Chapter 3. The State. The State as Aggressor.
The central thrust of libertarian thought, then, is to oppose any and all aggression against the property rights of individuals, in their own persons, and in the material objects they have voluntarily acquired.
While individual and gangs of criminals are of course opposed, there is nothing unique here to the libertarian creed, since almost all persons and schools of thought oppose the exercise of random violence against persons and property.
There is, however, a difference of emphasis on the part of libertarians, even in this universally accepted area of defending people against crime.
In the libertarian society there would be no district attorney who prosecutes criminals in the name of a non-existent society, even against the wishes of the victim of crime.
The victim would himself decide whether to press charges.
Furthermore, as another side to the same coin, in a libertarian world the victim would be able to press suit against a wrongdoer without having to convince the same district attorney that he should proceed.
Proceed.
Moreover, in the system of criminal punishment in the libertarian world, the emphasis would
never be, as it is now, on societies jailing the criminal.
The emphasis would necessarily be on compelling the criminal to make restitution to the victim
of his crime.
The present system, in which the victim is not recompensed, but instead has to pay taxes
to support the incarceration of his own attacker would be evident nonsense in a world that
focuses on the defense of property rights and therefore on the victim of crime.
Furthermore, while most libertarians are not pacifists, they would not join the present
system in interfering with people's right to be pacifists.
Thus suppose that Jones, a pacifist, is aggressed against by Smith, a criminal.
If Jones, as the result of his beliefs, is against defending himself by the use of violence,
and is therefore opposed to any prosecution of crime, then Jones will simply fail to prosecute,
and that will be the end of it.
There will be no governmental machinery that pursues and tries criminals even against the
wishes of the victim.
But the critical difference between libertarians and other people is not in the area of private
crime.
The critical difference is their view of the role of the state, the government.
For libertarians regard the state as the supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor
against the persons and property of the mass of the public.
All states, everywhere, whether democratic, dictatorial, or monarchical, whether red,
white, blue, or brown.
The state.
These and ever, the government and its rulers and operators have been considered above the
general moral law.
The Pentagon Papers are only one recent instance among innumerable instances in history of
men, most of whom are perfectly honorable in their private lives, who lie in their teeth
before the public.
Why?
For reasons of state.
Apparatus to the state is supposed to excuse all actions that would be considered immoral
or criminal if committed by private citizens.
The distinctive feature of libertarians is that they coolly and uncompromisingly apply
the general moral law to people acting in their roles as members of the state apparatus.
Libertarians make no exceptions.
For centuries, the state, or more strictly, individuals acting in their roles as members
of the government, has cloaked its criminal activity in high-sounding rhetoric.
For centuries, the state has committed mass murder and called it war, then ennobled the
mass slaughter that war involves.
For centuries, the state has enslaved people into its armed battalions and called it conscription
in the national service.
For centuries, the state has robbed people at bayonet point and called it taxation.
In fact, if you wish to know how libertarians regard the state and any of its acts, simply
think of the state as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically
fall into place.
Let us consider, for example, what it is that sharply distinguishes government from
all other organizations in society.
Many political scientists and sociologists have blurred this vital distinction and refer
to all organizations and groups as hierarchical, structured, governmental, etc.
Left-wing anarchists, for example, will oppose equally government and private organizations,
such as corporations, on the ground that each is equally elitist and coercive.
But the rightist libertarian is not opposed to inequality, and his concept of coercion
applies only to the use of violence.
The libertarian sees a crucial distinction between government, whether central, state,
or local, and all other institutions in society, or rather, two crucial distinctions.
First, every other person or group receives its income by voluntary payment, either by
by voluntary contribution or gift, such as the local community chest or bridge club, or
by voluntary purchase of its goods or services on the market, for example, grocery store
owner, baseball player, steel manufacturer, etc.
Only the government obtains its income by coercion and violence, that is, by the direct
threat of confiscation or imprisonment if payment is not forthcoming.
This coerced levy is taxation.
A second distinction is that apart from criminal outlaws, only the government can use its funds
to commit violence against its own or any other subjects.
Only the government can prohibit pornography, compel a religious observance, or put people
in jail for selling goods at a higher price than the government deems fit.
Both distinctions, of course, can be summed up as only the government in society is empowered
to aggress against the property rights of its subjects, whether to extract revenue,
to impose its moral code, or to kill those with whom it disagrees.
Furthermore, any and all governments, even the least despotic, have always obtained the
bulk of their income from the coercive taxing power.
And historically, by far the overwhelming portion of all enslavement and murder in the
history of the world have come from the hands of government.
And since we have seen that the central thrust of the libertarian is to oppose all aggression
against the rights of person and property, the libertarian necessarily opposes the institution
There is another reason why state aggression has been far more important than private,
a reason apart from the greater organization and central mobilizing of resources that the
rulers of the state can impose.
The reason is the absence of any check upon state depredation, a check that does exist
When we have to worry about muggers or the mafia.
To guard against private criminals, we have been able to turn to the state and its police.
But who can guard us against the state itself?
No one.
For another critical distinction of the state is that it compels the monopolization of the
service of protection.
The state arrogates to itself a virtual monopoly of violence and of ultimate decision-making
in Society.
If we don't like the decisions of the state courts, for example, there are no other agencies
of protection to which we may turn.
It is true that in the United States, at least, we have a constitution that imposes strict
limits on some powers of government.
But as we have discovered in the past century, no constitution can interpret or enforce itself.
It must be interpreted by men.
And if the ultimate power to interpret a constitution is given to the government's own supreme
court, then the inevitable tendency is for the court to continue to place its imprimatur
on ever broader powers for its own government.
