The Bactra Review The Cost of
Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes
There have been stateless societies which recognized and implemented
fairly complex systems of rights. A far from comprehensive list would include
medieval Iceland, the pre-conquest Native Americans living around Puget Sound
(who even had versions of intellectual property rights), the Atlas Berbers, and
the Pashtuns. (The last two were often formally claimed as part of various
states, but were effectively self-governing through this century.) The basic
point holds, however, since they had other institutional means of paying for
rights, which would not transfer well to modern conditions (the Berbers and the
Pashtuns relied, in part, on a military participation ratio of nearly 1), and
in any case nobody (pace the anarchists, communist and capitalist) has
come up with plausible alternatives to states for modern conditions.