On this day, 248 years ago, Americans declared independence from Great Britain in a bold act of defiance which put their individual lives at risk. But if something is so important that you can become willing to risk your life for it, then it deserves analysis.
Image from: https://www.loc.gov/free-to-use/flags-and-symbols/
Dependence?
When couples have children, then those children are properly dependent upon their parents for the first period of their lives as human beings. There is a dependence there, but it is proper and good, and it tends to work out well. As the children grow, a diminishing of that dependence on their parents is also proper and good.
This means that different levels of dependence will be proper and good, based on different contexts. The question then turns to when, if ever, it is proper and good for adult human beings to be dependent on, or independent from, other adult human beings. Full independence can sometimes mean that you are not answerable to others.
On the world stage, it is proper and good for nations to remain fully independent, remaining in a state of anarchy with one another. But within national borders, it is good to have an indifferent arbiter of dispute and conflicts — a single judicial system — so that when people violate the rights of others, there is terminable recourse.
Prior to singular, indifferent judicial systems, human beings lived under tribal law, where there was no terminable recourse — and conflicts resulted in violence, which results in retaliatory violence (blood feuds), as exemplified best by the fact that 44% of adult males of the Yanomamo Indians from the Amazon were found to be murderers:
Instead of 44% of us turning into murderers, and 30% of us dying from murder — which is what you get when you do not have a singular, indifferent judicial system — we have advanced to the point where murderers do not represent anywhere near even 1% of society, and the people have less than a 1-in-10,000 chance to be murdered:
But in order for us to get a singular, indifferent judicial system requires minarchy (“small government”) — a dispute/conflict resolution process which is the same for everyone.
While it is proper for nations to remain in a state of anarchy with one another (international anarchy), it is proper for there to be singular, but small, government inside of the borders of each nation (intra-national minarchy). Nations need independence from each other, but citizens depend on singular, indifferent justice.
But we also need for the government to be as small as it can be, so that, whatever it is that can be accomplished with free enterprise, is accomplished with free enterprise.
Reference
[when you don’t have any government, almost half of men become murderers] — Chagnon NA. Life histories, blood revenge, and warfare in a tribal population. Science. 1988 Feb 26;239(4843):985-92. doi: 10.1126/science.239.4843.985. PMID: 17815700. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17815700/