Chapter 1- The State Dethroned

The historical struggle

We can understand modern history as a perennial struggle between two main classes: the working class, the people who produce with their bodies and minds, those who are subject to the law; and the ruling class, those who would establish themselves as parasites upon that production, and who manufacture the law for their own interests.ⁱ More generally, it is a struggle between two moral positions: peaceful trade and legitimized coercion. When one dominates, the other cannot survive.



Primitive tribes are merely extensions of the societies already existing in other primates, which need to band together to defend themselves from predators (a need for organization which also led to the development of language and higher intelligence). Tribalism is therefore not primarily a political construct but rather social organization borne out of necessity. There are leaders but no parasitic ruling class, because parasites need pre-existing excess resources to steal their subsistence from. Subsistence societies have few of these excess resources.



As food production and metal working slowly progress, excess resources accumulate and prosperity follows. This permits the rise of a parasitic ruling class, which uses its brute strength to enforce its domination over groups of tribes, with the strongest at the top, using war and the threat of war as catalyser. This is monarchy, the simplest form of State. A State is an organization that monopolizes legitimized coercion on a given territory, or, more simply, a State is a group that imposes its will on people living in "its" territory by the force of propaganda and guns.

… at first recognized but temporarily during leadership in war, the authority of a chief is permanently established by continuity of war; and grows strong where successful war ends in subjection of neighbouring tribes. And thence onwards, examples furnished by all races put beyond doubt the truth, that the coercive power of the chief, developing into king, and king of kings (a frequent title in the ancient East), becomes great in proportion as conquest becomes habitual and the union of subdued nations extensive.ⁱⁱ

In a monarchy, exploitation is privately owned by a king and his very small corresponding ruling class. Given that there is no inherent reason why one person should hold all the power, and that any powerful fellow could covet the power of the king, it is very difficult for a monarch to justify his status, leading to rebellions, civil wars, coups, assassinations, and so on. Thus the symbiosis between the State and the Church is formed. The Church provides the justification for monarchic power (e.g. the king was chosen by the gods themselves, the king is a demi-god, etc.), and the State provides the general control needed for a given religion to impose itself on an entire society.



The constant desire to counter this exploitation leads to the downfall of monarchic beliefs and the rise of democracy. In a democracy, exploitation is publicly owned, which means that rulers do not profit from their subjects' prosperity, making them disinterested in said prosperity. While modern democracy was established with the naive intention of countering exploitation, it leads instead to the extension of the ruling class into all our social institutions. How is this state of affairs possible? Because democracy not only disinterests the ruling class in their subjects' prosperity, but it also gives the ruling class the legitimacy that it sorely lacked in the past in order to expand boundlessly, while still giving "the people" (i.e. the working class) no substantial decisional power over their own fate.



The end result of the democratic takeover is a widespread legitimization of the State through propaganda and monopolistic takeovers of social institutions, with no corresponding freedom or moral justification given to the population, no reason for the democratic State to be considered any more legitimate than a monarch. The democratic State constantly expands, with very few and small backwards steps, crowding out more and more of society, using its monopolistic power to destroy or control whole markets, raising the burden of "taxation," restricting freedom of trade, restricting the possibilities of the least fortunate and keeping them in poverty, waging wars both from without and within, eroding civil liberties, eroding the value of the monopoloid currency and the economy, and undermining voluntary resolutions to our social problems.

The lack of justification for the State

First, before we examine the nature of the current political system further, let us make this point totally clear: there is no justification for the existence of the State, and no such justification is possible.



You may think this is a rather shocking proposition, and that I'm starting rather abruptly. But this is not really the case. The proposition that there is no justification for the existence of the State is not inherently surprising. In a sense, it is in fact rather trivial, insofar as statists do not have the experience of strong and constant opposition that other believers contend with, such as Christians. The first modern Anarchist thinker is usually credited as being Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), starting his promotion of anti-State economics in the 1840s. An individualist Anarchist periodical called Liberty was published from 1881 to 1908. The modern scholarly study of Anarchy was popularized by the Center for the Study of Public Choice (including famous economist James Buchanan), as well as Murray Rothbard (an economist of the traditionally pro-capitalist Austrian school), both in the 1970s, which makes said study a very recent event on the political scene.