Furthermore, the highly touted checks and balances and separation of powers in the American
government are flimsy indeed, since in the final analysis all of these divisions are
are part of the same government and are governed by the same set of rulers.
One of America's most brilliant political theorists, John C. Calhoun, wrote prophetically
of the inherent tendency of a state to break through the limits of its written constitution.
A written constitution certainly has many and considerable advantages, but it is a great
mistake to suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the powers
Res endorsers of the government, will be sufficient to prevent the Hajar and dominant
party from abusing its powers.
Being the party in possession of the government, they will be in favor of the powers granted
by the constitution and oppose to the restrictions intended to limit them.
As the hajar and dominant parties, they will have no need of these restrictions for their
Their Protection.
The minor or weaker party, on the contrary, would take the opposite direction and regard
them as essential to their protection against the dominant party.
But where there are no means by which they could compel the major party to observe the
restrictions, the only resort left them would be a strict construction of the Constitution.
To this, the major party would oppose a liberal construction, one which would give to the
the words of the grant, the broadest meaning of which they were susceptible.
It would then be construction against construction, the one to construct and the other to enlarge
the powers of the government to the utmost.
But of what possible avail could the strict construction of the minor party be against
the liberal interpretation of the major, when the one would have all the powers of the government
to carry its construction into effect, and the other be deprived of all means of enforcing
its construction.
In a contest so unequal, the result would not be doubtful.
The party in favor of the restrictions would be overpowered.
The end of the contest would be the subversion of the Constitution.
The restrictions would ultimately be annulled, and the government be converted into one of
unlimited powers.
Or would the division of government into separate and, as it regards each other, independent
departments prevent this result?
As each and all the departments, and, of course, the entire government, would be under the
control of the numerical majority, it is too clear to require explanation that a mere distribution
of its powers among its agents or representatives could do little or nothing to counteract its
tendency to oppression and abuse of power.
But why worry about the weakness of limits on governmental power?
Especially in a democracy, in the phrase so often used by American liberals in their heyday
before the mid-1960s when doubts began to creep into the liberal utopia, are we not
the government?
In the phrase, we are the government, the useful collective term we has enabled an ideological
Political Camouflage to be thrown over the naked exploitative reality of political life.
For if we truly are the government, then anything a government does to an individual is not
only just and not tyrannical, it is also voluntary on the part of the individual concerned.
If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group
on behalf of another, this reality of burden is conveniently obscured by blithely saying
that we owe it to ourselves, but who are the we and who the ourselves?
If the government drafts a man or even throws him into jail for dissident opinions, then
he is only doing it to himself, and therefore nothing improper has occurred.
Under this reasoning, then, Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered.
They must have committed suicide, since they were the government, which was democratically
chosen, and therefore anything the government did to them was only voluntary on their part.
But there is no way out of such grotesqueries for those supporters of government who see
the state merely as a benevolent and voluntary agent of the public.
And so we must conclude that we are not the government.
The government is not us.
The government does not in any accurate sense represent the majority of the people.
But even if it did, even if 90% of the people decided to murder or enslave the other 10%,
this would still be murder and slavery, and would not be voluntary suicide or enslavement
on the part of the oppressed minority.
Crime is crime.
Aggression against rights is aggression, no matter how many citizens agree to the oppression.
There is nothing sacrosanct about the majority.
The lynch mob, too, is the majority in its own domain.
But while, as in the lynch mob, the majority can become actively tyrannical and aggressive,
the normal and continuing condition of the state is oligarchic rule.
rule by a coercive elite which has managed to gain control of the state machinery.
There are two basic reasons for this.
One is the inequality and division of labor inherent in the nature of man, which gives
rise to an iron law of oligarchy in all of man's activities.
And second is the parasitic nature of the state enterprise itself.
We have said that the individualist is not an egalitarian.
Part of the reason for this is the individualist's insight into the vast diversity and individuality
within mankind, a diversity that has the chance to flower and expand as civilization and living
standards progress.
Individuals differ in ability and in interest, both within and between occupations, and hence
in all occupations and walks of life, whether it be steel production or the organization
of a Bridge Club, Leadership in the activity will inevitably be assumed by a relative handful
of the most able and energetic, while the remaining majority will form themselves into
rank-and-file followers.
This truth applies to all activities, whether they are beneficial or malevolent, as in criminal
organizations.
Indeed, the discovery of the iron law of oligarchy was made by the Italian sociologist Robert
Richard Michels, who found that the Social Democratic Party of Germany, despite its rhetorical
commitment to egalitarianism, was rigidly oligarchical and hierarchical in its actual
functioning.
A second basic reason for the oligarchic rule of the state is its parasitic nature,
the fact that it lives coercively off the production of the citizenry.
To be successful to its practitioners, the fruits of parasitic exploitation must be confined
to a relative minority, otherwise a meaningless plunder of all by all would result in no gains
for anyone.
Nowhere has the coercive and parasitic nature of the state been more clearly limbed than
by the great late 19th century German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two and only two mutually exclusive means for
man to obtain wealth.
One, the method of production and voluntary exchange, the method of the free market, Oppenheimer
termed the economic means.
The other, the method of robbery by the use of violence, he called the political means.
The political means is clearly parasitic, for it requires previous production for the
In short, private crime is, at best, sporadic and uncertain.
The parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive parasitic lifeline can be cut at any time
by the resistance of the victims.
The state provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for predation on the property of the
producers.
It makes certain, secure, and relatively peaceful the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.
The great libertarian writer Albert J. Nock wrote vividly that the state claims and exercises
is the monopoly of crime.
It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale.
It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether
the property of citizen or of alien.
At first, of course, it is startling for someone to consider taxation as robbery, and therefore
government as a band of robbers.
