Where does the "state" end and "us" begin?
Discussion
Right here bro.
When we think the state should be handling things, we don't help each other so much. When we think it's just us, we take care of each other more 🥰
The state ends where individual natural rights begin.
As far as I know, this is all for me, within natural law as I perceive it to be.
The humans make no sense.
Natural law isn’t subject to personal perception, it exists independently of what any individual thinks it should be. Just like gravity works regardless of your beliefs about physics.
We do not all agree on the limits of natural law. Gravity included.
Disagreement about natural law doesn’t make it subjective, it just shows we’re fallible humans trying to understand objective truths.
But here’s the thing: if natural law is merely personal preference, then your view carries no more weight than mine, or even someone who wants to harm you. The Constitution was built on the idea that some principles of justice actually exist and are worth defending together, not just accommodating everyone’s opinions.
We can reason toward these truths even when we disagree about the details.
> "The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else."
Frédéric Bastiat
From James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: The state is a hegemonic imposition upon a domain (a forest or city) to make it _legible_ (measurable and understandable by a third party)
My interpretation: the state is a framework created by a group of individuals, in a similar sense that we all have frameworks for how we navigate our world and local communities. The difference, however, is that their framework is essentially applied to a domain that they're not embedded in. Doing so creates a mentality of "us" and "other", whether its the local community, or the state that thinks its locals are "others" that need to be managed and any deviations from its expectations are self reinforcing to apply their own framework more strongly.