Part 3 The State vs. Liberty
Chapter 22 The Nature of the State
So far in this book we have developed a theory of liberty and property rights and have outlined
the legal code that would be necessary to defend those rights.
What of government?
The state.
What is its proper role, if any?
Most people, including most political theorists, believe that once one concedes the importance
or even the vital necessity of some particular activity of the state, such as the provision
of a legal code, that one has ipso facto conceded the necessity of the state itself.
The state indeed performs many important and necessary functions, from provision of law
to the supply of police and firefighters, to building and maintaining the streets, to
and Delivery of the Mail.
But this in no way demonstrates that only the state can perform such functions, or indeed
that it performs them even passively well.
Suppose for example that there are many competing cantaloupe stores in a particular neighborhood.
One of the cantaloupe dealers, Smith, then uses violence to drive all of his competitors
out of the neighborhood.
He has thereby employed violence to establish a coerced monopoly over the sale of cantaloupes
in a given territorial area.
Does that mean that Smith's use of violence to establish and maintain his monopoly was
essential to the provision of cantaloupes in the neighborhood?
Certainly not, for there were existing competitors as well as potential rivals should Smith ever
relax his use and threat of violence.
Moreover, economics demonstrates that Smith, as a coercive monopolist, will tend to perform his service badly and inefficiently.
Protected from competition by the use of force, Smith can afford to provide his service in a costly and inefficient manner,
since the consumers are deprived of any possible range of alternative choice.
Furthermore, should a group arise to call for the abolition of Smith's coercive monopoly,
There would be very few protesters with the temerity to accuse these abolitionists of wishing to deprive the consumers of their much desired cantaloupes.
And yet, the state is only our hypothetical Smith on a gigantic and all-encompassing scale.
Throughout history, groups of men calling themselves the government or the state have attempted, usually successfully, to gain a compulsory monopoly of the commanding heights of the economy and the society.
In particular, the State has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly over police and military services, the provision of law, judicial decision-making, the mint and the power to create money, unused land, the public domain, streets and highways, rivers and coastal waters and the means of delivering mail.
Control of land and transportation has long been an excellent method of assuring overall control of a society.
In many countries, highways began as a means of allowing the government to move its troops conveniently throughout its subject country.
Control of the money supply is a way to assure the state an easy and rapid revenue,
And the state makes sure that no private competitors are allowed to invade its self-arrogated monopoly of the power to counterfeit, that is, create new money.
Monopoly of the Postal Service has long been a convenient method for the state to keep an eye on possibly unruly and subversive opposition to its rule.
In most historical epochs, the state has also kept a tight control over religion, usually
cementing a comfortable, mutually supportive alliance with an established church.
With the state granting the priests power and wealth, and the church in turn teaching
the subject population their divinely proclaimed duty to obey Caesar.
But now that religion has lost much of its persuasive power in society, the state is
is often willing to let religion alone and to concentrate on similar, if looser, alliances
with more secular intellectuals. In either case, the state relies on control of the levers
of propaganda to persuade its subjects to obey or even exalt their rulers. But above
all, the crucial monopoly is the state's control of the use of violence, of the police and
and Armed Services and of the Courts, the locus of ultimate decision-making power in
disputes over crimes and contracts.
Control of the police and the army is particularly important in enforcing and assuring all of
the State's other powers, including the all-important power to extract its revenue by coercion.
For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the state apparatus.
All other persons and groups in society, except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such
as thieves and bank robbers, obtain their income voluntarily, either by selling goods
and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift, for example, membership in
and a club or association, bequest or inheritance.
Only the state obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income
not be forthcoming.
That coercion is known as taxation, although in less regularized epochs it was often known
as tribute.
Taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal
It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition
of taxation which does not also include theft.
Like the robber, the state demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint.
If the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist
such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.
It is true that state apologists maintain that taxation is really voluntary.
One simple but instructive refutation of this claim is to ponder what would happen if the
government were to abolish taxation and to confine itself to simple requests for voluntary
Contributions.
Does anyone really believe that anything comparable to the current vast revenues of the state
would continue to pour into its coffers?
It is likely that even those theorists who claim that punishment never deters action
would balk at such a claim.
The great economist Josef Schumpeter was correct when he acidly wrote that the theory which
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.
It has been recently maintained by economists that taxation is really voluntary because it is a method for everyone to make sure that everyone else pays for a unanimously desired project.