But anyone who persists in thinking of taxation as in some sense a voluntary payment can see
what happens if he chooses not to pay.
The great economist Joseph Schumpeter, himself by no means a libertarian, wrote that the
state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private
purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force.
The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services
of, say, a doctor, only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific
habits of mind.
The eminent Viennese legal positivist, Hans Kelsen, attempted in his treatise, The General
Theory of Law and the State, to establish a political theory and justification of the
on a strictly scientific and value-free basis.
What happened is that early in the book, he came to the crucial sticking point,
the pons asinorum of political philosophy.
What distinguishes the edicts of the state from the commands of a bandit gang?
Kelson's answer was simply to say that the decrees of the state are valid,
and to proceed happily from there, without bothering to define or explain
explain this concept of validity. Indeed, it would be a useful exercise for non-libertarians
to ponder this question. How can you define taxation in a way which makes it different
from robbery?
To the great 19th century individualist anarchist and constitutional lawyer Lysander Spooner,
there was no problem in finding the answer. Spooner's analysis of the state as robber
per Group is perhaps the most devastating ever written.
It is true that the theory of our constitution is that all taxes are paid voluntarily, that
our government is a mutual insurance company voluntarily entered into by the people with
each other.
But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact.
The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man, your money or your life, and
Many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.
The government does not indeed waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the
roadside and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets.
But the robbery is nonetheless a robbery on that account, and it is far more dastardly
and shameful.
The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his
own act.
He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money or that he intends to
use it for your own benefit.
He does not pretend to be anything but a robber.
He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a protector and that he takes
men's money against their will merely to enable him to protect those infatuated travelers
who feel perfectly able to protect themselves or do not appreciate his peculiar system of
protection.
He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these.
Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you as you wish him to do.
He does not persist in following you on the road against your will, assuming to be your
rightful sovereign on account of the protection he affords you.
He does not keep protecting you by commanding you to bow down and serve him, by requiring
you to do this and forbidding you to do that, by robbing you of more money as often as he
finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so, and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor,
and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy if you dispute his
authority or resist his demands.
He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures and insults and villainies
If the state is a group of plunderers, who then constitutes the state?
Clearly, the ruling elite consists at any time of
a. the full-time apparatus, the kings, politicians and bureaucrats who man and operate the state
and B, the groups who have maneuvered to gain privileges, subsidies, and benefits from the state.
The remainder of society constitutes the ruled.
It was again John C. Calhoun who saw with crystal clarity that no matter how small the power of government,
no matter how low the tax burden or how equal its distribution,
The very nature of government creates two unequal and inherently conflicting classes in society.
Those who, on net, pay the taxes, the tax payers, and those who, on net, live off taxes, the tax consumers.
Suppose that the government imposes a low and seemingly equally distributed tax to pay for building a dam.
This very act takes money from most of the public to pay it out to net tax consumers,
the bureaucrats who run the operation, the contractors and workers who build the dam,
etc.
And the greater the scope of government decision making, the greater its fiscal burdens, Calhoun
went on, the greater the burden and the artificial inequality it imposes between these two classes.
You comparatively as they are, the agents and employees of the government constitute
that portion of the community who are the exclusive recipients of the proceeds of the
taxes.
Whatever amount is taken from the community in the form of taxes, if not lost, goes to
them in the shape of expenditures or disbursements.
The two, disbursement and taxation, constitute the fiscal action of the government.
They are correlatives.
What the one takes from the community under the name of taxes is transferred to the portion
of the community who are the recipients under that of disbursements.
But as the recipients constitute only a portion of the community, it follows, taking the two
parts of the fiscal process together, that its action must be unequal between the payers
of the taxes and the recipients of their proceeds.
Or can it be otherwise, unless what is collected from each individual in the shape of taxes
shall be returned to him in that of disbursements, which would make the process nugatory and
absurd?
The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide
the community into two great classes, one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the
and, of course, bear exclusively the burden of supporting the government, and the other of those who are the recipients of their proceeds through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government, or, in fewer words, to divide it into taxpayers and tax consumers.
But the effect of this is to place them in antagonistic relations in reference to the
fiscal action of the government, and the entire course of policy therewith connected.
For the greater the taxes and disbursements, the greater the gain of the one and the loss
of the other, and vice versa.
The effect then of every increase is to enrich and strengthen the one, and impoverish and
weaken the other.
If states have everywhere been run by an oligarchic group of predators, how have they been able
to maintain their rule over the mass of the population?
The answer, as the philosopher David Hume pointed out over two centuries ago, is that
in the long run, every government, no matter how dictatorial, rests on the support of the
majority of its subjects.
Now this does not, of course, render these governments voluntary, since the very existence
The convergence of the tax and other coercive powers shows how much compulsion the state must exercise.
Nor does the majority support have to be eager and enthusiastic approval.
It could well be mere passive acquiescence and resignation.
The conjunction in the famous phrase death and taxes implies a passive and resigned acceptance
to the assumed inevitability of the state and its taxation.
The tax consumers, the groups that benefit from the operations of the state, will of course be eager, rather than passive, followers of the state mechanism.
But these are only a minority. How is the compliance and acquiescence of the mass of the population to be secured?
Here we come to the central problem of political philosophy, that branch of philosophy that deals with politics,
The Exercise of Regularized Violence, The Mystery of Civil Obedience
Why do people obey the edicts and depredations of the ruling elite?
Conservative writer James Burnham, who is the reverse of libertarian, put the problem very
clearly, admitting that there is no rational justification for civil obedience. Neither the
source nor the justification of government can be put in wholly rational terms. Why should
Why should I accept the hereditary or democratic or any other principle of legitimacy?
Why should a principle justify the rule of that man over me?
His own answer is hardly calculated to convince many others.
