Okay, let me start. I have been admonished by Joe Stromberg to make you aware of the fact that today is Jefferson Davis' birthday.
So, otherwise...
Will there be a cake?
I think we will have to ask Joe Stromberg if he provided the cake.
The other remark, I recommended yesterday or so, among sociologists, Stanislav Andresky and I want to, apart from his general books mentioned in particular,
This is one that is also a hilarious book that is called Sociology as Sorcery.
It makes fun, so to speak, of the sociology profession in general.
If you have not read that book, I highly recommend it.
That is something that you should read late at night before you go to bed and you will laugh yourself to sleep.
Stanislaw Andreski
and the book is called Sociology as Sorcery
a wonderful little book
That's all you need to know about sociology when you find it.
My subject today is parasitism and the origin of the state.
So far, one important element has been missing in my reconstruction, so to speak,
When we speak of the present world, we have seen what the nature of man is, we've talked about property, division of labor based on property, the development of money, capital accumulation,
law and order production and the natural order resulting out of all of this.
And now we have to come, so to speak, to the disturbing elements that developed in history.
History, those events that somehow took the natural tendencies off its path and deviated history from its natural core, so to speak.
Let me begin by reminding you why we had this tendency towards a natural order.
The fundamental insight was that division of labor and human cooperation is beneficial for all people who participate in it.
Division of labor implies higher productivity and provides mankind with a reason, so to speak, to peacefully cooperate with each other.
Otherwise, if there would not be this higher productivity associated with division of labor,
We would indeed get some sort of permanent war against each other.
Mises writes, for instance, if it were not for this higher productivity of labor based on division of labor,
Therefore, men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature.
Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies.
His craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors.
No sympathy could possibly develop under such state of affairs.
And again, because of this higher productivity, this tendency is, so to speak, not necessary that people consider themselves as enemies,
as enemies, but can consider themselves as cooperative partner, if not even friends.
And again, to hammer away on this point, let me once again briefly
I want to re-quote something that I have already quoted before in a slightly different connection,
where Mises says that if one recognizes this principle of higher productivity, of cooperation based on division of labor,
If one recognizes a principle which results in the union of all Germans or all proletarians and all forms of special nations, races or classes out of individuals, then this principle cannot be proved to be effective only within the collective groups.
The Anti-Liberal Social Theories skim over the problem by confining themselves to the assumption that the solidarity of interests within the group is so self-evident as to be accepted without further discussion and by taking pains only to prove the existence of the conflict of interests between groups.
and the Necessity of Conflict as the sole dynamic force of historical development.
But if war is to be the father of all things, the fruitful source of historical progress,
it is difficult to see why its fruitful activity should be restricted within states, nations, races and classes.
If nature needs war, why not the war of all against all, and why merely the war of all groups against all groups?
Now, at this point, before I come to my genuine subject here, let me make you aware of the fact that, of course,
This principle that people can cooperate peacefully with each other to their own advantage
does not necessarily mean that all groups have to live in immediate neighborhood with each other.
That is, even if people so to speak dislike each other,
Recall, if people hate each other for various other reasons, then they can still peacefully cooperate with each other from some sort of distance.
That is, to accept the principle of peaceful cooperation does not at all imply the advocacy, for instance, of multicultural societies.
Multicultural societies might indeed, and likely will be, extremely dangerous institutions because people who are ethnically different, culturally different, do not necessarily like each other very much, but from a distance, from a physical distance, again, there is this overriding solidarity of mankind as a whole,
We can all benefit from each other peacefully cooperating with each other without any need to have multicultural societies on any point on the globe.
Now, so far, I have concentrated in all of my talks with brief deviations on what we
might call productive activities.
Let me briefly explain again what I mean by productive activities in order to contrast
productive activities from what one might call parasitic activities.
Interactive activities are activities that increase the well-being of at least one person,
reducing the well-being of other individuals.
You realize that by this definition we avoid all sorts of interpersonal comparisons of utility.
This formulation is similar to the formulation of the so-called Pareto criterion that also assumes that we cannot compare my happiness with your happiness.
And if we cannot compare your happiness with my happiness, can we still say something about social welfare increasing or not increasing?
The answer is, yes, we can do this if we recognize that if my well-being increases and through my activities the well-being of others is not decreased, then we can indeed say that social welfare has increased.
And there exist three types of activities that accomplish this, that is, making at least one person better off without making anybody else worse off in the following sense.
An act of original appropriation, that is, I am the first person to put some previously unowned resource to some use,
is, in this sense, a Pareto superior move.
It makes me better off, otherwise I would not have appropriated what I appropriate,
and it does not take away anything from anybody else because everybody else would have had the chance to appropriate the same thing but they demonstrate through their own activity that they did not attach sufficient value to it, they did something else.
