 In Greek myth, Sisyphus was punished in Hades by having to eternally push a boulder up to the summit of a hill, only to have it roll down again each time and to have to start over. This is an apt representation of the hopelessness of state revolution and reform, as can be revealed by bringing together the insights of two great libertarian anarchist scholars, Crisis and Leviathan. In one of the most justly celebrated contributions to the analysis of the state, Robert Higgs elaborated and empirically illustrated how public emergencies, including the manufactured variety, especially war-related emergencies, are easily used by states to excuse great expansions of tyrannical domestic power. Even if the emergency powers are leveled down after the crisis passes, they almost never go all the way down to pre-crisis levels. Thus with every passing crisis, the state accumulates ever more power. Higgs calls this the Ratchet Effect. Therefore the more warlike and imperialistic, externally tyrannical, and thus more emergency inducing, is a state, the more it will tend to become internally tyrannical. Higgs's definitive book on this subject is titled Crisis and Leviathan. We may call this insight the Crisis and Leviathan Thesis, CLT. See for example how especially the world wars and the war on terror led to huge domestic expansions of US federal power and curtailments of American liberties. This thesis logically implies it's obverse. Less belligerent states will tend to have fewer emergencies, and with fewer emergencies the state will be less able to swell itself domestically, and may even shrink. See for example how the Russian economy was able to liberalise and grow after Moscow let go of its empire and dropped its side of the Cold War, even though the US and NATO never really reciprocated. A complication concerning this thesis is that belligerent states also export crisis to the lands targeted by their belligerents. Targeted states can use the chronic state of crisis that results from such belligerents to easily whip up a bunker mentality among the populace, and thus to shore up and grow its own power. See for example the otherwise seemingly bizarre longevity of horribly oppressive communist regimes in Russia, Cuba and North Korea under constant American threats and sanctions, especially as contrasted to the rapid reforms in communist China and Vietnam after the US eased its antagonistic and murderous policies towards those countries. It is probably no coincidence that the Russians abandoned their communist regime not during Reagan's early saber-rattling phase, but only after the oft-forgotten US-Russia detente initiated under Reagan and Thatcher was underway. The Paradox of Imperialism Less famous than the Higgs thesis, but equally true, is an insight of Hans-Hermann Hopper, who elaborated and empirically illustrated how less domestically, internally tyrannical states will tend to become more war-like and imperialistic. This is because the vastly greater productivity of a populace with a high degree of liberty makes for much greater per capita tax revenue and a much wealthier state. Such a state will therefore have far more ability to project power abroad. Hopper referred to this as the Paradox of Imperialism and we may call it the Paradox of Imperialism thesis, P.I.T. See, for example, how the quintessential Lands of the Free, Great Britain and the United States, also became the homes of the inappropriately brave, belligerent. In other words, they have been in their heydays the greatest, most expansionist empires. Even the Deregist Nazis supported their aggression by expending the wealth and manpower that Germany built up in its liberalised industrialist years. The obverse this coin is true as well. More domestically, internally tyrannical states will tend to be economic basket cases that are less able to afford or competently undertake foreign expansionism. See, for example, how the Deregist Soviet Union was always on its back foot vis-à-vis the US throughout the Cold War. Since the ideology of its own subject is the only other chief constraint on state power and since people are chiefly concerned with their own plight and very little with the plight of foreigners, it is generally only bankruptcy that will seriously limit foreign belligerence. This has been abundantly illustrated by history. When was the last time an economically thriving empire voluntarily contracted? Even the British Empire's splendid isolation phase was at best a slowdown in expansionism, if that and not a contraction. The paradox of imperialism debunks the myth of minicism. Ask a Cherokee woman on the trail of tears or a Chinese man bleeding out in the midst of the opium war about America's or Britain's era of limited government. With the state it's always all something of a wash. You tend to either get relatively free Americans or turn at the mass starving with sanctions and mass slaughtering Iraqis in what amounts to a double decade campaign of genocide or enslaved North Koreans leaving the Iraqis alone. The devil will have his due one place or another. Higgs meets Hopper, the cycle of the state. These theses of Higgs, CLT and Hopper, PIT, if accepted and when joined imply a cycle of the state. Light internal statism makes for heavy external statism, PIT, which makes for heavy internal statism, CLT, which makes for light external statism, PIT obverse, which makes for light internal statism, CLT obverse, and around we go. Now this isn't some kind of iron law of state evolution. The Higgs and Hopper theses only deal with Ceteris Paribus tendencies. Other factors always play a role and may counteract these tendencies, but the tendencies are real and knowable through reasoned incentive analysis. The cycle of the state shows the Sisyphean hopelessness of state revolution and reform. Ideological change can reform a state domestically, but internal reforms tend to feed a state's external belligerence, which generally will eventually reverse the reforms anyway, and a state will almost never turn away from belligerence, unless it is forced to by the dearth it imposes on itself when it is imprudently hard and exacting on its human livestock. There can be no stable victory in the battle for limiting the state through revolution and reform, and therefore the state cannot be progressively reformed away, whether by an existing regime or a new post-revolutionary one. The only winning move against the state is not to play its game. The only way to break the cycle of the state is to secede from it. Exactly how to do that is a matter for another essay, but it does not involve warfare or any other kind of aggression. Put down his boulder, walk away from his hill, and get the hell out of Hades.