I accept the principle, well, because I do, because that is the way it is and has been.
But suppose that one does not accept the principle.
What will the way be then?
And why have the bulk of subjects agreed to accept it?
The State and the Intellectuals The answer is that, since the early origins
of the state, its rulers have always turned, as a necessary bolster to their rule, to an
alliance with society's class of intellectuals.
The masses do not create their own abstract ideas, or indeed think through these ideas
independently.
They follow passively the ideas adopted and promulgated by the body of intellectuals,
who become the effective opinion molders in society.
And since it is precisely a molding of opinion on behalf of the rulers that the state almost
desperately needs, this forms a firm basis for the age-old alliance of the intellectuals
and the ruling classes of the state.
The alliance is based on a quid pro quo.
On the one hand, the intellectuals spread among the masses the idea that the state and its
rulers are wise, good, sometimes divine, and, at the very least, inevitable and better than
any conceivable alternatives.
In return for this panoply of ideology, the state incorporates the intellectuals as part
of the ruling elite, granting them power, status, prestige, and material security.
Furthermore, intellectuals are needed to staff the bureaucracy and to plan the economy and society.
Before the modern era, particularly potent among the intellectual handmaidens of the state was the priestly caste,
cementing the powerful and terrible alliance of warrior chief and medicine man, of throne and altar.
The State established the Church, and conferred upon it power, prestige, and wealth extracted from its subjects.
In return, the Church anointed the State with divine sanction, and inculcated this sanction into the populace.
In the modern era, when theocratic arguments have lost much of their luster among the public,
the intellectuals have posed as the scientific cadre of experts,
and have been busy informing the hapless public that political affairs, foreign and domestic,
are much too complex for the average person to bother his head about.
Only the state and its core of intellectual experts, planners, scientists, economists and national security managers
can possibly hope to deal with these problems.
The role of the masses, even in democracies,
is to ratify and assent to the decisions of their knowledgeable rulers.
Historically, the union of church and state, of throne and altar, has been the most effective
device for inducing obedience and support among the subjects. Burnham attests to the power of myth
and mystery in inducing support when he writes that, in ancient times, before the illusions of
of Science had corrupted traditional wisdom, the founders of cities were known to be gods
or demigods.
To the established priestcraft, the ruler was either anointed by God or, in the case
of the absolute rule of many oriental despotisms, was even himself God.
Hence any questioning or resistance to his rule would be blasphemy.
Money and subtle are the ideological weapons the state and its intellectuals have used
over the centuries to induce their subjects to accept their rule.
One excellent weapon has been the power of tradition.
The longer lasting the rule of any given state, the more powerful this weapon.
For then the X dynasty, or the Y state, has the seeming weight of centuries of tradition
behind it.
Worship of one's ancestors then becomes a none-too-subtle means of cultivating worship
of one's ancestral rulers.
The force of tradition is, of course, bolstered by ancient habit, which confirms the subjects
in the seeming propriety and legitimacy of the rule under which they live.
Thus, the political theorist Bertrand de Juvenel has written,
The essential reason for obedience is that it has become a habit of the species.
Power is for us a fact of nature.
From the earliest days of recorded history it has always presided over human destinies.
The authorities which ruled in former times did not disappear without bequeathing to their successors their privilege,
nor without leaving in men's minds imprints which are cumulative in their effect.
The succession of governments which, in the course of centuries, rule the same society, may be looked on as one underlying government which takes on continuous accretions.
Another potent ideological force is for the state to deprecate the individual and exalt either the past or the present collectivity of society.
Any isolated voice, any razor of new doubts, can then be attacked as a profane violator of the wisdom of his ancestors.
Moreover, any new idea, much less any new critical idea, must necessarily begin as a small minority opinion.
Therefore, in order to ward off any potentially dangerous idea from threatening majority acceptance of its rule,
Rule.
The state will try to nip the new idea in the bud by ridiculing any view that sets itself
against mass opinion.
The ways in which the state rulers in ancient Chinese despotisms used religion as a method
of binding the individual to the state-run society were summarized by Norman Jacobs.
Chinese religion is a social religion, seeking to solve the problems of social interests,
and individual interests.
Religion is essentially a force of impersonal social adjustment and control rather than
a medium for the personal solutions of the individual, and social adjustment and control
are effected through education and reverence for superiors.
Reverence for superiors, superior in age and hence in education and experience, is the
ethical foundation of social adjustment and control.
In China, the interrelationship of political authority with orthodox religion equated heterodoxy
with political error.
The orthodox religion was particularly active in persecuting and destroying heterodox sects.
In this, it was backed by the secular power.
The general tendency of government to seek out and thwart any heterodox views was outlined
in typically witty and delightful style by the libertarian writer H. L. Mencken.
All that government can see in an original idea is potential change and hence an invasion
of its prerogatives.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for
himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest,
It is also particularly important for the state to make its rules seem inevitable.
Even if its reign is disliked, as it often is, it will then be met with the passive resignation
expressed in the familiar coupling of death and taxes.
One method is to bring to its side historical determinism.
If X state rules us, then this has been inevitably decreed for us by the inexorable laws of
history, or the divine will, or the absolute, or the material productive forces.
And nothing that any puny individuals may do can change the inevitable.
It is also important for the state to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any outcropping
A Searching of What is Now Called a Conspiracy Theory of History
For a search for conspiracies, as misguided as the results often are, means a search for
motives and an attribution of individual responsibility for the historical misdeeds of ruling elites.
If however any tyranny or venality or aggressive war imposed by the state was brought about
not by particular state rulers, but by mysterious and arcane social forces, or by the imperfect
state of the world, or if in some way everyone was guilty, we are all murderers, proclaims
a common slogan, then there is no point in anyone's becoming indignant or rising up
against such misdeeds.