Everyone in an area, for example, is assumed to desire the government to build a dam.
But if A and B contribute voluntarily to the project, they cannot be sure that C and D will not shirk their similar responsibilities.
Therefore, all of the individuals, A, B, C, D, etc., each of whom wish to contribute to building the dam, agree to coerce each other through taxation.
Hence, the tax is not really coercion. There are, however, a great many flaws in this doctrine.
First is the inner contradiction between voluntarism and coercion. A coercion of all against all does not make any of this coercion voluntary.
Secondly, even if we assume for the moment that each individual would like to contribute to the dam, there is no way of assuring that the tax levied on each person is no more than he would be willing to pay voluntarily even if everyone else contributed.
The government may levy a thousand dollars on Jones, even though he might have been willing to pay no more than five hundred dollars.
The point is that precisely because taxation is compulsory, there is no way to assure, as is done automatically on the free market, that the amount any person contributes is what he would really be willing to pay.
In the free society, a consumer who voluntarily buys a TV set for $200 demonstrates by his freely chosen action that the TV set is worth more to him than the $200 he surrenders.
In short, he demonstrates that the $200 is a voluntary payment.
Or, a club member in the free society, by paying annual dues of $200, demonstrates that he considers the benefits of club membership worth at least $200.
But in the case of taxation, a man's surrender to the threat of coercion demonstrates no voluntary preference whatsoever for any alleged benefits he receives.
Thirdly, the argument proves too much.
For the supply of any service, not only dams, can be expanded by the use of the tax financing arm.
Suppose, for example, that the Catholic Church were established in a country through taxation.
The Catholic Church would undoubtedly be larger than if it relied on voluntary contributions.
But can it therefore be argued that such establishment is really voluntary,
voluntary, because everyone wants to coerce everyone else into paying into the church,
in order to make sure that no one shirks this duty?
And fourthly, the argument is simply a mystical one.
How can anyone know that everyone is really paying his taxes voluntarily on the strength
of this sophistical argument?
What of those people, environmentalists say, who are opposed to dams per se?
Is their payment really voluntary?
Would the coerced payment of taxes to a Catholic Church by Protestants or atheists also be
voluntary?
And what of the growing body of libertarians in our society, who oppose all action by the
government on principle?
In what way can this argument hold that their tax payments are really voluntary?
In fact, the existence of at least one libertarian or anarchist in a country is enough by itself
to demolish the really voluntary argument for taxation.
It is also contended that in democratic governments, the act of voting makes the government and
all its works and powers truly voluntary.
Again, there are many fallacies with this popular argument.
In the first place, even if the majority of the public specifically endorsed each and
every particular act of the government, this would simply be majority tyranny, rather than
a voluntary act undergone by every person in the country.
Murder is murder, theft is theft, whether undertaken by one man against another, or
by a group, or even by the majority of people within a given territorial area.
The fact that a majority might support or condone an act of theft does not diminish the criminal
essence of the act, or its grave injustice.
Otherwise, we would have to say, for example, that any Jews murdered by the democratically
elected Nazi government were not murdered, but only voluntarily committed suicide, surely
the grotesque but logical implication of the democracy-as-voluntary doctrine.
Secondly, in a republic, as contrasted to a direct democracy, people vote not for specific
measures but for representatives in a package deal.
The representatives then reek their will for a fixed length of time.
In no legal sense, of course, are they truly representatives, since in a free society the
The principle hires his agent or representative individually and can fire him at will.
As the great anarchist political theorist and constitutional lawyer Lysander Spooner
wrote, they, the elected government officials, are neither our servants, agents, attorneys,
nor representatives, for we do not make ourselves responsible for their acts.
If a man is my servant, agent or attorney, I necessarily make myself responsible for
all his acts done within the limits of the power I have entrusted to him.
If I have entrusted him as my agent with either absolute power, or any power at all, over
the persons or properties of other men than myself, I thereby necessarily make myself
are really the agents of nobody.
Furthermore, even on its own terms, voting can hardly establish majority rule, much less
of voluntary endorsement of government.
In the United States, for example, less than 40% of eligible voters bother to vote at all.
Of these, 21% may vote for one candidate and 19% for another.
21% scarcely establishes even majority rule, much less the voluntary consent of all.
In one sense, and quite apart from democracy or voting, the majority always supports any
existing government.
This will be treated below.