Nevertheless, my thesis is not only that such a justification has not yet arisen, but also that it cannot exist at all. The average statist on the street must believe that such a justification exists somewhere. This is different from a Christian believer, for example. A Christian living in the Western world cannot believe his faith to be an obvious, pragmatic fact, because he experiences constant opposition to at least some of his beliefs. While statist ideologies are really collectivist faiths of the same order than Christianity, Islam or Hinduism, the average statist, due to the amount of indoctrination he is plunged into from birth, believes statism and collectivist constructs to reflect obvious, pragmatic facts about human society. If justifications for these "obvious facts" are in fact completely absent, then his belief system is wholly untenable.



There are two possible kinds of justification for any organizational system: pragmatic or moral. Either a system must be preferred because it is more efficacious, i.e. it gives the desired results, or because it has inherent moral merit, i.e. it returns morally superior results.



Let us first examine the moral standpoint. One of the basic principles of morality is universality, i.e. whether a principle applies only to certain people, or to all people. A principle that only applies to certain individuals and not others is not a moral principle, but rather a preference or opinion. Such a preference has no more epistemic validity than the kind of ice cream I prefer. I may prefer strawberry ice cream, while you prefer chocolate ice cream. We acknowledge that such things are matters of taste, do not reflect the truth about anything but our internal states, and, given that different people have different internal states, cannot be applied to all. In order to be valid, a moral principle must apply to all human beings. This is reinforced by the fact that all moral agents share the same human needs, making the theoretical necessity of one the theoretical necessity of all.



What are the moral basics of statism? Statism is predicated on the sharp division of society in two general classes, as we have seen before. It also requires that the ruling class dictate moral standards for the working class through the construct of "the law," while not itself being bound to this standard. Theft is declared immoral according to the law, but "taxation," which is (at least, once we remove the rationalizations and uniforms) extortion, is declared to be moral, indeed a moral necessity. "Gun control" (or more properly, victim disarmament) is lauded as a just measure in order to reduce crime, but the statist police militarizes itself. Murder and slavery are the gravest crimes in the eyes of the State, but killing civilians in a "war" and "drafting" people to get killed in foreign lands are both seen as necessary evils. And I could go on and on for quite some time, but I think the point is clear. The ruling class as a whole exploits its citizenry by committing immoral actions which it itself condemns in its arbitrary code of laws.

Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime […], and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. 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. There is, for example, no human right, natural or Constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States Government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit: murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and connivance.ⁱⁱⁱ

Statism, therefore, miserably fails the test of universality. And it is easy to see intuitively why that is, as I noted before, everyone has the same human needs. If it is good for policemen to have guns in order to defend themselves against criminals, then one must note that other people also need to defend themselves against criminals. If it is good to steal in order to have less poverty, then one must note that no one wants to live in a society with poverty (except, of course, politicians). If theft is needed in order to accomplish that goal, then it should be moral for everyone to steal. If it is moral for soldiers to kill innocents in the pursuit of a goal, then it should be moral for everyone.



Universality presents a further problem for the statist. Different democratic systems have different laws, sometimes contradictory ones. For instance, in some "countries" marijuana is legal within certain limits, while in others it is wholly illegal. If the arguments of the proponents of illegality are correct (i.e. that marijuana is a gateway drug and degrades the social fabric), then marijuana should be illegal everywhere. If the arguments of the proponents of legality are correct (i.e. that marijuana has little to no health effects, and that we should be free to ingest any substance we desire), then marijuana should be legal everywhere. Therefore democracy fails to be universal in that sense also.



So not only does statism fails the test of moral self-consistency, but it also fails the test of universality: moral consistency across all humans. Morally, the only difference between the State and a mafia is that the State has by far the most guns, and the most power to control production, so that people come to believe that we need the State in order to produce.



Which leads us to the efficacy standpoint. Statist believers usually try to rationalize the existence of the State by asserting that the State is the only possible producer of various goods: security, common defence, justice, charity, roads, consumer protection, rights protection, schools, urban planning, and so on; and that without a State, we would have none of those goods, lowering our standard of life and making a sizeable economy impossible.