Furthermore, a discrediting of conspiracy theories, or indeed of anything smacking of
and Economic Determinism will make the subjects more likely to believe the general welfare
reasons that are invariably put forth by the modern state for engaging in any aggressive
actions.
The rule of the state is thus made to seem inevitable.
Furthermore, any alternative to the existing state is encased in an aura of fear.
Neglecting its own monopoly of theft and predation, the state raises the specter among its subjects
of the chaos that would supposedly ensue if the state should disappear.
The people on their own, it is maintained, could not possibly supply their own protection
against sporadic criminals and marauders.
Furthermore, each state has been particularly successful over the centuries in instilling
fear among its subjects of other state rulers.
With the land area of the globe now parceled out among particular states, one of the basic
Ludwig's doctrine and tactics of the rulers of each state has been to identify itself
with the territory it governs.
Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its population
with the state is a means of making natural patriotism work to the state's advantage.
If then, Ruritania is attacked by Waldavia, the first task of the Ruritanian state and
and its intellectuals is to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack is really upon
them, and not simply upon their ruling class.
In this way, a war between rulers is converted into a war between peoples, with each people
rushing to the defense of their rulers in the mistaken belief that the rulers are busily
defending them.
This device of nationalism has been particularly successful in recent centuries.
It was not very long ago, at least in Western Europe, when the mass of subjects regarded
wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles and their retinues.
Another tried-and-true method for bending subjects to one's will is the infusion
of guilt.
Any increase in private well-being can be attacked as unconscionable greed, materialism
or Excessive Affluence and Mutually Beneficial Exchanges in the Market can be denounced as
selfish.
Somehow the conclusion always drawn is that more resources should be expropriated from
the private sector and siphoned into the parasitic public or state sector.
Often the call upon the public to yield more resources is couched in a stern call by the
The Ruling Elite for More Sacrifices for the National or the Common Wheel Somehow, however,
while the public is supposed to sacrifice and curtail its materialistic greed, the sacrifices
are always one way.
The state does not sacrifice.
The state eagerly grabs more and more of the public's material resources.
Indeed, it is a useful rule of thumb.
When your ruler calls aloud for sacrifices, look to your own life and pocketbook.
This sort of argumentation reflects a general double standard of morality that is always
applied to state rulers, but not to anyone else.
No one, for example, is surprised or horrified to learn that businessmen are seeking higher
profits.
No one is horrified if workers leave lower-paying for higher-paying jobs.
All this is considered proper and normal behavior.
But if anyone should dare assert that politicians and bureaucrats are motivated by the desire
to maximize their incomes, the hue and cry of conspiracy theorist or economic determinist
spreads throughout the land.
The general opinion, carefully cultivated, of course, by the state itself, is that men
enter politics or government purely out of devoted concern for the common good and the
public wheel.
What gives the gentlemen of the state apparatus their superior moral patina?
Perhaps it is the dim and instinctive knowledge of the populace that the state is engaged
in Systematic Theft and Predation, and they may feel that only a dedication to altruism
on the part of the state makes these actions tolerable.
To consider politicians and bureaucrats subject to the same monetary aims as everyone else
would strip the Robin Hood veil from the state predation, for it would then be clear that
in the Oppenheimer phrasing, ordinary citizens were pursuing the peaceful, productive, economic
means to wealth, while the state apparatus was devoting itself to the coercive and exploitative
organized political means. The emperor's clothes of supposed altruistic concern for the common wheel
would then be stripped from him. The intellectual arguments used by the
state throughout history to engineer consent by the public can be classified into two parts.
Arguments 1.
That rule by the existing government is inevitable, absolutely necessary, and far better than
the indescribable evils that would ensue upon its downfall.
And 2.
That the state rulers are especially great, wise, and altruistic men.
Far greater, wiser, and better than their simple subjects.
In former times, the latter argument took the form of rule by divine right, or by the
The Divine Ruler Himself, or by an aristocracy of men.
In modern times, as we indicated earlier, this argument stresses not so much divine
approval as rule by a wise guild of scientific experts, especially endowed in knowledge of
statesmanship and the arcane facts of the world.
The increasing use of scientific jargon, especially in the social sciences, has permitted intellectuals
The Theory of Money and Credit
In recent years, we have seen the development in the United States of a profession of national security managers, of bureaucrats who never face electoral procedures, but who continue through administration after administration, secretly using their supposed special expertise to plan wars, interventions, and military adventures.
Only their egregious blunders in the Vietnam War have called their activities into any
sort of public question.
Before that, they were able to ride high, wide and handsome over the public they saw
mostly as cannon fodder for their own purposes.
A public debate between isolationist Senator Robert A. Taft and one of the leading national
security intellectuals, McGeorge Bundy, was instructive in demarking both the issues at
at Stake and the Attitude of the Intellectual Ruling Elite.
Bundy attacked Taft in early 1951 for opening a public debate on the waging of the Korean War.
Bundy insisted that only the executive policy leaders were equipped to manipulate diplomatic
and military force in a lengthy decades-long period of limited war against the communist nations.
It was important, Bundy maintained, that public opinion and public debate be excluded from
promulgating any policy role in this area.
For, he warned, the public was unfortunately not committed to the rigid national purposes
discerned by the policy managers.
It merely responded to the ad hoc realities of given situations.
Bundy also maintained that there should be no recriminations or even examination of the
and the Decisions of the Policy Managers, because it was important that the public accept their decisions without question.
Taft, in contrast, denounced the secret decision-making by military advisors and specialists in the executive branch,
decisions effectively sealed off from public scrutiny.
