial statements for fiscal years 2007 and 2006 (http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=45430)."

It is an understatement to say that the federal government has an "inability to demonstrate the reliability of significant portions of the U.S. government’s accompanying accrual basis consolidated financial statements" for any year, much less two out of the past decade. The federal government possesses a deep inability to demonstrate the reliability of its entire fiscal approach, which has led us directly to the present day, where we have nearly $16 trillion in current liabilities between our national debt and our IOUs to Social Security, and well over $60 trillion in liabilities overall into the infinite horizon. The state doesn’t work.

This is true of all states, including our friends in Europe, who are on the verge of a continental implosion. Their crisis is largely one of structural importance, given the fact that they constructed a trading bloc which flew in the face of economic reality. The reality of the European Union is this: its very design ensures its eventual, for among its member states, the emergence of trade deficits cannot be corrected, because the member states lack unique currencies which they can adjust to meet the realities of their trade deficits and surpluses. They have but one currency.

For the fundamentalists around the world who rant and rave about the emergence of a global currency as a panacea offered by the Antichrist as an answer to economic problems, the simple truth is that the euro ought to dispel the notion of a single currency as an answer to economic issues once and for all. Between the single currency’s inflexibility and the historical trend toward fiscal profligacy of states, there is little reason to believe in magic bullets like a united currency or trading bloc as an answer to the problems of statism.

Internationalists, or globalists, depending on which nomenclature you prefer or subscribe to, are fond of claiming that all one needs is more cooperation. We are but a few compacts and treaties away from world peace and economic cooperation which will by necessity lead to the end of armed conflict and the ushering in of a new world order, but the reality of the matter is this: the state itself is the source of law and lawlessness, for no sooner does the state pass laws than it disregards them and holds itself above the law. The State must be abolished, or at the very least, held in chains. It must be yoked by specificity to certain tasks, and its masters among the people must be ever mindful of their duty to hold the state in check. This seems an unrealistic goal, given the fact that most people have lives which naturally decree that their time is spent on matters of immediate significance like the family and their own fiscal issues.

It is simpler to acknowledge that the state as a concept is a failed experiment, one that did not work to achieve its ostensible and purported purpose: the provision of a more secure existence with guaranteed liberties for the individuals who fell under its auspices. In point of fact, states begin with compacts and codifications of various rights which individuals supposedly possess, and those rights stem either from God or from the state which is made up of the individuals within its boundaries, but as soon as the ink dries on the paper, the state immediately makes unlimited and unprovoked war upon the very liberties which it supposedly exists to promote, defend, and expand!

Every success of the state depends largely on the control of a narrative, the perpetuation of a myth, and the battle for the mortaring of that myth into the historical record. Evan Cornog frames this issue quite well in his book The Power And the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W. Bush: "The key to American presidential leadership and the story of presidential success is, in great measure, storytelling. From the earliest days of our republic to the present, those who wished to hold the nation’s highest office have had to tell persuasive stories-about the nation, its problems, and most of all about themselves-to those with the power to elect them. A sitting president’s ability to tell the right story and to adapt it as necessary is absolutely crucial. And when he has left office, he often spends his remaining years attempting to inscribe the narrative as he sees it into the record. The impact of these stories on electorate and the nation is almost beyond measure, because it is often these stories that we call history (Liner notes & summation of pg. 2 emphasis added)."

We do not have an objective history in this country put forth by professional historians with no allegiance to ideology. What we have is a constant advancing and receding between various sides, who put forth their version of events as they hold power, reducing historical narrative to mere dependence on the holders of offices rather than the facts and records themselves. Everything is dependent not on fact, but on whose myths are cemented into record at a given time and place. This is why ideologues are so passionate about power: the control of historical record depends on who occupies a position of power from which to insert their version or their mythology into the record.

