I like to use the ammunition provided by the statists themselves (or those who take states for granted) that discredits their own statism. For example, there is the “Failed States Index.”
How many states are there in the world, and how many are failures or leaning toward failure, according to the people who devised this index? They assess 177 states. Of these, 124 are in the troubled categories (ALERT and WARNING). That’s 70 percent! Here we have a great experiment at one point in time. We have 177 trials of the state as a way to organize, and we have 124 failed or failing or approaching failure. Among the Moderate and Sustainable categories (non-failed states) we have such wonderful states as Greece and Spain.
If instead we look at the performance of states across time, a century or two, we find huge and endemic failures almost everywhere we look in major countries: Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, China, many eastern European countries, and even the United States (if we count, for example, the Civil War as evidence of a gigantic failure). The U.S. has held together by force, not law. Is that what a non-failed state is supposed to mean? Many European states have failed time and again, as several world wars and hyperinflations demonstrate. Their current financial manipulations are new evidence of their failure, as are their high rates of unemployment.
5:40 pm on June 16, 2012
