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If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned.
We must, therefore, emphasize 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.[1]
the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.
the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion;
The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the “economic means.” The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another’s goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed “the political means” to wealth.
In the long run, the robber destroys his own subsistence by dwindling or eliminating the source of his own supply.
The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.[4]
The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.[5] Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others.
the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.”
the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime.
The State, completely in its genesis . . . is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group of men on a defeated group, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad.
support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature.
the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.[8]
even the essential purchasing of support by subsidies and other grants of privilege still does not obtain the consent of the majority.
For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently;
The intellectuals are, therefore, the “opinion-molders” in society.
It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State.
it is precisely characteristic of the masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual matters.
Another successful device was to instill fear of any alternative systems of rule or nonrule.
Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State’s advantage.
The longer that the rule of a State has been able to preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon;
The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism; there is no better way to stifle that criticism than to attack any isolated voice, any raiser of new doubts, as a profane violator of the wisdom of his ancestors. Another potent ideological force is to deprecate the individual and exalt the collectivity of society.
“Listen only to your brothers” or “adjust to society” thus become ideological weapons for crushing individual dissent.[17]
A “conspiracy theory” can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State’s ideological propaganda.
In the present more secular age, the divine right of the State has been supplemented by the invocation of a new god, Science.
A robber who justified his theft by saying that he really helped his victims, by his spending giving a boost to retail trade, would find few converts; but when this theory is clothed in Keynesian equations and impressive references to the “multiplier effect,” it unfortunately carries more conviction.
see Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History
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.
the State has, in the process, largely transformed judicial review itself from a limiting device to yet another instrument for furnishing ideological legitimacy to the government’s actions.
What is needed, adds Black, is a means by which the government can assure the public that its increasing powers are, indeed, “constitutional.”
We had no means, other than the Supreme Court, for imparting legitimacy to the New Deal.[28]
Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the State is profoundly and inherently anticapitalist.
Whether it is Socialist or whether it is not, Power must always be at war with the capitalist authorities and despoil the capitalists of their accumulated wealth; in doing so it obeys the law of its nature.[34]
What the State fears above all, of course, is any fundamental threat to its own power and its own existence.
We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely—those against private citizens or those against itself?