Furthermore, he complained, if anyone dared to suggest criticism or even a thorough debate,
He was at once branded as an isolationist and a saboteur of unity and the bipartisan
foreign policy.
Similarly, at a time when President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles were privately
contemplating going to war in Indo-China, another prominent national security manager,
George F. Kennan, was advising the public that there are times when, having elected
a Government, we will be best advised to let it govern and let it speak for us, as it
will in the councils of the nations.
We see clearly why the state needs the intellectuals, but why do the intellectuals need the state?
Put simply, the intellectuals' livelihood in the free market is generally none too secure,
for the intellectual, like everyone else on the market, must depend on the values and
and Choices of the Masses of His Fellow Men, and it is characteristic of these masses that
they are generally uninterested in intellectual concerns.
The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a warm, secure, and
permanent birth in its apparatus, a secure income, and the panoply of prestige.
The eager alliance between the State and the intellectuals was symbolized by the avid desire
of the professors at the University of Berlin in the 19th century to form themselves into
what they themselves proclaimed as the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern.
From a superficially different ideological perspective, it can be seen in the revealingly
outraged reaction of the eminent Marxist scholar of ancient China, Joseph Needham, to Carl
Wittvogel's assiduous critique of ancient Chinese despotism.
Wittvogel had shown the importance for bolstering the system of the Confucian glorification
of the gentleman scholar officials who manned the ruling bureaucracy of despotic China.
Needham charged indignantly that the civilization which Professor Wittvogel is so bitterly attacking
was one which could make poets and scholars into officials.
What matter the totalitarianism so long as the ruling class is abundantly staffed by
certified intellectuals?
The worshipful and fawning attitude of intellectuals toward their rulers has been illustrated many
times throughout history.
A contemporary American counterpart to the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern
is the attitude of so many liberal intellectuals toward the office and person of the President.
Thus, to political scientist Professor Richard Neustadt, the president is the sole crown-like
symbol of the Union.
And policy manager Townsend Hoops, in the winter of 1960, wrote that under our system,
the people can look only to the president to define the nature of our foreign policy
problem and the national programs and sacrifices required to meet it with effectiveness.
After generations of such rhetoric, it is no wonder that Richard Nixon, on the eve of
his election as president, should thus describe his role.
He, the president, must articulate the nation's values, define its goals, and marshal its
will.
Nixon's conception of his role is hauntingly similar to Ernst Huber's articulation in
the Germany of the 1930s of the Constitutional Law of the Greater German Reich.
Miller wrote that the head of state sets up the great ends which are to be attained and
draws up the plans for the utilization of all national powers in the achievement of
the common goals.
He gives the national life its true purpose and value.
The attitude and motivation of the contemporary national security intellectual bodyguard of
the state has been caustically described by Marcus Raskin, who was a staff member of the
The National Security Council during the Kennedy administration.
Calling them mega-death intellectuals, Raskin writes that their most important function
is to justify and extend the existence of their employers.
In order to justify the continued large-scale production of these thermonuclear bombs and
missiles, military and industrial leaders needed some kind of theory to rationalize
their use.
This became particularly urgent during the late 1950s, when economy-minded members of
the Eisenhower administration began to wonder why so much money, thought, and resources
were being spent on weapons if their use could not be justified.
And so began a series of rationalizations by the defense intellectuals in and out of
the universities.
Military procurement will continue to flourish, and they will continue to demonstrate why
Why it Must
In this respect, they are no different from the great majority of modern specialists who
accept the assumptions of the organizations which employ them because of the rewards in
money and power and prestige.
They know enough not to question their employer's right to exist.
This is not to say that all intellectuals everywhere have been court intellectuals,
servitors and junior partners of power.
But this has been the ruling condition in the history of civilizations, generally in
the form of a priestcraft, just as the ruling condition in those civilizations has been
one or another form of despotism.
There have been glorious exceptions, however, particularly in the history of Western civilization,
where intellectuals have often been trenchant critics and opponents of state power and have
have used their intellectual gifts to fashion theoretical systems which could be used in
the struggle for liberation from that power.
But invariably, these intellectuals have only been able to arise as a significant force
when they have been able to operate from an independent power base, an independent property
base, separate from the apparatus of the state.
For wherever the state controls all property, wealth, and employment, everyone is economically
dependent on it, and it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for such independent criticism
to arise.
It has been in the West, with its decentralized foci of power, its independent sources of
property and employment, and therefore of bases from which to criticize the state, where
where a body of intellectual critics has been able to flourish.
In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church, which was at least separate, if not independent
from the state, and the new free towns were able to serve as centers of intellectual and
also of substantive opposition.
In later centuries, teachers, ministers, and pamphleteers in a relatively free society
were able to use their independence from the state to agitate for further expansion of
freedom.
In contrast, one of the first libertarian philosophers, Lao Tse, living in the midst
of ancient Chinese despotism, saw no hope of achieving liberty in that totalitarian
society except by counseling quietism to the point of the individuals dropping out of social
life altogether.
With decentralized power, with a church separate from the state, with flourishing towns and
cities able to develop outside the feudal power structure, and with freedom in society,
the economy was able to develop in Western Europe in a way that transcended all previous
civilizations.
Furthermore, the Germanic, and particularly the Celtic, tribal structure, which succeeded
The disintegrating Roman Empire had strong libertarian elements.
Instead of a mighty state apparatus exerting a monopoly of violence, disputes were solved
by contending tribesmen consulting the elders of the tribe on the nature and application
of the tribe's customary and common law.
The chief was generally merely a war leader who was only called into his warrior role
whenever war with other tribes was underway. There was no permanent war or military bureaucracy
in the tribes. In Western Europe, as in many other civilizations, the typical model of
the origin of the state was not via a voluntary social contract, but by the conquest of one
tribe by another. The original liberty of the tribe or the peasantry thus falls victim
Welcome to the Conquerors.