The delusions are not monopolized by the conservatives or the liberals, the so-called right or the left. Both seek to hold power for the purpose of dominating the narrative without regard to the facts, but in spite of those facts which might contradict their preferred version of events. The state is the instrument by which such individuals appropriate power in order to control history and craft narratives which depict their actions in the most favorable light. The point is never to learn from the mistakes of the past, but to enable those mistakes to be repeated again and again, to prevent individuals in the general population from every having an objective record to reference in order to discern between the true and the false in their current day existence. The point is to deny individuals a context in which to place the appeals of modern day demagogues and tyrants, to deny them a perspective from which they might deny their political class a manipulated and engineered consent to whatever abuses such political individuals seek to foist upon the world.

It is to polarize individuals into mindless bifurcations, to divide individuals in the same house against themselves, to balkanize us into camps peering suspiciously across the battlefield of ideas at our neighbor whose lawn sign differs from our own during election season. It is to make us see our peers as somehow blackened by their affiliations while we remain firm in our conviction that ours is the right cause, absolutely and without reservation. Even when the overwhelming evidence and the early returns tell us that our way is not working, we will persist, plunging headlong into destruction. The only substantive bifurcation that we have, the only real divide, is that of our own interest and the interest of our government, and those two interests very often do not align in the slightest.

Many of us recoil in horror at the notion that our government would claim that it has the right to execute any U.S. citizen at any time without charges or trial if that citizen is found by our government to have affiliated with a terrorist group. Those who do not are guilty of failing to comprehend the conveniently amorphous definitions of the government and the state. What, exactly, constitutes a terrorist group? Which groups are included? Remember, our government recently provoked outrage by denoting libertarians and individuals with Ron Paul stickers as potential domestic terrorists. It seems as though we are fine with individuals who may have some tenuous connection with Al-Qaeda being executed, but if our own affiliations are held to the same scrutiny, we erupt indignantly against the outrageous notion that we might be covered by such overreaches. We have due process in our country to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt precisely because history has taught us that a government or state left to its own devices will inevitably lapse into abuse and overreach. We have every reason to stand for limited government, for governments unfettered by the limits placed upon their power that individual liberties and rights represent have constantly erred on the side of excess. Nothing in the considerable documentary history of statism or government ought to give us faith that a government will act in our interests as opposed to its own. Quite the contrary is true.

We would recoil in horror at the notion that our government claims for itself the right to indefinitely detain and incarcerate individuals without hearing, charges, or trial if those individuals resembled us in any way. But when those individuals are Muslims, or people who befriend and associate with Muslims, or who might have some connection with a Muslim group, we have no issue whatsoever. We might well be mindful of the fact that whatever the government may do to others it may also do to us. If you acknowledge the power of government to engage in action against others, you acknowledge its power to act in the same manner towards you. After all, we are all equal before the law.

As I noted before, the state inevitably relies upon the very real differences people feel, whether those differences are matters of religion, race, creed, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or identification, or economic status. We do not object so long as the injustice is done to them rather than to us. The words of Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemoller resonate to this day where these issues are concerned: "When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent: I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent: I wasn’t a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out." This is the insidious nature of the state: to purchase your silent complicity by committing abuses first against others, and then lastly against those for whom it might have been previously unthinkable that the state would ever take an adversarial position against. If we are to be united, it is not against an external threat. It is against the state which, if unchecked, will gradually erode our liberties and freedoms until at last, when they come for us, no one will be left to speak out on our behalf.

The state is not your friend or your ally. It is in the best case scenario your employee, your servant. Anyone who has ever been in a position of management or supervision can explain to you the perils of being too friendly with the subordinates. Eventually, those subordinates come to mistake your friendliness for weakness and even a servility, and they act as if your role is theirs. So it is with the state, and if we do not beat the state back into a position of servility, we will be reduced obsequious groveling serfs ourselves. In large part, we already are. The security apparatus at airports, which has elevated individuals who outside of their rank within a government agency are of little consequence or importance to the level of bullies and thugs who feel empowered to speak to the very taxpayers who make their existence possible with a level of hauteur that is shocking for its rudeness and disrespect, is but one example of how we are gradually being reduced to compliance in the name of our own good. Yet on Christmas Day, that security apparatus was of no effect in preventing the Nigerian born underwear bomber from detonating his bomb on board a flight. Ordinary citizens intercepted and detained him on board when a security and intelligence apparatus funded by hundreds of billions failed to function as advertised.