So nothing has been taken away through an act of original appropriation from anybody else but one person is definitely better off, nobody else is made worse off.
The second type of Pareto superior move is to engage in acts of production.
I use my own physical body with the help of originally appropriated resources
and now transform something that was less valuable into something that I expect to be more valuable.
Obviously, I am better off because of this, otherwise I would not have engaged in this act of production, and nothing is taken away from anybody else.
Everybody else has exactly the same resources at their disposal that they had prior to my act of production.
One person is better off, no one is made worse off.
and finally acts of voluntary contractual exchange, also are productive in the sense that two individuals benefit from the exchange, otherwise this voluntary exchange would not have taken place
And again, no resources at the disposal of any third party are affected by this voluntary transaction between two individuals.
So in this case we have two individuals gaining in utility and satisfaction and nobody losing in utility or satisfaction as a result of that.
Because of this, these three types of activities can be referred to as productive activities, as activities that increase social well-being.
In contrast, we have, of course, what we call parasitic activities.
And I mean parasitic this time in a slightly different meaning from that that I mentioned very early on as having been used by Carol Quickly.
Remember, Quickly refers to parasitic activities as activities that somehow diminish the amount of goods in existence, like picking berries and not replacing it with anything.
I would call this, under the current definition, as a productive activity.
So he uses that term in a slightly different way.
At that time, when I talked about that, the use of parasitic simply had a different explanatory purpose than the one that I'm using now.
What I mean by parasitic in this context is activities that make some people better off at the expense of making other people worse off.
And those activities would be obviously activities such as taking away what some other person has originally appropriated,
Taking away what some other person has produced, or not waiting for the agreement of some potential exchange partner, but simply robbing him of whatever is his.
In this case, in all of these cases, we obviously have one person gains and another person loses.
Let me briefly mention three typical parasitic activities that play a great role in history
before I then come to a special form of parasitic behavior which is associated with the institution of the state.
Parasitic behavior would be, for instance, in the most drastic form, cannibalism.
That is, people simply eating another person up.
It was, again, insight and intelligence on the part of people that led to the abolition of cannibalism.
People realized that, yes, in the short run cannibalism might be beneficial.
But, if you have slightly longer term perspectives, you would prefer slavery over cannibalism.
This is indeed a stage of human development for which we have anthropological evidence.
I think that most cannibals realized at some point, after smarting up a little bit, that slavery was definitely superior over this, unless you are very, very hungry at this particular moment.
I wonder what would be a grain pit, or a ranch for a grain pit?
during the times when cannibalism was still a common practice.
And they asked him what he missed the most about this period of cannibalism.
And what he said was, you know, what I missed the most was the baby meat.
That was the most tender of all the meats, but at least people even overcame this delicious temptation and developed slavery and again it was rational thought, so to speak, that also overcame this institution of slavery.
Because they realized that slavery is by and large an unproductive system of human interaction.
Again, slavery in the short run can of course be beneficial.
If I can use you as my slave for a while, even if I would recognize that in the long run
I would be better off if you were a free man and I would be a free man and we would cooperate with each other.
In the short run, of course, slavery can have certain advantages.
And again, it requires, so to speak, a certain development of intelligence,
a certain lowering of our time preference, so to speak,
in order to be willing to give up this immediate advantage
and the advantage that the institution of slavery might represent.
Apart from slavery, of course, the most common form of parasitic behavior is plain crime and robbery and fraud and activities such as those.
And again, we can say, of course, that the fact that most people abstain from these type of activities is based on insight,
is based on the fact that they realize in the long run these things simply do not pay.
If robbery would become, so to speak, a general practice, we would all be in terrible shape.
And we abstain even from engaging in robbery and fraud, even if we know that in the short run we might be able to get away with it.
Again, insight, a certain amount of intelligence, a certain ability to delay gratification is necessary on the part of man in order to give up the temptations that these forms of parasitic behavior might represent.
And because of this, because of a certain amount of intelligence and so forth, we have reached a stage where cannibalism has basically disappeared,
where slavery has basically disappeared and where fraud and robbery have become rare events conducted by just some few asocial individuals that most people abstain from it.
So civilization is maintained by rational insight, by having developed a certain state of intelligence and having lowered our time preference to a certain degree.
And again, a quote to this effect by Mises and then I will really come to the problem of the origin of the state as I promised.
promised, Mises says here, one may admit that in primitive men the propensity for killing
and destroying and the disposition for cruelty were innate.
We may also assume that under the conditions of earlier ages the inclination for aggression
and murder was favorable to the preservation of life.
Man was once a brutal beast, but one must not forget that he was physically a weak animal.
He would not have been a match for the big beasts of prey if he had not been equipped
with a peculiar weapon, reason.