And finally, how is it that taxes are levied on one and all, regardless of whether they
How can either non-voting or voting for the loser indicate any sort of endorsement of
the actions of the elected government?
Neither does voting establish any sort of voluntary consent even by the voters themselves
to the government.
As Spooner trenchantly pointed out, in truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting
Banking is not to be taken as proof of consent.
On the contrary, it is to be considered that without his consent ever having been asked,
a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist, a government that forces
him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights
under peril of weighty punishments.
He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot.
He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving
himself from this tyranny of others by subjecting them to his own.
In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he uses the ballot, he
may become a master.
If he does not use it, he must become a slave.
And he has no other alternative than these two.
In self-defense, he attempts the former.
His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must
either kill others or be killed himself.
Because to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents,
it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing.
are in contests with the ballot, which is a mere substitute for a bullet, because as
his only chance of self-preservation a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the
contest is one into which he voluntarily entered, that he voluntarily set up all his own natural
rights as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers.
If the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed
the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of ameliorating their condition.
But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself that
crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or even consented to.
If then, taxation is compulsory, and is therefore indistinguishable from theft, it follows
It says that the state, which subsists on taxation, is a vast criminal organization, far more formidable and successful than any private mafia in history.
Furthermore, it should be considered criminal not only according to the theory of crime and property rights as set forth in this book,
but even according to the common apprehension of mankind, which always considers theft to be a crime.
As we have seen above, the 19th century German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer put the matter succinctly when he pointed out that there are two and only two ways of attaining wealth in society.
A. By production and voluntary exchange with others, the method of the free market, and B. By violent expropriation of the wealth produced by others.
The latter is the method of violence and theft. The former benefits all parties involved. The latter, parasitically, benefits the looting group or class at the expense of the looted.
Oppenheimer trenchantly termed the former method of obtaining wealth the economic means, and the latter, the political means.
Oppenheimer then went on brilliantly to define the state as the organization of the political means.
Nowhere has the essence of the state as a criminal organization been put as forcefully or as brilliantly as in this passage from Lysander Spooner.
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
He makes 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 imposters and insults and villainies
as these.
In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or
his slave.
It is instructive to inquire why it is that the state, in contrast to the high women,
invariably surrounds itself with an ideology of legitimacy, why it must indulge in all
the hypocrisies that Spooner outlines.
The reason is that the highwayman is not a visible, permanent, legal or legitimate member
of society, let alone a member with exalted status.
He is always on the run from his victims or from the state itself.
But the State, in contrast to a band of highwaymen, is not considered a criminal organization.
On the contrary, its minions have generally held the positions of highest status in society.
It is a status that allows the State to feed off its victims while making at least most
of them support, or at least be resigned to, this exploitative process.
In fact, it is precisely the function of the state's ideological minions and allies to
explain to the public that the emperor does indeed have a fine set of clothes.
In brief, the ideologists must explain that while theft by one or more persons or groups
is bad and criminal, that when the state engages in such acts, it is not theft, but the legitimate
and even sanctified act called taxation.
The ideologists must explain that murder by one or more persons or groups is bad and must
be punished, but that when the state kills it is not murder but an exalted act known
as war or repression of internal subversion.
They must explain that while kidnapping or slavery is bad and must be outlawed when done
by private individuals or groups, that when the state commits such acts it is not kidnapping
or Slavery, but conscription, an act necessary to the public wheel and even to the requirements
of morality itself.
The function of the statist ideologists is to weave the false set of emperor's clothes
to convince the public of a massive double standard, that when the state commits the
gravest of high crimes, it is really not doing so, but doing something else that is necessary,
Ideology has always been vital to the continued existence of the state, as attested by the
systematic use of ideology since the ancient oriental empires.
The specific content of the ideology has, of course, changed over time, in accordance
with changing conditions and cultures.
In the Oriental despotisms, the emperor was often held by the Church to be himself divine.
In our more secular age, the argument runs more to the public good and the general welfare.
But the purpose is always the same.
To convince the public that what the state does is not, as one might think, crime on
a gigantic scale, but something necessary and vital that must be supported and obeyed.
The reason that ideology is so vital to the state is that it always rests in essence on
the support of the majority of the public.
This support obtains whether the state is a democracy, a dictatorship or an absolute
Monarchy, for the support rests in the willingness of the majority, not, to repeat, of every
individual, to go along with the system, to pay the taxes, to go without much complaint
to fight the state's wars, to obey the state's rules and decrees.
