People respond to incentives. This is the case regardless of how the politico-economic system in which we live and work is structured. In an important sense, then, we are never outside of the market, because we can never successfully abstract human social and economic dynamics from this fundamental truth that people are sensitive to incentives. Thus, if we propose increased government involvement in the economy or in a particular sector of it, we should consider that government actors are, no more or less than non-government actors, bound to respond to incentives.
Accordingly, we should ask whether we have improved the overall organization and structure of the incentives at play by increasing the state’s role. To answer this question requires an understanding of the qualities that define the state, that make it different from other human institutions. Fundamentally, the state is a behavior, and that behavior is predicated upon violence.
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