The fact that man is a reasonable being, that he therefore does not yield without inhibitions
to every impulse, but arranges his conduct according to reasonable deliberation, must
must not be called unnatural from a zoological point of view.
Rational conduct means that men, in face of the fact that he cannot satisfy all his impulses,
desires and appetites, forgoes the satisfaction of those which he considers less urgent.
In order not to endanger the working of social cooperation, man is forced to abstain from
and satisfying those desires whose satisfaction would hinder establishment of societal institutions.
There is no doubt that such a renunciation is painful.
However, Men has made his choice.
He has renounced the satisfaction of some desires incompatible with social life and
has given priority to the satisfaction of those desires which can be realized only or
or in a more plentiful way under a system of the division of labor.
This decision is not irrevocable and final.
The choice of the fathers does not impair the son's freedom to choose.
They can reverse the resolution.
Every day they can proceed to the transvaluation of values and prefer barbarism to civilization
or, as some authors say, the soul to the intellect, myth to reason and violence to peace.
But they must choose. It is impossible to have things incompatible with one another.
Now this fact that mankind has by and large developed the sufficient reason to engage in cooperation
that has been built as society has also led, on the other hand, of course, to the temptation of creating a system of institutionalized exploitation or institutionalized parasitism or, as some people have referred to it, as stationary banditry.
It is only if, insofar as we have a rich society in front of us, does a temptation arise for some people to take advantage of the wealth that society has accumulated
can institute a system where they can systematically benefit themselves at the expense of the great masses of productive individuals.
And this brings me to the institution of the state.
Let me begin by giving you a definition of what the state is, a definition that is more
or less uncontroversial, that you find adopted by practically everyone who talks about this
institution.
And this definition of the state is that a state is defined as an organization or an
agency that exercises a territorial monopoly of ultimate jurisdiction or of ultimate judgeship
or of ultimate arbitration in cases of conflict.
In particular, it is an institution that is also the ultimate judge in cases of conflicts
involving itself with other people in society and as a second element of the definition
in which is in a way already implied in the first one.
The state is an organization that exercises a territorial monopoly of taxation.
That is, it can determine unilaterally, without the consent of others, how much the inhabitants
of a territory have to pay to the agency of the state for the state providing this service
of being the ultimate judge and arbitrator in the territory.
Now, you immediately recognize from this definition that it is not difficult to explain why people might be motivated to create an institution such as a state.
Just imagine what that means.
It means that whenever you have conflicts with each other, you must come to me and I settle the conflict and I tell you then what you owe me for this settlement without receiving or having your consent doing this.
This is of course a magnificent position to be in, and even better is the position, once you recognize that even if I cause a conflict, if I hit him on the head, then he must come to me and I decide what is right and what is wrong,
and then typically decide, of course, that what I did was likely right
and what he did that is complaining about the fact that I hit him on the head was wrong
and then I tell him in addition that this is the amount of money that you have to pay me
for providing you with this magnificent service.
So it should be from the outset very clear that to explain why there have been attempts to form an institution such as states is anything but difficult.
This is easy as pie to explain why there are constant attempts, so to speak, to try to form institutions such as this.
Because what more wonderful position could one have, so to speak, as somebody who has parasitic inclinations than being in charge of an apparatus such as a state.
So to explain why attempts to found states is a very, very easy thing to do.
What is a difficult thing to do is to explain why anybody can get away with this.
Why people do not prevent such institutions from coming into existence.
And I will turn now to this task to explain why people would ever put up with an institution such as this.
This explanation becomes even more difficult, so to speak, once you recognize the following,
The fundamental law of parasitism is simply this, one parasite can live off a hundred or a thousand hosts in a very comfortable way.
But we cannot imagine that thousands of parasites can live a comfortable life of one or two or three hosts.
In that case, their life would be miserable too.
So what we recognize from this fundamental law of parasitism is that those people who aspire to institute
Institutes and institutions such as a state must also always have an interest to be themselves just a small group that is capable of ruling, of exploiting, of taxing and exercising an arbitration monopoly over a group of people far larger than they themselves are.
And if this is the case, that the state must always attempt to be a very small group as compared to the group which they exploit,
then we realize or recognize some other fundamental insight.
Obviously, a small group, a very small group, cannot subject a large group only by means of brutal force and weapons.
Yes, for a short time that might be possible.
We can imagine that there are ten people who are all heavily armed that might control 200, 300, 400 people and keep them in subjection if they have no arms and the rulers do have arms.
But in the long run, this is very difficult to maintain.
That is, we must expect that these 400, 500 people will also find a way to arm themselves.
And in that case, how can 10 people equipped with arms rule over 400, 500 or thousands of people
also equipped with arms and means to defend themselves?
Then the explanation of violence does it.