At first, the conquering tribe killed and looted the victims and rode on.
But at some time, the conquerors decided that it would be more profitable to settle down
among the conquered peasantry and rule and loot them on a permanent and systematic basis.
The periodic tribute exacted from the conquered subjects eventually came to be called taxation.
And with equal generality, the conquering chieftains parceled out the land of the peasantry
to the various warlords, who were then able to settle down and collect feudal rent from
the peasantry.
The peasants were often enslaved, or rather, insurfed, to the land itself to provide a
continuing source of exploited labor for the feudal lords.
We may note a few prominent instances of the birth of a modern state through conquest.
One was the military conquest of the Indian peasantry in Latin America by the Spaniards.
The conquering Spanish not only established a new state over the Indians, but the land
of the peasantry was parceled out among the conquering warlords, who were ever after to
collect rent from the tillers of the land.
Another instance was the new political form imposed upon the Saxons of England after their
conquest by the Normans in 1066.
The land of England was parceled out among the Norman warrior lords, who thereby formed
a state and feudal land apparatus of rule over the subject population.
For the libertarian, the most interesting and perhaps the most poignant example of the
creation of a state through conquest was the destruction of the libertarian society of
ancient Ireland by England in the seventeenth century, a conquest which established an imperial
and Ejected Numerous Irish from Their Cherished Land The Libertarian Society of Ireland, which lasted for a thousand years, and which will be described further below, was able to resist English conquest for hundreds of years because of the absence of a state which could be conquered easily, and then used by the conquerors to rule over the native population.
But while throughout Western history, intellectuals have formulated theories designed to check and limit state power, each state has been able to use its own intellectuals to turn those ideas around into further legitimations of its own advance of power.
Thus, originally in Western Europe, the concept of the divine right of kings was a doctrine promoted by the Church to limit state power.
The idea was that the king could not just impose his arbitrary will.
His edicts were limited to conforming with the divine law.
As absolute monarchy advanced, however, the kings were able to turn the concept around to the idea
that God put his stamp of approval on any of the king's actions, that he ruled by divine right.
Similarly, the concept of parliamentary democracy began as a popular check on the absolute rule of the monarch.
The king was limited by the power of parliament to grant him tax revenues.
Gradually, however, as parliament displaced the king as head of state, the parliament itself became the unchecked state sovereign.
In the early 19th century, English utilitarians, who advocated additional individual liberty in the name of social utility and the general welfare, were to see these concepts turned into sanctions for expanding the power of the state.
As de Jouvenel writes,
Many writers on theories of sovereignty have worked out one or the other of these restrictive devices.
But in the end, every single such theory has, sooner or later, lost its original purpose,
and come to act merely as a springboard to power, by providing it with the powerful aid of an invisible sovereign,
with whom it could, in time, successfully identify itself.
Certainly, the most ambitious attempt in history to impose limits on the state was the Bill of Rights and other restrictive parts of the United States Constitution.
Here, written limits on government became the fundamental law to be interpreted by a judiciary supposedly independent of the other branches of government.
All Americans are familiar with the process by which John C. Calhoun's prophetic analysis has been vindicated.
The state's own monopoly judiciary has inexorably broadened the construction of state power over the last century and a half.
But few have been as keen as liberal professor Charles Black, who hails the process,
in seeing that the state has been able to transform judicial review itself from a limiting device
into a powerful instrument for gaining legitimacy for its actions in the minds of the public.
If a judicial decree of unconstitutional is a mighty check on governmental power, so too a verdict of constitutional is an equally mighty weapon for fostering public acceptance of ever greater governmental power.
Professor Black begins his analysis by pointing out the crucial necessity for legitimacy of any government in order to endure,
That is, basic majority acceptance of the government and its actions.
Acceptance of legitimacy, however, becomes a real problem in a country like the United States,
where substantive limitations are built into the theory on which the government rests.
What is needed, adds Black, is a method by which the government can assure the public that its expanding powers are indeed constitutional.
And this, he concludes, has been the major historic function of judicial review.
Let Black illustrate the problem.
The supreme risk to the government is that of disaffection and a feeling of outrage widely
disseminated throughout the population, and loss of moral authority by the government
as such, however long it may be propped up by force or inertia or the lack of an appealing
Almost everybody living under a government of limited powers must sooner or later be subjected to some governmental action which, as a matter of private opinion, he regards as outside the power of government, or positively forbidden to government.
A man is drafted, though he finds nothing in the Constitution about being drafted.
A farmer is told how much wheat he can raise.
He believes, and he discovers that some respectable lawyers believe with him that the government
has no more right to tell him how much wheat he can grow than it has to tell his daughter
whom she can marry.
A man goes to the federal penitentiary for saying what he wants to, and paces his cell
A businessman is told what he can ask, and must ask, for buttermilk.
The danger is real enough that each of these people, and who is not of their number, will
confront the concept of governmental limitation with the reality, as he sees it, of the flagrant
overstepping of actual limits, and draw the obvious conclusion as to the status of his
is Government with Respect to Legitimacy.
This danger is averted, Black adds, by the states propounding the doctrine that some one
agency must have the ultimate decision on constitutionality, and that this agency must
be part of the federal government itself.
For while the seeming independence of the federal judiciary has played a vital role
Professor Black concedes that the government has thereby set itself up as a judge in its
own case, and has thus violated a basic juridical principle for arriving at any kind of just
decision.
But Black is remarkably light-hearted about this fundamental breach.
The final power of the state must stop where the law stops it.
And who shall set the limit, and who shall enforce the stopping against the mightiest
power?
Why, the state itself, of course, through its judges and its laws.
