[Originally published in The Voluntaryist, article by Mike Morris]
A seemingly trivial, though widely unrecognized, fact of the State is that it must first do they very thing—steal, through taxation—that it goes on to claim to protect us against: theft, aggression, etc. It’s an inherent and unavoidable contradiction for this taxman-protector. For something “good” to come out of it must be preceded by an act of original sin. Most people don’t consider this when they casually mention what they think is the proper role for the State. That is, they don’t justify it in terms of “am I willing to use aggression to have this?” Most simply think of the State as some consensual organization of people whose proclamations aren’t really backed by force, but mere people asking nicely for your cooperation. In truth, its decrees are comply-or-die.
For instance, for the State to pretend that it is “our” protector, it must first violate our property rights by way of taxation before it can even go on to make the claim. Such is why the State is a protection racket: it unilaterally determines how much we pay for our “defense.” Would anyone find it excusable for someone to mow your yard without asking, and then demand at gunpoint that you must pay them for the service you never requested? I doubt it. What they’re doing to us today, say, taxing half our income, is indefinitely worse than what they posit would happen to us without them. Distant Arabs aren’t robbing us or telling us we must be licensed to run businesses; it’s the U.S. government.
Unlike private businesses, its ventures are not subject to the test of profit and loss, either. When the State loses money, it continues operations and forces us to pay more; when crime rises, it says it needs a bigger budget; when it misappropriates funds, it says “whoops”; when it screws up, harasses or kills us, you can’t discontinue your payments but must keep being a “customer.” In short, abstention from buying is not an option; the boycott (called resistance) is not without consequence.
Since what the State spends money on had to first be coercively extracted from the people, whose preferences would otherwise be for something else, evident by their demonstrated preference not to voluntarily fund said operations, the State is inherently wasteful, too, i.e., it goes to satisfy something less-valued at the expense of something valued higher, thus a loss in social utility.
And since its income is not dependent upon continued voluntary payments, it has no incentive to care for us, nor to protect the capital values of its resources (that now no one really owns); and furthermore no reason to care if what it provides is anything the people really wanted. In addition, no incentive, nor means of knowing, where to direct these resources. Without private property, and thus the prices that come out of free exchange, there can be no rational allocation of resources. Its use of resources therefore must come at the expense, or the cost, of the non-production of something that we valued even higher. The State thus indisputably grows at the expense of the people.
Contrary to popular superstition, the State is not “us”, either. Its progress—which means more production of its only products: inflation, taxation, war, bureaucracy, etc.—means our decline. The State is not a producer; the people are, and the State the expropriators. The State is that class of privileged people who claim a superior right to aggressively appropriate, which is to say, expropriate, our resources, whereas no one else has such a legal right; and where no one has the moral right. It’s one law for them, another law for us.
This conflation of state and society has thus been detrimental to true progress. Seeing them as one and the same, the people have largely come to believe that to have one you must have the other; there is no society without it. I would argue differently: The State comes at the expense of society; and to have a society, you don’t need a State.
The centralization of government substitutes for local, community-driven solutions its own plans; plans that increase dependence and grow its power, just how they want it. The State wants to be the sole arbiter in disputes; and so it creates conflicts, and the further they go on the harder it is for anyone to see a way to reverse this, i.e., to get rid of the State. Interestingly, as non-consensual exchanges accumulate, consensual exchange becomes more unforeseeable.
Societies work their problems out best internally, i.e., when they arbitrate privately. Democracy is only a source of conflict for incompatible peoples, as we see today. Forcing everyone into a democracy doesn't make them altruistic toward one another; it makes their interests antagonistic, causing hostility and pitting neighbors against each other. Harmony is found in the market economy; in consensual exchange.
Nor is the State a charity, as many probably think of it as; and private charity is not socialism. Charity is a voluntary act, and should be community-based. But now with the Federal welfare-state, people shrug off the notion that they should act themselves. The government will take care of that homeless man, right? They will take care of my health when it’s ailing, right? Daddy-government is substituted for personal responsibility as are community-based solutions for centralization of power. This “forced altruism”, which democratic-socialists propose, is contrary to the idea of being altruistic, which again must be a voluntary act. It’s like being forced to apologize when you’re not really sorry. It’s not genuine. Benevolence doesn’t come at the barrel of a gun.