Sheer brute force does it.
This explanation does not work.
What we recognize instead is the class of the parasites,
the small group of parasites must, if it wants to rule over
over lengthy periods of time over a population must base its power on opinion.
That is, it must have at least tacit support among the public.
The public must have taken on a position where they put up with this,
somehow see a reason in having this institution, and so forth.
The public must have accepted certain ideologies.
And the insight, which has been first formulated by Etienne de la Boitie and then by David Hume,
We also find that in Ludwig von Mises and in Murray Rothbard, the basic insight is the rule of the state over its population depends not on the exercise of sheer brute force, even though that plays some role,
but rests fundamentally on nothing else but opinion and tacit agreement on the part of the public.
So then the task becomes to explain the transition from a natural order, as I described it yesterday, from a system of feudalism where essentially no state organizations existed to a state of affairs where a stable state of affairs existed.
A stable state institution has come into existence.
And let's assume for a moment, so to speak, the most favorable situation for state formation
without having a state already there.
And what I mean by this is the following scenario. Let's assume we have a feudal king who is, so to speak, the natural monopolist of conflict resolution.
As a natural monopolist, I mean every person, whenever they have conflicts with each other,
do in fact go to the king and say, come on, you are the most prestigious, most wise and most experienced person.
I'll ask you to settle the dispute that I have with somebody else.
People are entirely free to choose different arbitrators, different judges, so to speak, but as a matter of fact, they all go to the king to do this.
Such a scenario would still be what I call a natural order.
The king in this situation would receive nothing but rental payments from his own tenants.
And the nobles would receive rental payments from their tenants.
There is no exploitation of any kind going on.
The king does not tax anyone, anyone who has property that is independent of the property of the king.
The king also does not pass any laws, that is, he does not legislate.
Of course, he lays down the rules that his tenants have to follow, but that would be no more than if I'm the owner of a house,
And of course I lay down certain rules that the tenants of my house have to follow, that whatever, that they have to clean the stairs once a week and things like this.
So this king is part of a natural order and not yet a state king.
He neither taxes nor legislates.
Money collects rents and lays down the rule of the house of which he himself is the genuine
owner.
The decisive step that he must take in order to transform his position into the position
of a state would be the following.
The king at one point would have to say, so to speak, now you must come to me whenever
you have a conflict with somebody else.
You can no longer go to anybody else for conflict resolution.
Up to this point you chose me, so to speak, voluntarily to be the judge in all cases of
conflict.
Now I take away this possibility from you to turn to others, and I take the right away
from others to act, if they should be chosen as judge to do so.
Now you immediately recognize that by taking this seemingly small step, the king does engage
in an Act of Expropriation.
In particular, visible is this Act of Expropriation vis-a-vis
the other leaders in society, the other nobles, so to speak,
to whom conflicting parties could
have turned to receive justice.
Again, recall, in the feudal order,
It was precisely the fact that there existed a large number of independent, separate jurisdictions, so to speak.
Each lord was responsible to create justice within his own territory, over his own property.
Now he can no longer do this. So it is in particular the other nobles, of whom we would expect that they will put up resistance against this attempt of the king to monopolize, to acquire the exclusive monopoly, no longer a natural monopoly, but in this case it becomes a compulsory monopoly of being the ultimate.
and final judge in cases of conflict.
How can the king get away with this?
The first step, and again I offer you here, so to speak,
So to speak, not a precise historical description of what had happened here or there,
but something that you might call a logical reconstruction of what has happened more or less all over the place.
The first step is for the king to cause and bring about a crisis situation.
And how does he bring about a crisis situation?
In a way that is not very difficult to explain.
Just as we recognize how natural, how easy it is to have the motivation to become a state,
we can also recognize that among mankind there exists always the temptation, the itching, so to speak,
especially among the tenants to free themselves from their rent payments and the rules laid down for them by their own landlords.
That is, tenants, wherever you go, you can imagine that it would be not all that difficult to persuade them to gauge in some sort of riots against their own landlords.
I free you of the rent payment that you must pay.
I free you of the disciplinary rules that your landlord imposes on you.
And I promise you to make you a free man.
I promise you that you will become the owner of those things which you previously only occupied as a tenant.
Or, in a slightly different scenario, you as a king, so to speak, incite a riot among
the poor against the rich.
You form a coalition with the poor against your own immediate competitors, that is, the
The well-to-do people in society that somehow are rivals to the most direct rivals to the king.
So then you create, so to speak, a civil war.
That is to say you create a situation that is similar to the situation that Hobbes claims exists, so to speak, naturally among mankind.
Recall I explained that the natural condition of mankind is not war of all against all.
People do recognize that division of labor is beneficial and because of this tend to be in favor of peaceful cooperation.
