Of Course It's a Gang! (Or "Why Anarchy Fails, Pt. 1138")

There is one thing that the anarchists (the an-caps, if you most be specific) get right it is this: "government" is a gang.

Well fucking duh. The very reason that "legitimacy" is a thing is due to the very real perception of syndicates and governments only differing based on (a) access to Central Bank IOUs ("currency") backed by nothing and (b) the ability to nuke the fuck out of others as a tool of policy enforcement.

I've said it more than once: The only rules that exist are those that are enforced.

Gangs are very basic mechanisms for doing just that: setting rules upon a population within an area, and then enforcing those rules. It's one step up from the family as a model of government; you have an executive, a chain of command, revenue generation, and use of force to establish and maintain the dominant position therein. The "law" is what the shot-callers say it is, enforced by those who have sufficient power to make it so, and the people pay up because it's better than the alternative.

That is a government. Add recognizable turf, and you have a state.

And now you have the most fundamental reason for both how and why all forms of anarchy are nothing but shitshow failures. History records that, inevitably, someone becomes a shot-caller and forms a gang around them; they become the government if they are success in establishing and maintaining dominance in an area.

Every form of government builds off the Family or the Gang, and you're better off using the Family as your model if you have a choice. That, at the least, has a built-in justification for executive benevolence towards subordinates that--ideally--leads to Noblesse Oblige and a healthy regime of Patron-Client relationships, customized for the specifics of a given nation and country.

So, since the State is inevitable, the smart thing to do is to stop whining about it and instead to ensure that it remains a machine under your control and not a cancerous vampire sucking the blood out of one and all. Pick your own damn cotton, ignore rules that can't or won't be enforced, and kill everyone that tries to make you their bitch. That's as close to anarchy as Natural Law allows.