“The state is about privilege. It is about power. It is about class stratification, redistribution of wealth from the many to the few, war, torture, tribalism writ large, prisons, police, borders, and control. The state is the negation of liberty, as Mises said. For this reason the libertarians have always opposed statism. For the same reason, the monarchists, theocrats, mercantilists, and feudal lords always favored statism.”
“The state socialists want the state to be something it cannot be—an engine of humanitarian equality, a bulwark of peace, a tool of worker’s liberation, a break on corporate and religious privilege, a tribute to the international brotherhood of man. Insofar as the state expands its power, liberal ends become more elusive. So the state socialist continues pushing for more interventions, more crackdowns, more taxes, more regulations, more penalties. It never works. The harder you try to turn the state into something it isn’t, the more you will see it for what it really is.”
“Achieving monarchism or fascism through the state is a much easier project than achieving liberation and equality with it. Propping up unearned wealth is an expensive political program, but states have managed to do it for centuries. Dismantling privilege and leveling the playing field are another matter. When the state only needs to please the elite, there is some limit to its rapaciousness. When it is allegedly geared toward supporting the masses, it must maintain all the costly and vicious apparatuses of the conservative state—taxes, armies, police, borders, and bureaucrats—but it must do even more. To trick the people into thinking it rules on their behalf it must adopt a welfare state. To put in a more earnest attempt it needs to utilize even more violent means. The more people try to turn the state into something it is not, the worse it becomes. This is not always because state socialists have abandoned their ideals and become corrupted by power, although that is a large part of the story. But even if they remain true believers, statists acting out of genuine conviction in an impossible plan can do just as much damage, refusing to give up on their fantasy and making the problem worse with every expansion of power pursued in the guise of empowering the powerless. Whereas the conservative authoritarians must only go so far to get their way, the state socialist gets further from her goal the more she sees conservatives means employed to achieve her liberal ends. This is because conservative means can only yield anti-liberal ends.”
~ Anthony Gregory
Thank you for posting those passages. I am unfamiliar with Anthony Gregory, but that quote is excellent.