Socialism, conceived of as aggression against private property, is not “progress” for mankind. The height of civilization should be that of voluntary cooperation. Rather, we’re supposed to believe that coercion is a means to forcibly make us civilized. Such a scheme should be roundly dismissed as the method that brings about community, if that is anyone’s concern. It does the opposite; and the more it destroys community, the more people become dependent upon it, and the less community-driven solutions we have.
Such is why it is in the interest of those who make up the State to destroy community, the family, or other such institutions that compete with it for security: they offer an alternative to government in its coercive, institutionalized form, which it doesn’t like. Humans can self-govern; but in order to rule them they have to be made to believe they cannot. The propagandists have been thoroughly successful.
The way people think of the State, abstractly as some nice social tool full of benevolent people working tirelessly in our interest, is, needless to say, not the reality. But as well, the issues behind anarchism are often dealt with too much in the abstract as well. While the burden of proof should be on the person advocating aggression, anarchists are expected to conceive of every possible detail of an admittedly conjectural stateless society, or else we keep the demonstrably atrocious State, an entity absolutely evil and corrupt to the core.
Though many precedents exist in some time or place for the private provision of each of the goods and services we contend could all be privatized, but which are now thought could only be “public goods”, this argument is more intellectual than the task before us of getting rid of statism wherever possible. We don’t have every answer, and we should be comfortable with that: nor do the central-planners! Spontaneous order cannot be predicted, but should be free to function.
We’re not utopians who think that statelessness is perfect; we’re simply asserting that it’s preferable. The utopian idea is socialism, or “limited”-statism as in the “minimum-government” constitutionalist idea that failed to restrain itself in the United States. This is why it the only logical conclusion to classical liberalism is anarcho-capitalism: to oppose all aggression, even in the name of a “national defense” that supposedly must be of public provision.
No anarchist is promising to make crime vanish. We’re upholding, what I believe correctly, that no crime could amount to the one’s presently concocted by the State; that their theft and plunder of our resources couldn’t exist on such a grand scale without this institutionalization of aggression against property and people they’ve shrouded in legitimacy; that their wars turn skirmishes into world-wars; and that local, community-based “government” could devise the means to preserve their property rights and lives in a manner far more superior than that institution—the centralized state—which is only pretending to do so.
Few would still believe, or openly admit, they think the Federal government still represents them, though most still find it indispensable despite its misgivings. The idea that Trump, or anyone else, has the “consent of the governed” is, if using the metric of voter turnout, quickly refuted in that three-fourths of eligible voters didn’t vote for the victor; around half abstained altogether. There is no representative “mandate.” Their right to rule us is just a decree. They use the fallacy of “proof by assertion” to justify their rule: point to a law on the books and say it applies “because we said so.”
We need alternatives to the coercive monopolist State, and it’s necessarily only voluntaryists that offer it. We’re not against people voluntarily organizing however they wish, be it a commune that lives by “each according to his need, each according to his ability”; an all-white Christian community that excludes, say, blacks and non-Christians; an all-gay community; or whatever an example you wish to make. Any non-aggressive configuration is possible and compatible with liberty. Any competition in government is an improvement from the present state of centralized authority.
Today, we live under a massive State where people intend to use it to maximize inclusivity, thereby destroying the rights of free association through non-discrimination laws; and hence destroying liberty and prosperity with it. Discrimination is a right, as harsh as this may be interpreted. Such is the problem of the State: we’re not free to deny its coerced services.
While we still see the need for community, but haven’t confused this for relationships that are coerced, i.e., non-consensual, like our association with the State, we reject the notion that non-contractors of our property should decide for us how we live. Other people who are liberty-adverse like to claim that this is “necessarily a government” to form together in a union to protect ourselves, but this is distinguished by the primary feature of the State as an aggressive monopolist over a given territory, which self-governing is not.