The state would have you believe that it is necessary for your survival, for your defense, for your livelihood. Watching it siphon off your livelihoods with regulations which cost $1.14 trillion annually, and budget deficits which will siphon off the livelihoods and sustenance of your children and their children’s children, why would you believe in the efficacy of the state to accomplish anything to your benefit? Why would you trust the state, given the ample evidence that the state is your enemy, an ostensible servant to your interests which dares to transgress against your property and person with impunity, to arrogate unto itself greater and greater amounts of power at the expense of your own liberty and self-determination?

Statism relies solely upon myth, upon the manipulation of facts and statistics to bolster its justification for existing. But when you independently look at the state, when you go outside the official record and you objectively consider what the state does and for what ends it is acting, you come to one indisputable conclusion: those ends directly contravene the limits placed upon the state by the very documents which define the state, such as the Constitution and various statutes. The state claims to uphold the law, but in all truth, it routinely disregards the law.

Its various bureaucracies know no limitation upon their actions, and these bureaucracies are isolated from electoral consequence because their officers and employees are not subject to an election. They can continue to persist in the same abuses, overreaches, and outright violations of the law year in and year out because there is not accountability for them. They are not out of control, either. Despite the official byline that states are so fond of reciting, that rogue agents and lone individuals operating on their own violated the law and retain culpability for the violation themselves, the simple truth is this: the disregard for the law is institutional rather than individual. The bureaucracies merely seek to dissociate themselves from culpability after the fact by heaping responsibility upon a few scapegoats, who then claim that they were merely following orders.

To understand how this is possible, how ingrained it is within bureaucracies and the individuals who make up the rank and file of bureaucratic organizations, it is most informative to refer to the interviews conducted by Nuremberg officials of Nazi war criminals: "For example, Adolph Eichmann was asked, "Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people their death?" Eichmann replied, "To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy." Asked to explain, Eichmann said, "My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache — ‘office talk.’" In office talk "you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, ‘Why did you do it?’ you say, ‘I had to.’ ‘Why did you have to?’ ‘Superiors’ orders. Company policy. It’s the law (http://www.prorev.com/wannsee.htm).’" Indeed. It’s the law. It’s the order of my superior, and so what if it flouts the law as I know it, or even if it flouts basic moral standards and violates my own conscience? I have to do it. I was told to by X, and X outranks me.

This is the legacy of statism and its offshoot the bureaucracy: to turn men from independent thinkers into drones who unquestioningly conform to whatever the state and its bureaucracies decree as necessary and prudent. It is intellectual, mental, and moral slavery. It is the surrendering of an individual capacity to judge for oneself what is right and what is wrong; and for individual freedom to prevail, the state must be either reined in or absolutely destroyed. Given our repeated failures to rein the state in, and to prevent its continual and egregious overreach and abuse, it is perhaps time to come to the conclusion that the state in its current form is fundamentally incompatible with free and open societies whose members wish to have liberty of life, person, and property.

When the Pike Committee reviewed the assorted and sundry violations of the CIA, its final report reached the conclusion that the CIA was never out of control. In point of fact, the Pike Committee’s final report found the following: "All evidence in hand suggests that the CIA, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (The Pike Report, p. 189)." The simple truth is that the narrative the state would have us all believing is that individuals within bureaucracies simply go rogue and do their own thing, but the facts do not bear this out. The evidence is quite clear, when we have been able to attain the evidence, that the state has an open policy of violating its own laws, of trampling the limitations placed upon offices by the Constitution, and of functioning with a blatant and total disregard for any limitation upon its authority and action by the Constitution and the laws its officers and elected officials are sworn to uphold.