This support need not be active enthusiasm to be effective, it can just as well be passive
of Resignation, but support there must be, for if the bulk of the public were really
convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing
more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take
on no more status or breadth of existence than another mafia gang.
Hence the necessity of the State's employment of ideologists, and hence the necessity of
The first modern political theorist who saw that all states rest on majority opinion was
the 16th century libertarian French writer Etienne de la Butte.
In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, de la Butte saw that the tyrannical state is
always a minority of the population, and that therefore its continued despotic rule must
rest on its legitimacy in the eyes of the exploited majority, on what would later come
to be called the engineering of consent.
Two hundred years later, David Hume, though scarcely a libertarian, set forth a similar
analysis.
Thus, as Hume stated, nothing appears more surprising than the easiness with which the
The many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their
own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.
When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force
is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but
opinion.
It is therefore on opinion that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the
The Most Despotic and Most Military Governments
The counter-argument that, with modern weapons, a minority force can permanently cow a hostile
majority, ignores the fact that these weapons can be held by the majority, and that the
armed force of the minority can mutiny or defect to the side of the populace.
Hence, the permanent need for persuasive ideology has always led the state to bring into its
This rubric, the nation's opinion-molding intellectuals. In former days, the intellectuals
were invariably the priests, and hence, as we have pointed out, the age-old alliance
between church and state, throne and altar. Nowadays, scientific and value-free economists
and national security managers, among others, perform a similar ideological function in
on behalf of state power.
Particularly important in the modern world, now that an established church is often no
longer feasible, is for the state to assume control over education and thereby to mold
the minds of its subjects.
In addition to influencing the universities through all manner of financial subventions
and through state-owned universities directly, the state controls education on the lower
levels through the universal institutions of the public school, through certification
requirements for private schools, and through compulsory attendance laws.
Add to this a virtually total control over radio and television, either through outright
state ownership, as in most countries, or, as in the United States, by the nationalization
of the airwaves and by the power of a Federal Commission to license the right of stations
to use those frequencies and channels.
Thus, the state by its very nature must violate the generally accepted moral laws to which
most people adhere.
Most people are agreed on the injustice and criminality of murder and theft.
The customs, rules and laws of all societies condemn these actions.
The state, then, is always in a vulnerable position, despite its seeming age-old might.
What particularly needs to be done is to enlighten the public on the state's true nature, so
that they can see that the state habitually violates the generally accepted injunctions
against robbery and murder, that the state is the necessary violator of the commonly
accepted moral and criminal law.
We have seen clearly why the state needs the intellectuals, but why do the intellectuals
need the state?
Put simply, it is because intellectuals, whose services are often not very intensively desired
by the mass of consumers, can find a more secure market for their abilities in the arms
of the state.
The state can provide them with a power, status and wealth which they often cannot obtain
in voluntary exchange.
For centuries, many, though of course not all, intellectuals have sought the goal of
power, the realization of the Platonic ideal of the philosopher-king.
Consider for example the cry from the heart by the distinguished Marxist scholar, Professor
Needham, in protest against the assiduous critique by Carl Wittfogel of the alliance
of state and intellectuals in Oriental despotisms.
The civilization which Professor Wittfogel is so bitterly attacking was one which could
make poets and scholars into officials.
Needham adds that the successive Chinese emperors were served in all ages by a great company
of profoundly humane and disinterested scholars.
Presumably for Professor Needham this is enough to justify the grinding despotisms of the
ancient Orient.
But we need not go back as far as the ancient Orient, or even as far as the proclaimed
goal of the professors at the University of Berlin in the 19th century, to form themselves
into the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern.
In contemporary America, we have the eminent political scientist, Professor Richard Neustadt,
hailing the President as the sole crown-like symbol of the Union.
We have National Security Manager Townsend Hoops writing 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.
And in response, we have Richard Nixon, on the eve of his election as President, defining
his role as follows.
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 the scholar Ernst Huber's articulation,
in the Germany of the 1930s, of the constitutional law of the greater German Reich.
Huber wrote that the head of state sets up the great ends which are to be attained,
Thus the State is a coercive criminal organization that subsists by a regularized large-scale system of taxation theft, and which gets away with it by engineering the support of the majority, not, again, of everyone, through state-owned, state-owned, state-owned, state-owned, state-owned, state-owned, state-owned, state-owned, state-owned,
Securing an alliance with a group of opinion-moulding intellectuals, whom it rewards with a share in its power and pelf.