At least the large majority of people do this.
But you can incite, especially if you are yourself an influential person, a person that is trusted by the masses, if you are the king.
You can incite a situation that brings about a situation such as a war of all against all.
And then in this situation where the war of all against all breaks out,
where the tenants rise against their landlords and the poor rise against the rich,
Then you come to the rescue of the nobles, the middle classes, and strike some sort of compromise.
That is, you get the promise from the nobles and your immediate competitors,
Yes, we will give up our former right to act as judge ourselves and grant you an exclusive right to be the monopoly judge in exchange for you and us getting together and stopping this civil war conditions that exist.
This was, by the way, precisely the situation, for instance, during the Middle Ages, especially during so-called Protestant revolutions, when first, so to speak, the Protestant revolutions resulted in big-time looting activities and so forth.
And then people turning to the kings and saying, this sort of stuff has to be stopped, and in order to stop it, we will grant you the exclusive right to be the judge.
So you create a Hobbesian situation. The Hobbesian situation does not exist from the outset, but it can be created.
Again, let me just read you a quote here from Henri Perrin that, in a slightly different way, describes the same phenomenon that is to say, the king allying himself with a lower class,
the power classes with the sub-noble classes, so to speak, in order to break the power of the competing aristocracy of those people who would lose the most, so to speak, from the fact that the king acquires a monopoly.
Pyren there says, the clear interest of the monarchy was to support the adversaries of high feudalism.
That is, the adversaries of the noble class, of the aristocracy.
Naturally, help was given whenever it was possible to do so without becoming obligated to, in this case he talks about the cities,
The King in particular also inciting the inhabitants of cities to rise against the nobility.
Whenever it was possible to do so without becoming obligated to the middle classes,
who in arising against their lords fought to all intents and purposes in the interests of royal prerogatives.
To accept the king as arbitrator of their quarrel was, for the parties in conflict, to recognize his sovereignty.
The entry of the burghers upon the political scene had as a consequence the weakening of the contractual principle of the feudal state to the advantage of the principle of the authority of the monarchical state.
It was impossible that royalty should not take count of this and seize every chance to show its goodwill to the communes and also to the peasants and so forth, without intending to do so, who the communes and the peasants, who, without intending to do so, labored so successfully in its own behalf.
Now, but this is of course only the first step. You create the crisis, the noble class comes to you, wants to be rescued and you rescue them in exchange for them granting you exclusive judgeship rights.
You have to offer something, of course, in addition to the aristocracy.
What is typically offered is that the aristocracy now plays some particularly important role
in the slowly developing royal bureaucracy that will be established.
But more than this, you need, of course, now an ideology.
Again, recall, with ideological support for this institution, this institution is not going to last for very long.
And the ideology that is created, and that is still with us to this day,
is the so-called Hobbesian myth, that is the idea that the normal state of mankind is precisely this war of all against all which the king deliberately brought about and that in order to stop this war of all against all
It is necessary that there must be one single monopolist ruling over all people in order to create peace.
Now, if you ask yourself, if you ask all around people, ask them, why do we need a state?
Almost everyone will give you exactly this reason.
Without a single monopolist, there would be permanent war of all against all.
This is the belief that maintains up to this day a state apparatus.
This is what practically everyone believes.
I have asked my own students at times, and that was the answer that everyone gave.
Without the state, of course, there would be chaos. There would be no cooperation.
There must be a single monopolist.
This is the ideology that keeps the state in place.
Now, let me only point out this at this moment.
You can quickly realize the weakness of this ideology if you do two things.
On the one hand, imagine what this means if you have very small groups of people.
That is two individuals.
So what this theory essentially says is no two people can ever peacefully cooperate with each other.
That would always lead to war one against the other. There must be always a master and there must be always someone who is subject to the master.
You realize if you just use a very small group of people, immediately how absurd the Caesar becomes.
We have five people. Is it necessary for five people that there must be one who is the monopolist in every possible conflict, including conflicts involving himself with the other four?
For these small groups, most people would immediately say, you must be crazy to believe this sort of stuff.
That can never be true, because you know groups of this size who peacefully cooperate all the time.
Nonetheless, this is one of the implications.
What you recognize here is that they never talk, so to speak, about the size of the territory.
On the other hand, you recognize that if the theory is true, then of course it must be the case that we must have a world state in order to create peace, because the same argument applies, of course, to a situation where we have a multitude of states.
If we have a multitude of states, then these various states are in a state of anarchy, of natural order vis-a-vis each other, and allegedly there must be permanent war among them.
Now this is also obviously not the case. There are wars among them, and I will explain why there are more wars among states than there are wars among individuals, so to speak, in one of my next lectures.
But it is certainly not the case that states are permanently at war against each other.
