I’ve been having a lot of fun lately thinking about the boundaries between a coercive state and a voluntary government. A recent article by Wanjiru Njoya over at the Mises Institute threw me into a bit of a rabbit hole and I thought I’d set down some of my thoughts in a video.
In this video, I’m talking about what makes a nation and how the size of a nation can be affected by the power of the coercive state that rules it. My thesis is that a nation’s size depends on how many issues the state takes a side. Powerful states fragment their internal nations ever smaller because disagreement leads to mutually exclusive state actions.
By contrast, in a limited state that does very little, larger and more diverse groups of people can integrate themselves into effective nations.
However, since every coercive state has a tendency to grow and become more powerful, coercive systems are inherently unstable. Even if the state starts out serving one nation, eventually that state will start to pick sides where it didn’t before, splitting the nations up as they try to make the state serve them over others.
Works cited:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/socialisms-very-quiet-revolution
https://www.tsowell.com/spquestc.html
https://mises.org/mises-daily/folly-national-unity