The problem with Bastiat's analysis is that civilization is a cartel, and government is our cartel enforcer. We have thus delegated power to the state that we have not retained for ourselves. If we did retain those powers, the cartel could not function, and we would be forced to revert to Nash equilibrium strategies rather than maximized outcomes.
The law is not a pooling of resources. It is a compact wherein everyone holds the same blade to everyone's throats, so that everyone will behave in a manner that benefits the whole, rather than out of pure self-interest. Thus, a government may lawfully do those things that individuals have given up as a condition of maintaining good standing in the cartel.
The enforcer needs to be exactly as monstrous as is required to discourage cartel defections.
As you might expect, this leads to a host of real and potential problems with governments, but those problems have a different root cause than the state acting outside the authority of natural law, and are practically insurmountable for quite different reasons.
Government derives its authority from being a better-than-random strategy in a massive, never-ending game wherein players are continually chosen at random to participate in a Prisoner's Dilemma. Government provides an incentive to consistently cooperate rather than defect. Other winning strategies may exist. Some of them may even produce better overall scores. We allow government to exist and direct certain aspects of our lives because, on average, it makes us richer in the long run. Or it makes enough of us richer that we are prepared to gamble, to try to be one of them.
One of the biggest problems is not being able to know for certain whether the government player is defecting against us in the metagame, even as we cooperate. How do we prove mathematically whether the state really is acting in the best interests of all of its people, treating each of them equally, or not?
The law is not a pooling of resources. It is a compact wherein everyone holds the same blade to everyone's throats, so that everyone will behave in a manner that benefits the whole, rather than out of pure self-interest. Thus, a government may lawfully do those things that individuals have given up as a condition of maintaining good standing in the cartel.
The enforcer needs to be exactly as monstrous as is required to discourage cartel defections.
As you might expect, this leads to a host of real and potential problems with governments, but those problems have a different root cause than the state acting outside the authority of natural law, and are practically insurmountable for quite different reasons.
Government derives its authority from being a better-than-random strategy in a massive, never-ending game wherein players are continually chosen at random to participate in a Prisoner's Dilemma. Government provides an incentive to consistently cooperate rather than defect. Other winning strategies may exist. Some of them may even produce better overall scores. We allow government to exist and direct certain aspects of our lives because, on average, it makes us richer in the long run. Or it makes enough of us richer that we are prepared to gamble, to try to be one of them.
One of the biggest problems is not being able to know for certain whether the government player is defecting against us in the metagame, even as we cooperate. How do we prove mathematically whether the state really is acting in the best interests of all of its people, treating each of them equally, or not?