People should be free to voluntarily organize into whatever different ways are to their own specifications. And when they do, this isn’t a State; it’s a genuinely contractual relation unlike that of the State’s “social contract.” This idea of self-determination, or self-ownership, is a spirit that needs to return into the people’s hearts. Free association, i.e., consent, is what man knows. Everything else is coercion and slavery.
Now, I don’t think a libertarian social order must be conservative, as some seem to think. It must uncoerced. Whatever flourishes in the absence of coercion is up to those people. Preferences outside of political philosophy (say, to smoke cannabis, or homosexuality) should remain outside of it. The problem, really, with most is that they want to insert their personal morality into it, in an inability to compartmentalize thoughts.
It’s necessarily another misconception of the anarchist position that what we demand is ultimate individual autonomy, i.e., the freedom to go do whatever we want to, wherever we want to. While I do think this individualism could be achieved, being that there presently exists a State our position first and foremost is to advocate rolling it back and any and every point; cut, chop, and abolish everywhere possible.
Taxation is not necessary, but is inexcusable and patently coercive. If it must exist, it should be as localized as possible. But shipping our money away thousands of miles is obviously not in our interest. With small communities, or “governments” if you will, achieved after a decentralization and abolishment of the State, such might be considered truly contractual at that point (since you could actually “leave if you don’t like it”, and go right up the way). Wouldn’t it be nice to travel a couple hundred miles some way and discover a whole group of people who would look at you dumbfounded if you asked if they knew who Donald Trump was? Instead, the geographically-huge U.S. government, the monopoly on force for 3.7 million square miles, has extended its reach into life everywhere. It knows no bounds.
Being that humans are diverse, subjective, and unique individuals (and such philosophies as Marxism deny this), it’s insane to believe that one government could represent us all. There is no reason it’s not possible for us to revert, though not economically or socially, but indeed the opposite, to a decentralized governance.
Those who champion diversity for no reason but to virtue-signal are probably useful idiots for those who centrally control societies. States create homogeneity, not diversity. The aim of the State is to destroy preexisting culture, nationalities, families, “governments”, etc., and subject the people to their one-size-fits-all ways, which always comes before the individual; to prevent any and all competition in security; to turn us all into one similar mold where no one person can think for themselves. They wish also to quell rebellion at an early age as they do so through the public school system, which again should be provided privately by local, not central, organizations. As the sometimes-pessimistic H.L. Mencken points out:
“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, insane and intolerable.”
He was right: we should find it an Intolerable Act of their very existence, which is only to subjugate us.
Liberty, on the contrary, would offer true diversity; a chance to truly see what types of governance can evolve outside of the central state. We still see it to a smaller degree now, such as how the Colorado government won’t cage you anymore simple marijuana possession, but whereas the Utah government might. But why should be stop there? The “governor” should make laws for everyone living within “Colorado’s” borders? Why can’t Colorado be broken into fifty pieces as is the United States as a whole?
As Murray Rothbard put it, which should make the case against the nation-state maintaining its territory:
“Once one concedes that a single world government is not
necessary, then where does one logically stop at the
permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United
States can be separate nations without being denounced as in
a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South
secede from the United States? New York State from the
Union? New York City from the state? Why may not
Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each
house? Each person?”
We should stop the division between all those who want liberty—between anarcho-capitalists, minarchists, constitutionalists, disaffected conservatives, and perhaps even Antifa types (though they can’t stop labeling anyone who wants freedom an “alt-right fascist”, and I’m unsure they’re not just communists who are unwilling to reason)—and unite against the rise of statism, which most certainly will continue under Trump. Republicans have long since ceased to be advocates for limited government. Now they, like their adversaries on the Left, simply wish to be the ones in control. There is nothing wrong with the presidency per se; who presides over the office is what’s important.