There are two little problems with this line of rationalization, the first being that it is a straightforward lie. All the goods I have listed have been or are provided by private individuals today, routinely outperforming their statist alternatives. Private polices (such as the railway police, established in the United States after WW1) are more concerned with helping victims or protecting goods than catching criminals, but still manage a far greater ratio of convictions than State polices. Guerrilla groups hold their ground against immoral, interventionist public armies that cost ten times more. Private business courts offer time limits and cost limits to resolve disputes efficiently and fairly. Private charities, despite having their own share of scandals (which are mostly due to the laxity of the State's own policing), still vastly outperform public programs, and welfare was provided more efficiently by fraternal societies before their persecution by the State. Private roads offer less traffic and better service than public roads, which are built on the miserable fruit of organized theft of land. Private schools outperform public schools, are twice as efficient, and help raise the level of education of the poorest in India and Africa. The private urban planning of the 19th century, in the incredible rush towards urbanism that characterized industrialization, accomplished more than anything local governments "plan" today in our modern crime, and traffic-riddled, balkanized, impractical cities.^iv And finally, we have whole societies in history that lasted for decades, and in two particular cases for centuries, without a State and without experiencing any significant problem in any of these areas.



Why do markets inevitably provide better service at lower costs than the State? For one thing, it is an established fact of economics that monopolies are inherently detrimental to the end user, and the State is the biggest monopoly of all. I will further discuss the monopoly of force and its consequences in the section on incentives.



The second little problem is that individuals produce these goods, not States. This may seem rather too obvious, but it bears pointing out for the sake of refuting the idiotic "we need States to have roads" argument. Individuals lay down rock, flatten the path, lay down asphalt and roll it out. All that the State as a whole does is pay for the production and control the fruits of that production. These are also things that can be done by individuals; indeed, we pay for our own property and control it every day. The main difference is that, as private owners of our property, we have a strong incentive to administrate it wisely, lest it lose its value. Politicians do not personally own the roads, and thus do not have a strong incentive to administrate them wisely, except insofar as bad administration may generate a scandal that would hurt one's popularity or re-election. So statism fails to answer a basic burden of proof, that of proving that we need the State at any step of the way.



In an even more specific form of this "burden of proof" argument, statism fails to answer to Occam's Razor as well. Occam's Razor tells us that, when we have two explanations or models that explain (or claim to explain) the same facts, the most parsimonious model is the model best justified by the facts at hand. We simply do not need the extraneous parts in the unjustified model to explain the facts. For example, I could claim that the Earth is flat. In answer to the obvious evidences for a round Earth, I can then add new processes: that, say, there are space warps around the edge of the Earth so we can go "around" it. Perhaps there is a strange new law of physics that bends light so that we get a horizon at all points. I can make up all these new imaginary mechanisms so I can explain the same facts as the round Earth scenario, but they are not justified by the facts. So there are two different scenarios, one that is justified and one that is not justified.



And we have two different scenarios here as well. Either statism is correct, in which case we need the State to mediate some or all production, or its negation, Anarchy, is correct, in which case we do not need the State to mediate production. And as I have just pointed out, the State is not necessary at any step of the way. So it is up to the statists to provide a justification for the added entities and processes that they claim are necessary for the survival of society as a whole. There is no more reason for us to see the State as valid than there is for us to believe that a new law of physics bends light and makes the Earth look round.



At this point, our statist believer may reply that, while he acknowledges that the State is not at all necessary for the production of any good, and that the State can only produce sub-par goods, the State may yet be necessary to produce a sufficient quantity of these goods. In an Anarchy, according to this line of reasoning, people would not demand a sufficient quantity of these goods, and thus the sufficient quantity would not be produced.



This, however, fails equally miserably, because of the failure of defining what a "sufficient quantity" is. How much charity should a society produce? How many roads? How much security? Well, who can answer these questions but the end users? Only you know the degree to which you value charity, roads or security, and the same is true for every other individual in your society. The only way to know the "sufficient quantity" is to let people trade for these products and see how much they need.



The State creates artificial demand based on the ruling class' self-contained values, which are disconnected from the rest of society. Indeed, the main activity of the State seems to be either underproduction or overproduction. The State overproduces many goods, such as roads, schools and parks, stealing our resources in order to do so, and getting a lot of approval in the process. The State's drive towards overproduction is nowhere more apparent than in the market for roads and in how eagerly the State steals people's land and real estate (calling it "eminent domain") in order to create new space where this overproduction can take place.



But it is easy to see, with a reductio ad absurdum, that the State's overproduction is not desirable. If overproduction was desirable for roads, then we should steal everyone's property and pave roads everywhere. But if overproduction of schools is desirable, then we should build schools everywhere. And if overproduction of parks is desirable, then we should turn every area into a park. It is obvious that these three goals are contradictory, and that there needs to be a judicious allocation of resources; between roads, schools, parks, and everything else. Only market coordination can accomplish this.



