Posted on 01/23/2002 3:56:02 AM PST by tberry
What Do We Owe the State?
by Joseph 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?
January 23, 2002
One might as well speak of "self-coercion" or "self-slavery."Joey seems to have discovered Marxist ideology theory, the notion of how we tend to internalize our own oppression, how we are conditioned to oppose our own interests etc. This sounds a lot like Gramsci or Lucacs or Debord Lite.
Resistance
I tell you what, tex. We live in exciting times.
When it's time for the steamship,
there's no stopping the steamship from coming.
Anarchy is not an option for a Christian. However, socialism or statism are also not options. The civil magistrate is bound by the same moral law that binds his subjects. If the Decalogue prohibits theft, those in authority are not permitted to redistribute wealth through welfare payments and old age benefits, or to take land via eminent domain for the sake of transportation needs or environmental purity. If the education of children is entrusted to parents, as Scripture would indicate in several places, the State may not compel mandatory public education nor prevent parents from homeschooling their children.
Application of Biblical principles of morality and guidelines for civil government to both rulers and subjects would place necessary restraints on what Washington said could be a terrible master.
The middle finger.
The state is a cure far worse than the disease.
We are the sovereigns of this nation. When government, the servant, acts outside of its Constitutionally defined realm of authority, whether it oppresses someone or not, it is the servant rebelling against its master and has earned any retribution we see fit. It has no license to kill Jews or anyone else regardless of the percentage of us that theoretically might wish that action to be taken. Anyone who does not understand that at the core of this nation is our individual sovereignty and Rights has already silently and likely unknowingly acted to overthrow our rightful form of government and gets whatever they historically deserve.
It is because we have lost this proper focus that our nation is in the straights that its in.
The educational, medical and judical bureacracies as well as the entertainment corpocracies all are dedicated to eradication of what, in another age. would have been called "sin".
The passivity of our population in the face of State power--unthinkable only one generation ago--is the result of this self-hatred which eats away at any idea of the splendour of man's nature. "...What a peice of work is man...." could only be written as a savage, bitter and ironic comment today--probably by a government-funded feminist "performance artist".
Sometimes the self-hatred becomes unbearable and, in the case of Kliebold and Harris is turned outwards. I don't think we realize how important these school shootings are in terms of the health of the nation. Revolutions were never fought as they are portrayed in the movies--giant set pieces with mass action on a particular day. Rather, they appeared to be small, seemingly unorganized street fights. "Normal" life goes on outside the skirmishes.
We are "free" and we have the largest prison population in the history of mankind. This doesn't seem to concern too many people around here. But I think it is part of an ongoing revolution--a rejection of State imposed self-hate through lawlessness. Opting out of the various eternal wars our government has declared--against illiteracy, drugs, domestic violence, poverty, now "terrorism", puts one one beyond the pale now that we are either with us or with the terorists.
How long before 51% are on the side of the devil? Perhaps we've reached that point already. Perhaps highly classified internal documentation that the government has compiled in its years of remorseless caluclating, measuring and statistics-gathering, is telling them something. Something that causes them "terror". Maybe that's why the word "terrorist" is so elastic--so all emcompassing now.
And, in terms of the Attacks of Sepember 11th--those attacks would not have occured without our overwhelming pre-existing self-loathing. Our culture was literally the air-traffic controller which guided Mo Atta and the boyz into the side of the Trade Center.
Worth repeating.....
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