So what remains entirely unexplained here and what is somehow taken intuitively for granted is that we are talking about sizes of states
where it is not perfectly clear immediately that, of course, these people would peacefully cooperate with each other.
But the size of states are in a way arbitrary. Why should not a state have the size of whatever, a small village?
In a small village, we have not the slightest difficulty imagining that there is peaceful cooperation going on without a monopolist.
Only when the size becomes a little bit bigger, then we become increasingly blinder, so to speak, to recognizing that at all times, of course, the same principle is at work.
Just as the same principle was at work in order to explain why all of mankind can engage in peaceful cooperation based on division of labor.
Why there is not only a reason for division of labor for the Germans, but the Germans and the French against each other must fight?
Why the same principle applies to Germans and to French?
So we have to recognize that this status principle, if it should be correct, should also apply to the level of you and me.
That is to say, either I am your slave, or you must be my slave, but it is impossible that peaceful cooperation between two of us can exist.
And once you recognize that the same principle that applies not just to two people, but applies to the entire world,
in our world, you recognize immediately, of course, that this is just a made-up myth created, so to speak, by this initial crisis that the states themselves, or the would-be states, created in order to blind people to something that should be perfectly obvious.
So now, once a state has established this sort of mythology, they all go through a sequence of steps, again essentially the same sequence of steps wherever you look.
The first one is, of course, you have to disarm the population.
There existed initially in the Middle Ages, of course, independent army leaders,
offering their army services to whoever needed them, mercenary troops.
They are now incorporated into the national army or into the king's army or they are eliminated.
Again, all states try to disarm the population.
In the Middle Ages, one of the immediate things that kings as soon as they had acquired semi-state position
The first imposition was to insist that all the nobles had to raise down their own fortresses to prevent, so to speak, that they might come up with the idea that maybe that whole thing was a screwy process after all, and they would defend themselves against the jurisdiction or the tax impositions coming from the side of the king.
Now you can build nice palaces, so to speak, but no longer anything that serves defensive purposes.
Then, of course, all independent jurisdictions must be eliminated.
Ultimately, even going as far as no longer allowing the husbands and wives, so to speak, to be judged in their own house.
This process takes hundreds of years.
My reconstruction compresses this, of course, into a very short period of time.
But all of these powers are gradually, step by step, won from civil society.
And we have basically only now, in the 20th century, reached the point where the power of the state
The State extends as far as involving itself in immediate family affairs, like daring, for instance, to take the kids away from parents.
This is something that would not have been possible, of course, hundreds of years ago.
The power of the kings was not sufficient from the outset to do something like this.
But we now realize, of course, now the power of the state is large enough in order to tell you whether you can smoke in your own room or not.
The next step is, very importantly, of course, to control the ideology, to keep this belief in the Hobbesian myth
and the Necessity of the State for the Creation of Peace Alive and for this you have to take over, will try to take over first the churches.
This occurs basically with the Protestant Revolution as a result of which a far closer alliance between church and state is built
that existed prior to the protestant revolutions.
By the way, that's why the protestant revolutions, of course, were supported by so many princes
because they realized that that was exactly offering them the opportunity to establish themselves as states.
Besides the motive, of course, that they could also grab the property of the Catholic Church, which in some countries made up 20 to 30 percent of the used land mass.
So it offered them a great opportunity to just enrich themselves greatly by expropriating the churches and then of course introducing successively public education.
either controlling the church, which the church was the main instructional institutions for a long period of time, making the priests state employees.
This has of course happened in all European countries to a larger or smaller extent, in particular of course in the Protestant countries,
And if this does not go far enough, then of course, create a system of public education under direct state control.
Again, Martin Luther, for instance, played a great role in this thing, advising the princes, not only to oppress the peasants, who he had first, so to speak, brought to rise against the princes, but then smashed them down,
who advised the princes that just as the people should be trained in order to be ready for war,
so of course they should be also brainwashed in state controlled schools in order to be brave and well trained citizens.
And in the last step, after the nationalization of education, or the two last steps are the control of money, that is the monopolization of the issue of money.
There existed, for instance, in France, before the establishment of a central French king, a multitude of mints competing against each other, trying to acquire, so to speak, the reputation of producing the best, most reliable, least manipulated type of money.
All these competing mints were gradually closed down until in the end only one central government mint remained in existence,
which of course makes it far easier to engage in manipulations of the gold or silver content
than it would be if there would be a multitude of mints competing against each other.
If you have a multitude of mints competing against each other, each mint has, so to speak, an incentive to point out if another one is defrauding you.