The new fad in statist theorizing consists of arguing that we need the State to regulate because of necessarily occurring "market failures." Typical examples include the so-called "public goods" problem and the resulting assumed underprovision, negative externalities such as pollution, and information asymmetry (such as when one party takes advantage of another when the latter lacks crucial information about the market).



A side discussion on the specific issue of "public goods": A public good is a good that must be produced for the whole of society if it is produced at all, and where no single individual has an incentive to contribute because their contribution pays for everyone's usage. Public goods rarely exist in markets, and their existence is generally forced by the monopoly of the State. The law under a State is one such example. When the State monopolizes the law, then naturally any change to the law affects the whole of society. The problem with public goods is that no one has a strong incentive to contribute, as they have to shoulder more of the costs and less of the benefits, at least until most people decide to contribute. Any desire to improve the public law comes at great cost and little benefit to the contributor, making a better society under the State a public good.



Now, granted, we should not be overly pessimistic about public goods: after all, "public television" (read Public Broadcasting (for example on airwaves) not State stations) is a public good and yet people still contribute to it. Any single contributor helps to finance everyone's television viewing. We can also see that Churches are another example of a public good, as any single donor is in fact supporting everyone's churchgoing. The common thread between these two cases is that the donations are done with a personal ideological goal in mind, the personal relevance of which nullifies the original lack of incentive to donate. Market contracts can also help produce many public goods, as in the example of covenants in market urban planning during the 18th and 19th century in "Britain,"^v as well as the reduction of pollution and litter in private communities.^vi



The case of lighthouses is altogether different, and while it may also appear to be a public good; given that a great number of ships benefit from any single lighthouse and thus there seems to be no incentive for any given ship to pay, lighthouses have in fact traditionally been paid for in markets by ports asking docked ships for a small stipend to cover their use of the lighthouses, and then paying the lighthouses. For a given port, nearby lighthouses are obviously not a public good, hence this package deal approach also nullifies the problem. Aside from these specific cases, we can still conclude that, insofar as there is a public goods problem, it is a problem for the statists, not for us.



At any rate, the apparent complexity of "market failure" theorizing can in fact be reduced to a similar "insufficient quantity" argument. What the statist laments is the fact that the market cannot provide enough "public goods," that it cannot provide enough protection from pollution, and that it cannot provide enough information to all the agents in a market. Usually this is compared to an "ideal scenario" where "public goods" are plentiful; when the State can simply steal our resources to "provide" for them, where pollution is suppressed regardless of costs to economic efficacy and employment, and where information is plentiful, regardless of the actual costs of generating and supplying that information. In short, statist "ideal scenarios" are far from ideal.



We must therefore ask the same question: why this scenario and not the market one? Why should the agents in a market be forced to provide more "public goods" than the laws of supply and demand indicate? If most people in a society see no value in a "public good," then why should we declare this an "underprovision"? Why should we see more protection from pollution than the agents in a market desire? Why should we see more information being generated and supplied? Well, the facetious answer is "because that is what the believer believes, and belief is always valid regardless of the facts." The more serious answer is that no such "cultural/societal values" can be established apart from the values of the agents involved and their interaction within the market.



Justifying the existence of the State is therefore proven to be impossible. Like any other collectivist belief system, capturing belief starts by creating an imaginary problem, and then providing an imaginary solution. In the case of statism, the imaginary problem is that people are too individualistic and "selfish," and the imaginary solution is to subjugate all individualism in the name of non-existent "common interests." But individualism is only a problem when a self-proclaimed authority attempts to impose his will on other people, and those people resist. Free people don't fear non-conformity.







ⁱ Throughout this book, I will refer to both classes as if they were cohesive groups, for the sake of simplification. In reality, factions within each class may sometimes have divergent interests. A politician may advocate a law against some businesses in order to gain more voter support, as in the struggle against Big Tobacco. But in general, members of the ruling class will share more political values between themselves, and members of the working class also, then individuals from both will share between each other.

ⁱⁱ Henry Spencer, The Man Versus the State, pp. 71-72.

ⁱⁱⁱ Albert Jay Nock, On Doing the Right Thing, and Other Essays, p. 145.

^iv For more on these results, see The Voluntary City, edited by Beito, Gordon and Tabarrok, pp. 38-41.

^v Ibid, ch. 2.

^vi Ibid, pp. 58-59.