But there is another vital aspect of the state that needs to be considered.
There is one critical argument for the state that now comes into view.
Namely, the implicit argument that the state apparatus really and properly owns the territorial area over which it claims jurisdiction.
The state, in short, arrogates to itself a monopoly of force, of ultimate decision-making power over a given territorial area, larger or smaller depending on historical conditions and on how much it has been able to wrest from other states.
If the state may be said to properly own its territory, then it is proper for it to make rules for anyone who presumes to live in that area.
It can legitimately seize or control private property because there is no private property
in its area, because it really owns the entire land surface.
So long as the state permits its subjects to leave its territory, then, it can be said
to act as does any other owner who sets down rules for people living on his property.
This seems to be the only justification for the crude slogan, America, love it or leave
as well as the enormous emphasis generally placed on an individual's right to emigrate from a country.
In short, this theory makes the state, as well as the king in the Middle Ages, a feudal overlord,
who at least theoretically owned all the land in his domain.
The fact that new and unowned resources, whether virgin land or lakes, are invariably claimed as owned by the state,
by the State, its public domain, is an expression of this implicit theory.
But our homesteading theory outlined above suffices to demolish any such pretensions
by the State apparatus.
For by what earthly right do the criminals of the State lay claim to the ownership of
its land area?
It is bad enough that they have seized control of ultimate decision-making for that area.
What criterion can possibly give them the rightful ownership of the entire territory?
The State may therefore be defined as that organization which possesses either or both,
in actual fact almost always both, of the following characteristics.
A. It acquires its revenue by physical coercion, taxation.
And B. It achieves a compulsory monopoly of force and of ultimate decision-making power
over a given territorial area. Both of these essential activities of the state necessarily
constitute criminal aggression and depredation of the just rights of private property of
its subjects, including self-ownership. For the first constitutes and establishes theft
on a grand scale, while the second prohibits the free competition of defense and decision-making
Agencies Within a Given Territorial Area, Prohibiting the Voluntary Purchase and Sale
of Defense and Judicial Services.
Given territorial area in this context of course implicitly means beyond the area of
each property owner's just property.
Obviously, in a free society, Smith has the ultimate decision-making power over his own
just property, Jones over his, etc.
The state or government claims and exercises a compulsory monopoly of defense and ultimate
decision-making over an area larger than an individual's justly acquired property.
Smith, Jones, etc. are thereby prohibited by the government from having nothing to do
with that government and from making their own defense contracts with a competing agency.
I am indebted to Professor Sidney Morgan Besser for raising this point.
Hence the justice of the vivid critique of the State by the libertarian theorist Albert
J. Nock.
The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime in a given territorial area.
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 alien.
It must be emphasized that the State does not merely use coercion to acquire its own
revenue, to hire propagandists to advance its power, and to arrogate to itself and to
enforce a compulsory monopoly of such vital services as police protection, firefighting,
Transportation and Postal Service.
For the State does many other things as well, none of which can in any sense be said to
serve the consuming public.
It uses its monopoly of force to achieve, as Nock puts it, a monopoly of crime, to
control, regulate and coerce its hapless subjects.
Often it pushes its way into controlling the morality and the very daily lives of its subjects.
The State uses its coerced revenue not merely to monopolize and provide genuine services
inefficiently to the public, but also to build up its own power at the expense of its exploited
and harassed subjects, to redistribute income and wealth from the public to itself and to
its allies, and to control, command and coerce the inhabitants of its territory.
In a truly free society, a society where individual rights of person and property are maintained,
the state then would necessarily cease to exist.
Its myriad of invasive and aggressive activities, its vast depredations on the rights of person
and property, would then disappear.
At the same time, those genuine services, which it does manage badly to perform, would
should be thrown open to free competition and to voluntarily chosen payments by individual consumers.
The grotesquerie of the typical conservative call for the government to enforce conservative definitions of morality,
for example, by outlawing the alleged immorality of pornography, is therefore starkly revealed.
Aside from other sound arguments against enforced morality, for example, that no action not
freely chosen can be considered moral, it is surely grotesque to entrust the function
of guardian of the public morality to the most extensive criminal and hence the most
immoral group in society, the state.