Just now here are these guys, here are mints from town A or town B, they are engaging in coin clipping and people would bankrupt this type of mint.
as soon as only one exists over large territories, it becomes far easier to engage in these sorts of manipulations
and thereby again having a tool of enriching yourself besides your power to tax
And lastly, they of course also then monopolize the means of transportation and communication,
which is of great importance once you recognize it, of course, means of communication and transportation
would play a very important role, would have to play a very important role in any attempt to revolt against the government.
You have to move troops from place to place and so forth. You have to just send letters and messages from place to place.
to Place, so you monopolize the postal service and you monopolize at least the main throughways
and make them the king's roads and the king's postal service and so forth in order to control
the public.
You have a question?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I have another one and you probably touched upon it already in your final two
as well as the controlling of ideology, but in more abstract terms, and I would say that's the introduction of state symbolism, money is of course a state symbol, there are also songs, I wrote down some more flags, as well as very important architecture, governmental buildings as well.
and all of a sudden it has the imprint of the king flags and all the rest of it are part of the educational process that you do
to create some sort of myth, also the myth that the king derives directly from the gods and who knows what
For instance, the author, Filmer, wanting to justify the legitimacy of the English king went as far as to say that he derived his authority directly from Adam and Eve in the form of continuous passing on of inheritances to make the claim, so to speak, that after all, he was just a normal landlord and the other people were all tenants.
What can we expect of such an institution that is once you have a stable state in existence, even if you assume that the power of money is in the hands of the people who are in the hands of the people who are in the hands of the people
The power of the state is initially very limited. That is to say, they still have to by and large adhere to the previously existing and recognized laws.
Even if you assume that at the beginning their power to tax is very weak, that is, they can only tax a very small amount,
what we can predict, simply based on the definition of what a state is, is that there will be a tendency of a minimal state
to become a more and more total or totalitarian state.
And again, the prediction of this is very easy,
once we remember what the definition of the state is.
If I am the ultimate judge in all cases of conflict,
including conflicts involving myself, then you can predict that there will be a tendency to deviate from the existing law and make laws, that is, create legislation.
I cause the conflicts myself. I cannot use, of course, the normal laws, because the normal laws would just make me look like what I am, that is, a guy who has caused the conflict myself and deserves to be punished for it.
So, I have to then invent a new law, make law in order to come to the conclusion, despite my act of provocation, despite my act of expropriation, I'm of course perfectly right to do this.
We would expect an increasing perversion of law favoring increasingly the institution of the state.
And on the other hand, we would expect based on the fact that the state has the right to tax.
And based on the insight that nobody really likes to work, that work implies disutility, that the states will in fact do less and less of those things that they were supposed to do, that is to protect us,
and ask for ever higher contributions, ever higher taxes to do so.
And this, as a general prediction, is of course what we have seen over the centuries.
Let me end with a few additional observations.
With states coming into existence,
The normal natural tendencies for markets to expand, division of labor to expand and intensify is, if not brought to a halt, but it is somehow distorted and disrupted.
There exists now all of a sudden state borders that previously did not exist.
And automatically once you have state borders the possibility of course arises that you now hamper and interfere with the free flow of goods.
that is that you will impose tariffs on this.
Secondly, the normal tendency of money to become an international money is also brought to a halt
because now we have borders.
There will be national monies arising, even if they are initially commodity monies, but they will now be French francs and Italian liras or whatever the country's name is.
This and in so far bring about monetary disintegration, reduce the amount of integration that would
otherwise naturally arise on the market.
Then with the existence of the state, of course, the tendency for law to become universal and
International that I described in my lecture yesterday.
We have these insurance agencies and reinsurance agencies and arbitration agencies and the
conflict between various insurance agencies leading then to the competitive development
of universal, everywhere accepted standards of right and wrong, of legal and illegal.
This comes to a halt.
Law is now broken up into whatever, German law, Dutch law, Swedish law, every country
having so to speak different sorts of principles, procedures and so forth.
The tendency that normally exists of unifying this comes to a halt and last but not least states also have a profound effect on the development of languages.
On the one hand, of course, they sometimes forcibly expand certain types of languages within their territory, eliminate, so to speak, certain languages and make some languages the official language of the country.
On the other hand, by doing this, as the other side of the same coin, of course, they also disrupt, so to speak, the natural tendency of people to learn different languages and on the fringes of different territories for people to speak multiple languages and, in a way, also prevent the development of some languages that are used as
International languages. Just think of what happened, so to speak, to Latin, which used to be the language of international communication for hundreds of years, all through Europe.
Latin basically disappears in this function as soon as national states come into existence.
It is then that French is spoken, German is spoken, and so forth, and Latin becomes, yeah,
if it does not die out immediately, it becomes a language that is spoken less and less,
And in the end it becomes, so to speak, just a relic that some strange people still learn in strange places
without really knowing why, because nobody except the Pope and his people actually speak that language.