In place of order and responsibility, stability and decency, we have institutions who promote the disorder, instability, and indecency throughout their own territories and the world at large, and who then discharge themselves from culpability by claiming sovereign immunity after the fact. That’s right, sovereign immunity. Sovereign immunity which essentially gives the state and its bureaucracies immunity, and with it, carte blanche to do as they please without regard for the letter, spirit, or limitations placed upon states by the law.

Take Section 223 of the Patriot Act, which essentially exempts the U.S. government from civil liability for illegal wiretaps, intentional or otherwise. The case of Jewel, et al v. National Security Agency is essentially an attempt by the plaintiffs to file suit against the aforementioned defendants because there was an intentional violation of U.S. law committed when the government wiretapped and obtained "the domestic and international communications content of millions of ordinary Americans" which included "the phone calls, emails, instant messages, text messages, web communications and other communications, both international and domestic, of practically every American who uses the phone system or the Internet, including Plaintiffs and class members, in an unprecedented suspicionless general search through the nation’s communications networks (http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/jewel/jewel.complaint.pdf)."

The Patriot Act did not exempt the government from such suspicionless searches, even in the most broad reading of Section 223 imaginable. The Bush Administration did not bother claiming that it did. Under every prior reading of the law imaginable, it was conceded that such broad searches were not legal or permissible under the law. Enter the Obama Administration, which claimed the even when the government engages in intentionally illegal wiretaps which clearly violate U.S. law and the Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. citizens, the U.S. government retains sovereign immunity from civil suits under Section 223 of the Patriot Act, a position which would grant to the government full and total immunity from any civil challenge to its actions under any surveillance statute ever passed (and likely any surveillance statutes passed in the future as well).

The net effect is that the government is no longer limited in what it may do, but is instead free to act unilaterally as it pleases without regards to a citizen’s right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. In other words, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted where cyberspace and telecommunications are concerned, and if you don’t like it, you have no legal recourse to pursue a challenge of your government’s abuses. The idea of limited government is just that: an idea with no intellectual concreteness or real world currency whatsoever. The state wins, totally and completely, and you as an individual have no assurance of privacy in your internet or telephone communications whatsoever. Your phone calls are monitored, recorded, and mined. Your internet travels are documented and recorded, retained in vast data mines for future perusal. Whatever you discuss is subject to the knowledge of the state, and their discretion determines how your communications may be used in any court proceedings that may arise. You may be able to challenge the admissibility of such evidence, but the trend of precedent tends to indicate that you will lose any challenge.

This is the logical result and the historical tendency of the state: to be initially established to promote individual freedoms and liberties, and to eventually implode those liberties to ensure its own perpetuation and expanded power. The legal inconsistencies of the state, whether in its own violation and wanton disregard of the very contracts and treaties it enters into, or its blatant ignorance of basic differences among the people it tries to incorporate into one country, ensures that states will divide painfully over time, proliferating into ever smaller fragmenting and schisms over time. The rise of ever more treaties, compacts, accords, and agreements does not change the fact that the number of states has risen over time, and this logically entails a splitting of states, often with violent civil disturbances in accompaniment.

The erecting and establishing of myth cannot interfere with the inevitable clash of absolutes which will occur between the true and false: states inevitably meet their end when the bill comes due. The great flaw of human history is that we as individuals pretend that more states can correct or remedy the flaws of the states which came before. The state can have its positive and affirming purposes, insofar as we commonly agree to limit it to specific roles like defense, the providing and maintaining of infrastructure, and the establishment of courts which we may appeal to on matters of legal significance such as crimes, torts, and the enforcement of contracts. But the greater the role of the state, the more expansive the responsibilities it is handed, the greater the likelihood of abuse becomes and the myths which serve to gloss over or cover the failings of the state will only multiply over time.