Who controls the temperate?
Who teaches the wise?
And so Black admits that when we have a state, we hand over all our weapons and means of
coercion to the state apparatus.
We turn over all of our powers of ultimate decision-making to this deified group.
And then we must jolly well sit back quietly and await the unending stream of justice that
will pour forth from these institutions, even though they are basically judging their own
case.
Black sees no conceivable alternative to this coercive monopoly of judicial decisions enforced
by the state, but here is precisely where our new movement challenges this conventional
view and asserts that there is a viable alternative, libertarianism.
Seeing no such alternative, Professor Black falls back on mysticism in his defense of
of the State, for in the final analysis he finds the achievement of justice and legitimacy
from the state's perpetual judging of its own cause to be something of a miracle.
In this way, the liberal black joins the conservative Burnham in falling back on the miraculous
and thereby admitting that there is no satisfactory rational argument in support of the state.
Applying his realistic view of the Supreme Court to the famous conflict between the Court
and the New Deal in the 1930s, Professor Black chides his liberal colleagues for their short-sightedness
in denouncing judicial obstructionism.
The standard version of the story of the New Deal and the Court, though accurate in its
way, displaces the emphasis.
It concentrates on the difficulties.
It almost forgets how the whole thing turned out.
The upshot of the matter was, and this is what I like to emphasize, that after some
24 months of balking, the Supreme Court, without a single change in the law of its composition,
or indeed in its actual manning, placed the affirmative stamp of legitimacy on the New
Deal and on the whole new conception of government in America.
In this way, the Supreme Court was able to put the quietest to the large body of Americans
who had strong constitutional objections to the expanded powers of the New Deal.
Of course, not everyone was satisfied.
The Bonnie Prince Charlie of constitutionally commanded laissez-faire still stirs the hearts
of a few zealots in the highlands of choleric unreality.
But there is no longer any significant or dangerous public doubt as to the constitutional
power of Congress to deal as it does with the national economy.
We had no means, other than the Supreme Court, for imparting legitimacy to the New Deal.
Thus, even in the United States, unique among governments in having a Constitution, parts
of which, at least, were meant to impose strict and solemn limits upon its actions, even here,
the Constitution has proved to be an instrument for ratifying the expansion of state power
rather than the opposite.
As Calhoun saw, any written limits that leave it to government to interpret its own powers
are bound to be interpreted as sanctions for expanding and not binding those powers.
In a profound sense, the idea of binding down power with the chains of a written constitution
has proved to be a noble experiment that failed.
The idea of a strictly limited government has proved to be utopian.
Some other, more radical means must be found to prevent the growth of the aggressive state.
The libertarian system would meet this problem by scrapping the entire notion of creating
a government, an institution with a coercive monopoly of force over a given territory,
and then hoping to find ways to keep that government from expanding.
The libertarian alternative is to abstain from such a monopoly government to begin with.
We will explore the entire notion of a stateless society, a society without formal government
in later chapters.
But one instructive exercise is to try to abandon the habitual ways of seeing things,
and to consider the argument for the state de novo.
Let us try to transcend the fact that for as long as we can remember, the state has
monopolized police and judicial services in society.
Suppose that we were all starting completely from scratch, and that millions of us had
been dropped down upon the earth, fully grown and developed, from some other planet.
Debate begins as to how protection, police and judicial services will be provided.
Someone says, let's all give all of our weapons to Joe Jones over there and to his relatives,
and let Jones and his family decide all disputes among us.
In that way, the Joneses will be able to protect all of us from any aggression or fraud that
anyone else may commit.
With all the power and all the ability to make ultimate decisions on disputes in the
hands of Jones, we will all be protected from one another.
and then let us allow the Joneses to obtain their income from this great service by using
their weapons and by exacting as much revenue by coercion as they shall desire.
Surely in that sort of situation no one would treat this proposal with anything but ridicule,
for it would be starkly evident that there would be no way in that case for any of us
to protect ourselves from the aggressions or the depredations of the Joneses themselves.
No one would then have the total folly to respond to that long-standing and most perceptive
query who shall guard the guardians by answering with Professor Black's blithe who controls
the temperate.
It is only because we have become accustomed over thousands of years to the existence of
the state that we now give precisely this kind of absurd answer to the problem of social
protection and defense.
And of course, the state never really did begin with this sort of social contract.
As Oppenheimer pointed out, the state generally began in violence and conquest.
Even if at times internal processes gave rise to the state, it was certainly never by general
consensus or contract.
The libertarian creed can now be summed up as 1.
The Absolute Right of Every Man to the Ownership of His Own Body
2.
The Equally Absolute Right to Own and Therefore to Control the Material Resources He Has Found
and Transformed and 3.
Therefore the Absolute Right to Exchange or Give Away the Ownership to Such Titles to
Whoever is Willing to Exchange or Receive Them.
As we have seen, each of these steps involves property rights.
But even if we call step one personal rights, we shall see that problems about personal
liberty inextricably involve the rights of material property or free exchange.
Or briefly, the rights of personal liberty and freedom of enterprise almost invariably
intertwine and cannot really be separated.
We have seen that the exercise of personal freedom of speech, for example, almost invariably
involves the exercise of economic freedom—that is, freedom to own and exchange material property.
The holding of a meeting to exercise freedom of speech involves the hiring of a hall, traveling
to the hall over roads, and using some form of transportation, etc.
The closely related freedom of the press even more evidently involves the cost of printing
and of using a press, the sale of leaflets to willing buyers, in short, all the ingredients
of economic freedom.
Furthermore, our example of shouting fire in a crowded theater provides us with the
clear guideline for deciding whose rights must be defended in any given situation.
The Guidelines Being Provided by Our Criterion The Rights of Property