Also currently going on with English, I think, if we perceive English as a natural language at this point, for international trade and communication, there are a lot of countries who try to resist the influence of English by all kinds of ridiculous rules, like no English songs, more than 40% on the radio, or in France, for example, you can't write email as a bureaucrat, you have to write a courriel or something.
The international aspect enters the picture and that is the status of English as a dominant language similar to Latin owes its existence, of course, to the fact of imperialism.
whereas the adoption of Latin as the international language was in a way an organic phenomenon that had very little to do with one place occupying another place and so forth
Whereas nowadays English is of course promoted by the very fact that the United States is of course a dominant country and can impose in a way its language at least as a second most important language in various places.
Mr. Ebonics will be having its break in the next few days.
Isn't the dominance of English today more attributable to increased trade and communication than imperialism?
The second language in Germany before World War II. It was actually Latin and French.
After World War II, English clearly became foreign language number one.
That had nothing to do with trade or so. That had something to do with Germany lost the war.
The United States was the leading place there, the leading occupier there, and they enforced their language on the German school system.
That happened also in the East German part, for instance.
The Russians enforced Russian as being the second most important language in East Germany.
People at that time, so it was easier to impose on the West Germans English because English was number three before.
Whereas, of course, nobody in East Germany even contemplated in its most far-fetched dreams ever learning Russian.
And all of a sudden now they had to learn Russian.
And the consequence was after the Russians disappeared from East Germany, the people just wanted to forget about Russia.
That is, you would then think somehow the people who, after having invested a certain amount of time into learning this sort of stuff,
even if there is no force behind it anymore, you would maintain your skill.
But what happened by and large was people hated it so much that they made an effort to forget even what they knew.
Same as Central Asia.
In many countries. Yes, I think that's probably true for Poland and those countries too.
For them it was even far easier to learn Russian because those were both Slavic languages, whereas for Germans it was quite difficult to learn Russian.
What is in the U.S. today, what are the numbers or the preponderance of parasites versus producers of adults?
I have seen figures that one out of every two employed or working people in America today actually is a bureaucrat.
It sounds a lot like our social security scam where at some point you just cannot have everybody be the parasite and there be no host left.
I don't know numbers about this. It would be interesting to figure that out, but it should be pointed out that it is also a very difficult task.
You see, in the old days, it was more clear who was part of the state apparatus and who wasn't.
Whereas nowadays, of course, there are many private institutions, semi-private institutions that should be counted as government employees.
Let's say people who work for Boeing or firms that have more or less only the government as purchaser of their goods.
Officially they are classified as working in the private sector.
are de facto, of course, they are not.
The other complication is that one has to determine in a way are the net recipients
or net payers.
So in some sense, probably every single person receives some handouts from the state and
is in this way tied to it.
On the other hand, he might pay in far more in taxes
than he gets out.
And in other cases, it might be just the other way around.
So one would have to look almost at every individual
to make a determination of this.
But it is certainly a strategy of states
to make people at least to a small extent dependent on the state and then emphasize in public opinion the tremendous importance of precisely this little handout that they get.
Again, it would be nice to know more precise numbers, what percentage of people can be classified as a net tax payer,
and what can be classified as a net tax recipient that can be probably done, but I haven't done it.
In this development of the state, I think psychologically at least some of this is the ability of people to escape from their own responsibility.
Let me give you an example. Let's say, Ron, I steal his watch, and if the two of us together, he would immediately take action.
Whereas if I make this into a group, and I steal Ron's watch here, and then I'll say well I'm part of the village, and I'll go to the village and I say, even though I get the thing that I should be responsible for, I say well I'm part of the village, and then immediately we get an attack of one group of another, you've wronged my sister or something like this, you get this Klan mentality.
I will come to that when I talk about, in my next lecture, the transition from monarchy to democracy in a way that is a subject that plays into this transition.
It's easier to use anonymous groups to do evil stuff than if it is perfectly clear who does the evil stuff.
Isn't there a certain, English has a facility of expression, as we go into this infusion of economic and scientific, to describe things in a word that in other languages take phrases, and it's a simpler way to communicate in English, whereas in the older languages you, they get kind of pondered.
I have met many German philosophers who have told me philosophy you can only do in German
because German is the most precise of all languages.
I have no opinion on the matter, I'm just saying there's a certain amount of nationalism that goes on.
The international language used to be French and I think that's why the French have their nose out of joint
because suddenly they aren't premier. It's all in English.
Again, you will find very many French people who think that French is the only language in which you can think clearly.
Even though the French have also produced the most unclear thinkers like Jacques Derrida so that you can imagine.
So I think each language community has its own little myths, why they are more precise in some ways than others,
Supposedly English had all these awkward expressions too, but being overrun or captured on several occasions, the captors threw out some of these things.
Thank you very much.