Minarchism in Pardes

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Kohen Institute 2013 Watchman Index of Pardes.
  Minarchistic states     Minarchies

Minarchism in Pardes refers to the prevalence of nation-states, political parties, ideologies, institutions, and public figures in and throughout Pardes that align with, support, are sympathetic with, and/or actively advocate minarchism and the concept of the night-watchman state, or similar political philosophies.

In contemporary Pardes, the nations of Alleghania, the Western Confederacy, the Empire of Belhavia, and the United Republic of Emmeria are considered to be the most minarchistic, with political climates, political parties, and histories of being conducive to, or outright proclaimed as, "minarchist".

Several other countries, such as Estovnia, Valinor, and Tippercommon, are considered partially "minarchistic" but have important deviations from the political philosophy that theorists and thinkers on the topic often categorize them as "borderline minarchist," or just falling short of skewing close enough towards the Night-Watchman State model.

Political Philosophy

Minarchism is a political philosophy that places the Non-Aggression Principle as the fundamental principle of organized human society, and that posits that a minimalist state that protects this value is the only legitimate polity. Pursuant to this end, the state's sole function is the protection of individuals from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud.

To accomplish this, the state may consist of institutions such as a military, law enforcement, and a judiciary. In some strains of thought, other legitimate state bodies include a legislature, chief executive, and related security apparatuses such as prisons and fire departments.

Origins

Pardesian Minarchism arose in 18th century Alleghania as an intellectual reaction and recognition of the history of rugged individualism and frontier experience that the early Alleghanian settlers and colonialists acclimated to. As the Age of Enlightenment spread from its first theorists in Arthurista across the Belfrasian world in the late 18th and early 19th century, early classical liberal and protolibertarian thinkers and writers in the Golden Circle of Alloquia, as Alleghania was known then, developed early minarchist thought.

Through intellectual, trade, economic, and political ties, minarchist thought spread along with the emergence and growing acceptance of classical liberalism in mostly Western Pardes. The political philosophy had its most readily-adopted and earliest impact outside of Alleghania in the Western Confederal States. Later, it gained a foothold in Belhavia and Emmeria in the early-to-mid 1800s.

Minarchism in Pardes Today

"Pure" Minarchist Model

Alleghania is considered with universal unanimity among libertarian theorists and analysts as the closest real-life implementation of the Night-Watchman State and a developed, entrenched minarchistic national culture. The Alleghanian system has an extremely small and limited Confederal (national) government, supported by an overwhelming political, cultural, and social consensus that emphasizes the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) as the first value of Alleghanian society.

Political power is limited, and diffused by a system of checks and balances both between the branches of the Confederal government and between the various states, compacts, and localities.

Social liberalism and economic laissez faire conservatism undergird a fiercely individualist, localist, and decentralized nation.

The Western Confederacy, though with its own history among the former centralizing monarchies and Great Powers of western Pardes, developed a culture of firm individualism and localism as well, both before the Western bid for independence as well as afterword.

Today, the Western Republic shares a similar model to the Alleghanian one.

Belhavian Model

Belhavian minarchism emerged from a synthesis between the ascendant classical liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries and Jewish social conservatism.

While Belhavia approaches Alleghania in terms of its limited state interference in the free market and small bureaucracy, its policy of state-enforced social conservatism is a deviation from minarchist thought, which by the nature of the NAP, imbibes it with socially liberal values. The so-called "White Terror laws", which outlaw homosexuality and prohibit the advocacy of certain radical political ideologies, among other restrictions, embody this longstanding tradition of social and cultural conservatism.

Belhavians reconciled this philosophical challenge by adopting in the late 19th century the policy of voluntary self-exile. At age 18, or if charged under the White Terror laws, a person may choose to renounce his citizenship, pay a fine, and be deported, with strict limits on visitation allowances.

This compromise - strong economic freedom paired with state-enforced social conservatism but with an "escape hatch" to respect the NAP - has categorized Belhavia as a minarchy. While most libertarians and minarchists agree with this categorization, a small minority regard the Empire as "borderline minarchistic," at best, for failing to be thoroughly socially liberal.

Emmerian Model

In the reverse of the Belhavian model, Emmerian minarchism has been characterized by a fairly strong social liberal tradition married to a larger state-directed economic interventionism, compared relatively to its fellow neoliberal peers such as Alleghania, the Western States, and Belhavia.

Emmerians generally justify their slight deviation from the economic models of the other minarchies by pointing to their history of being strongly influenced by their neighbors, such as Erucia and Eslovakia, all of which developed and have as their mainstream economic populist and progressive political cultures.

Most libertarians note that even with this comparatively-larger economic interventionism by the Emmerian state, the United Republic's size and scope of government is vastly smaller and more limited than most of its fellow Pardesi countries. Still, some radical minarchist and anarcho-capitalists, mainly in Alleghania, do not recognize Emmeria as a minarchy until it downsizes its state footprint into the private economy even further.

Contemporary Geopolitics

Although countries such as Belhavia, Emmeria, and Estovnia had minarchist roots, a resurgence in their domestic politics away from left-Keynesianism and towards minarchy and neoliberalism emerged in the middle-to-late Pardesi cold war in the late 1970s and 1980s in the so-called Neoliberal Revolution (also known as the Blue Wave of the 1980s).

The political invigoration of minarchistic conservative political parties in these countries enabled them to win elections and majority governments, where they progressively dismantled their large public sectors throughout the 1980s (Belhavia and Emmeria) and 1990s (Estovnia).