dedicated to all libertarians
What is a state? A state is a mental construct. To overcome it, it must be overcome mentally. What is the content of this construct? It is not coincidental that terms like state, status, stasis, etc., share the same root. In the broadest and least suspicious sense, a state is a status between people. It is a stabilized relation. People relate to each other in a fixed, recognizeable, expected, repeatable manner. All involved parties have to imagine that state, and imagine that the other party imagines it in the same way as they do and so on. It stabilizes through feedbacks: Each side observes the actions of the other side and may imply a common idea of a state.
What could such a state consist of? In the first place, it is the idea of yours and mine. This is the first, original state - a common boundary mutually limiting spheres of action. Why do we want to limit our spheres of action? Not only do we want to, but we have to. Because of the scarcity of means. There are far more ends than means to achieve them. Before such limits, there is no state, only chaos, mistrust, noncommunication, noncoordination. Bellum omnium contra omnes.
Recap this: The original state is not a third actor imposing a status, but is a status or relationship between different parties. It is a temporary exit from a conflict in order to move on and develop. In the initial step out of chaos, there is no possibility of a third side; it always emerges later, is a latecomer, and is never an absolute necessity for anything. Of course, there is some form of fixation. That is the whole point of leaving the jungle. Every structure is fixation, as it differs from the noise, the nonstructure. Noise means total disintegration, a death in heat. A state is dead, as well, when it ceases to change and move at all, when it becomes entirely frozen.
Life needs a certain range of temperatures to allow blood to flow through the veins, to transport information through the body, to perturb its environment, and to adapt to perturbations in its environment. Life needs both, change and conservation, shock and consolidation. Both require contested, scarce energy. New structure can only be created at the cost of other structure. Only decay is free, without costs, because it is optionless in the grand scheme of things. Every day we irretrievably lose usable energy, structure, order. We get old. We decay. We die. This is the second law of thermodynamics. The ever growing entropy. The merciless arrow of time. Every state comes to its end one day.
If you profit from a state, you will have little motivation to end it, on the contrary. You will expend precious energy to maintain it. A somewhat fixed status between people is not a bad thing per se. But it can be considered bad, exploitative, or at least disadvantageous by one side or the other. There are always different perspectives on a state. Why does the party that feels oppressed or disadvantaged live on in such a state? Because it is still the best state within the reach of their known means and possibilities. If a revolution is considered too costly, it will not happen. Otherwise, they would revolt and try to overcome the bad state and establish a new state that is supposedly more favorable to them, with the probable result that this new state is a state of oppression of the former oppressors.
The State
There is a point at which an initially mutually benefical state turns into the State. Every state or status has this tendency to degenerate over time into the State. Why the capitalization? In an analog manner, there is the idea to distinguish between Democracy(capital D) and democracy(small d).1 The small-d democracy is the democracy of the ideal market, while the capital-d Democracy is essentially the majority rule. Every monetary unit spent counts and matters in a market to some degree. There is no majority rule here, but separation in different baskets and niches is possible and likely. There are, so to speak, many bilateral states in the parallel. Therefore, a lot more states have a chance to materialize, to matter, to manifest a individual will. Well, as every state has its costs, the diversity of many states in parallel comes with the cost of accumulation and scale. Some qualities require a tremendous quantity for their realization.
The State is such a massive, holistic decision artifact of sheer quantity. It is the decision en bloc, beyond millions of heads. It is a state transformed into the pure hypostasis: a state that seems to be a creature of its own, a monster, a leviathan above them. A single individual's will is mostly in vain on the political arena of such Uberstate. Only the fewest have significant political influence to change the course of the State as a whole.
The question is not whether you should overcome a particular state, but whether you will be able to do so, and whether you are willing to bear the necessary risks and costs. In most cases you will not. The Uberstate is an enormous fixation that seems almost impossible to break. If they think you are a danger to the State, they will hinder you, stop you, silence you, punish you, and eventually kill you to make it as costly as possible to overcome their preferred state in the Gestalt of the State. Even the most liberal state can turn into a hell on earth when it feels its very existence is threatened.
The “minimal” State
Among libertarians, there is the idea of reducing the State to what is perceived as its bare necessity, to a “minimal state”. But every state is minimal in that sense, that only the necessary effort is made. You can try to define or “constitute” a set of state responsibilities or functions, but it will not be fundamentally different from any other state. It brings all the problems and tendencies towards degeneration into the State.
Why should the State be the only producer of security2? Why should it be limited to that? The so called problem of the “public good” could be extended to anything and everything. And it will be. Again and again. No constitution could prevent the inflation or change of a state, only powerful opposition would do.
Conclusion
The weakness of typical libertarianism lies in a black-and-white thinking. Thus it remains weak in persuading and converting others. However, there is a broad continuum between the original chaos and the State in its final stage. Practical libertarianism lies somewhere in between.
You may be able to overcome a particular state, but you cannot eliminate all motivations and intentions to establish states per se. It would be futile. Fixation is part of life. Property is one such fixation. Property is a relation and as such it is an established state. Property is not established by being the first to occupy a part of this world alone. That is mere possession and only a fixed idea of yours. In order for your propertarian idea to have a lasting impact, you must successfully exclude every latecomer, again and again, i.e. you must bear the cost of exclusion. Property is created in the moment, when other parties begin to respect a boundary, when you have made it too costly for them to tear down “your” fence, when a state has been emerged between you and them.
In short, the state per se, the need to establish a state between people only “withers away” when there is no more conflict. But as long as there is scarcity, there is conflict.
https://www.panarchy.org/anonymous/democracy.1962.html
s. Gustave de Molinari, The Production of Security