LanceD

I think we can use examples from recent history as well as the present day to shed some light on this topic. If we investigate our most recent major conflicts, the World Wars, we see examples of two distinct causes of war. The first World War was fought by states that were largely economically independent. While there certainly was trade among the European nations, no nation was crippled economically by losing this trade and thus was able to fight a war with it's neighbors. This allowed the typical nonsense fueled by the states to take hold, nationalism, dehumanizing of the "enemy", etc to fuel the conflict. World War II was of a different sort, it was an example of an unbalanced distribution of power. It was a situation where nations that were utterly dependent were at the same time less powerful then those they depended on. Japan was dependent on the US for oil, Germany was held down by the treaties that ended WWI and buried in an economic hole the victors of the past conflict would never let them out of and I think we all know the rest of the story there. Jumping ahead to present day, while we still have an abundance of conflict we have not had a major war since WWII. This is largely due to globalization of the world's economy. All of the nation's world powers are utterly reliant on each other. The US depends on China for manufacturing cheap goods (this reliance is much more important then that sounds but I won't go into detail how this supports the US' fiat currency we have and the Fed), while China depends on the flow of cash from the US to maintain their absurd levels of economic growth. On the other side of the world Europe is utterly dependent on Russian oil, while Russia needs the flow of Euro's coming in to prop up their failed democracy. This has created a situation similar to that with nuclear weapons and the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, starting a war with any of the other world powers would assure economic devastation. I would also argue that the present day conflicts that are going on, mostly in the Middle East, further support this idea. While the world markets need oil out of the middle east the conflicts arise out of an unbalanced distribution of power. These nations have the oil the world needs, but they do not have the ability to defend themselves. This creates a situation where it is more beneficial for the world powers to just move in and take it, rather then trade for it on equal terms. So I would conclude that if a situation were created where arms were more evenly distributed and a balance of power could be reached, it would always be more beneficial for groups of people to trade for the things they can't supply for themselves, rather then take it by force.

I know less about how the Greek government actually functioned then the Roman republic. However this seems to make some sense. Also the United States being Center Right totally agrees with your idea. We are mostly the Roman Empire with a growing bit of Greek stuff going on lol.

Ron Paul admits he was never going to achieve a political solution. He was spreading his message and using the campaigns as a bully pulpit, and it worked very well.

ILO I suspect what you want is simply a "community" and not a government. In a free society you would inevitably get groups of people who pooled their resources in order to provide the group services that would be difficult to get on your own. Since such an arrangement would be completely voluntary it could provide certain services to a community, similar to a government, except without all the stealing and guns to people's heads.