If we could ever even hope to get to that point, where the State’s role was no more than “collective defense”, though this utopian idea of limited government has been a complete failure in the American experiment, then we’ll argue that last little bit of statism out of existence once we get there. But a long battle awaits us. The State’s success can be seen in that even anarchists are adopting titles of “left” and “right”, and can’t join together to oppose the central government.
But division, as many know, is the name of the State’s game: Divide et impera. A “low class consciousness” prevails toward the ruling-class. They’ve submitted us into docility. Anything the people might revolt against, if not the State, is the wrong enemy; or at least not the primary one. The State wants us to bicker over petty issues it has politicized so that no one takes issue with itself. Talk about abortion, not the IRS.
It’s sad this is where we have found ourselves. We could all be interconnected through trade and the division of labor, but instead we choose politicking. Man’s nature though—preferring more goods to less—in democracy means mass plunder; all against all; the tragedy of commons. In liberty, it's to trade, not to war; to peaceably cooperate with each other. When I see the so-called political-Left – represented by the Bernie Sanders cult and Antifa-types – and the political-Right – represented by Trump supporters – fighting in the street (as in Berkeley, California) it strikes me as the end of America as we know it. We forgot what we should be doing: living. I guess we’re all just protesters now. It truly isn’t how our lives are supposed to be—politicized as they are. We’re supposed to be living, laughing, loving, producing and exchanging. We’re not supposed to be embroiled in political battles. This isn't normal; it’s not our nature to know this.
Can anyone recall a time when American society was so politicized and divided than today? I’d say it’s truly unprecedented what we’re witnessing, and that these developments, specifically the rise to national prominence of “Antifa” after Trump’s near-unexpected victory – the violent, wrongheaded anti-capitalist Leftists who have existed long before their recent popularity, now to oppose Trump – will not end nicely. Internal strife is brewing; a second American Revolution is not out of the question. Hopefully Trump will do what Obama did not: totally delegitimize the State, revealing it for the sick joke it is.
Their schemes are just that: schemes meant to swindle the people. The State is shrouded in such perceived legitimacy that even when they fail outright they are still sustained as solutions. The aim of egalitarianism by socialization often isn't achieved anyway; bureaucrats direct resources where they think they're most valued. A ruling elite form among them.
This explicit goal of “equality” through the State is a fantasy. Why are there such inequalities today when the State is bigger than ever? Chavistas ostensibly pushed this for Venezuelans too and look what has happened down there. While inequality is natural and would be the case in an anarchist society, as production and exchange increase the total social wealth the economic system would grow to alleviate poverty for many marginalized people who previously suffered under taxation, regulations, trade restrictions, and all of the hindering effects of central government. The people would flourish and thrive could we achieve a truly voluntary society, but it would seem that accepting enslavement is a built-in biological feature that all too many are unable to shake.
The institution of private property was one of the great advancements of civilization, for prosperity and liberty, and now, those spoiled by its fruits are hostile to it. The American government was never meant to evolve into a system of positive rights (e.g. “free” health care). Obviously though, once established, the State cannot be constrained. Begging the State for redistributed property is what keeps it in power. They know that. But no one is entitled to another man’s property. The only thing anyone owes you is liberty, which clearly centralized government doesn’t provide.
So, amidst the political bickering they’ve successfully reduced us all too, and would love for us to continue, don’t forget to care, and set a little time aside, for the people who truly care for you, i.e., not those people in government who pretend to be our representatives: family, friends, romantic partners, businesses, community centers, neighbors, clubs, those in need, and other social systems. They need your support; the State wants you to beg for theirs.
There is no stateless society without the society; and such relies on the bonds of family, friends, free association, etc. If private institutions (e.g. the family, the church, community center) will replace the State, we must not let the State tear them down.
Don’t confuse friend from foe. The State is not for “the people” and it’s not “progressive.” It’s regressive, rolling back our gains and stifling further ones. Any change that occurs with it is in spite of it, not because of it. Change comes from us, the people, not from politics. The sooner people begin to accept this, the sooner we’ll stop looking toward a backward institution as the only possibility for the advancement of mankind.