States arose with agriculture, around the same time as slavery. When states were monarchies, it was relatively obvious that the institution existed – like slavery – to separate people into two classes. One that produced, and another one that consumed.
This fact became intolerable, and people demanded to have a say in how the state was run. They did not imagine that states, as such, were the problem, but simply that they were run by monarchs. They could no longer imagine forms of organisation that did not involve state, but really states are the anomaly. Throughout most of history there were none. They are a logical error predicated on misunderstanding of economics.
Economics demonstrates that people and institutions tend to act as they are incentivized to behave.
Companies gain wealth from providing goods and services for money, the consumer is king and puts them out of business if they don’t deliver the goods. Charities have limited resources and must allocate them effectively if they are to do well in league tables. Even then there is still corruption.
The government is simply not incentivized to solve problems. First, they get paid whether they do a good job or not. Second, they monopolize services so they can’t compare their performance to other strategies and adopt other people’s innovations.
Damningly, the government derives its power from people being poor because the pretext for every government program is “how will the poor get xyz if the government does not provide it”.
If poor people become rich they will just do what middle class people do which is take their kids of out public schools and put them in better private schools, take out health insurance so they don’t need to rely on poorer nhs hospitals, there will be less crime so less need for police, and no poor people to go in the army and fight endless wars in the Middle East. With the diminishing need for social programs because people are rich enough to solve their own local issues, there will be less need for social workers and other social services. Millions of government bureaucrats will no longer be necessary. How can the government even make them redundant given that A) they represent a huge voting block? and B) they are heavily unionized.
Solving problems reduces the need for government and no one puts themselves out of a need for a job unless they are forced to. The incentive structures are such that government are doomed to fail and basically everything that economic theory predicts you will find from government is exactly what you see the results to be. More and more dependence, less self-sufficiency, people bribed with public funds to support this or that policy, and driven to hatred of one another.
Source: Seeing Not Seen – Governments Are Not Incentivized to Solve Problems