For one thing, the state is emergent from society. It is not imposed by some God, as in the presumed, “divine right of kings.”
Also the more people there are the greater the pressure gets. It’s like trees out in the open get to spread their branches out as far as they can and the earliest branches get to be the biggest, yet trees in the forest tend to abort the lower branches and just grow higher. Like people in cities tend to become quite hierarchal. The problem is that’s simple physics and you can’t beat physics, but you can try to understand physics and better adapt to it. We grow in the soil we are in, not some ideal we think we deserve.
So yes, government is a centralizing function to a community, like the nervous system is to the body and it does tend to grow bureaucratic, but that’s a function of the system aging, as the innovators giving way to the managers and what originally seemed free and unfettered gets to be a rut. Another physical dynamic. Eventually though, these top heavy systems break down, as they hollow out their foundations and external forces push them over. Remember Soviet communism did implode.
Reality is that dynamic between bottom up energies and top down pressures, but if you can only resort to slogans as a response, you are not one of those engaged in dynamic thinking, just following a rut that is well travelled. Life will always be handing us problems to solve and some will succeed and others will fail. Trial and error.
Also I argue our state is fairly subordinate to the financial system and the extent to which it predates on the community through its control of the medium by which the community and the markets function, so it uses the state to enable and enforce this control. Banking has lost sight of the fact it serves a function to the community, in order to be part of it. It is having its “Let them eat cake.” moment.
