See, for example, how the quintessential “Lands of the Free” (Great Britain and the U.S.) also became the “Homes of the Inappropriately Brave (Belligerent)”; in other words, they have been, in their heydays, the greatest, most expansionist empires. Even the dirigiste Nazis supported their aggression by expending the wealth and manpower that Germany built up in its liberalized industrialist years.

The obverse of this coin is true as well. More domestically (internally) tyrannical states will tend to be economic basket cases that are less able to afford or competently undertake foreign expansionism. See, for example, how the dirigiste Soviet Union was always on its back foot vis-à-vis the U.S. throughout the Cold War. Since the ideology of its own subjects is the only other chief constraint on state power, and since people are chiefly concerned with their own plight, and very little with the plight of foreigners, it is generally only bankruptcy that will seriously limit foreign belligerence. This has been abundantly illustrated by history. When was the last time an economically thriving empire voluntarily contracted? Even the British Empire’s “Splendid Isolation” phase was at best a slow-down in expansionism (if that), and not a contraction.

The Paradox of Imperialism debunks the Myth of Minarchism. Ask a Cherokee woman on the Trail of Tears or a Chinese man bleeding out in the midst of the Opium War about America’s or Britain’s “era of limited government.” With the State, it’s always all something of a wash. You tend to either get relatively free Americans alternately mass-starving (with sanctions) and mass-slaughtering Iraqis in what amounts to a double-decade campaign of genocide, or enslaved North Koreans leaving the Iraqis alone. The Devil will have his due, one place or another.

Higgs Meets Hoppe: The Cycle of the State

These theses of Higgs (CLT) and Hoppe (PIT), if accepted, and when joined, imply a Cycle of the State. Light internal statism makes for heavy external statism (PIT), which makes for heavy internal statism (CLT), which makes for light external statism (PIT-obverse), which makes for light internal statism (CLT-obverse), and around we go.

Now, this isn’t some kind of “iron law” of state evolution. The Higgs and Hoppe theses only deal with ceteris paribus tendencies. Other factors always play a role and may counteract these tendencies. But the tendencies are real and knowable through reasoned incentive analysis.

The Cycle of the State shows the Sisyphean hopelessness of state revolution and reform. Ideological change can reform a state domestically, but internal reforms tend to feed a state’s external belligerence, which generally will eventually reverse the reforms anyway. And a state will almost never turn away from belligerence unless it is forced to by the dearth it imposes on itself when it is imprudently hard and exacting on its human livestock.

There can be no stable victory in the battle for limiting the state through revolution and reform. And, therefore, the State cannot be progressively reformed away, whether by an existing regime or a new, post-revolutionary one. The only winning move against the State is not to play its game. The only way to break the Cycle of the State is to secede from it. Exactly how to do that is a matter for another essay, but spoiler alert, it does not involve warfare or any other kind of aggression.

Don’t be Sisyphus. Drop his boulder, walk away from his hill, and get the hell out of Hades.