What Do We Owe the State?
January 8, 2002

by Joe Sobran

     I've had a lot of response to my column on Hans-
Hermann Hoppe's new book DEMOCRACY -- THE GOD THAT 
FAILED, most of it enthusiastic. [See the column of 
December 20, 2001, "The Myth of 'Limited Government'."] A 
surprising number of citizens of this democracy have lost 
faith in the state, democratic or otherwise.

     It's amazing how seldom we ask the most basic 
questions. What is a state, anyway? Where does it get its 
authority? Might we be better off without it?

     These are serious questions. One scholar estimates 
that during the twentieth century, states murdered about 
177 million of their own subjects. And that doesn't count 
foreigners killed in wars. In order to justify their own 
existence, states had better be doing someone a lot of 
good, or be able to show that in the absence of states, 
even more people would have been slaughtered. Neither 
proposition is credible.

     "Wait a minute," someone will say. "You're mixing 
apples and oranges. Sure, there are bad states, like the 
Soviet Union, which murder millions. But there are also 
good states, which don't murder people and which protect 
their people from bad states."

     Well, it's possible that a mildly rapacious state 
may afford us some protection against a much worse one, 
just as one neighborhood gang may offer safety against 
another. But all states are rapacious, almost by 
definition.

     What is a state? It is the ruling body in a 
territory, which claims a monopoly of the legal right to 
command obedience. It may demand anything -- our 
earnings, our services, our lives. Once the right to 
command is conceded, there are no limits on its power.

     Many people think a state is a natural necessity of 
social life. They can hardly conceive of society without 
the state.

     This would be plausible if the state confined itself 
to enforcing natural moral obligations -- that is, if it 
protected us from robbery, murder, and the like, 
otherwise leaving us alone. But what if the state itself 
robs and murders, claiming the authority to do so?

     Any two men will usually agree that neither may 
justly take the other's property or life. Nor does either 
owe the other obedience; that would be slavery. But 
somehow the state claims what no individual may claim -- 
a right to the lives, property, and obedience of all 
within its power. The state asserts its "right" to do 
things that would be wrongs and crimes between private 
men. And most people accept this claim! They think they 
have a moral duty to obey power!

     So why do people think they have this duty? Of 
course, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued, the 
state ultimately rests on its power to kill (or otherwise 
harm) those who disobey it. But this is a threat, not a 
duty. If I demand your money at gunpoint, you will obey, 
but the gun doesn't create an obligation, merely a 
menace.

     But the state pretends that all its demands, however 
arbitrary, are moral obligations, even though those 
demands rest on force. If it were confined to demanding 
only what decent people do anyway -- refraining from 
murder, robbery, et cetera -- it might be bearable. But 
it never stops with reasonable moral demands; at a 
minimum, even the most "humane" and "democratic" states 
use the taxing power to extort staggering amounts of 
money from their subjects. The predatory tendency of the 
state is inherent and expansive, and nobody has found a 
way to control it. No control can long withstand the 
monopolistic "right" to demand obedience in every area of 
human activity the state may choose to invade. 
Systematized force -- which is all the state really is -- 
follows its own logic.

     Legal forms, moral rhetoric, and propaganda may 
disguise force as something it is not. The idea of 
"democracy" has persuaded countless gullible people that 
they are somehow "consenting" when they are being 
coerced. The real triumph of the state occurs when its 
subjects refer to it as "we," like football fans talking 
about the home team. That is the delusion of "self-
government." One might as well speak of "self-coercion" 
or "self-slavery."

     No, the state, now grown to a monstrous magnitude, 
remains what Albert Jay Nock called it: "our enemy, the 
State." Maybe Professor Hoppe is dreaming. Maybe 
anarchism couldn't be sustained. Maybe the evil of 
systematized force can never be eliminated in this fallen 
world. But why pretend such an evil is a positive good?

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