Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin
podcast. It's Monday, July 31, 2023. The Bitcoin block height is 801077 and the
value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. Today's episode is Bitcoin Out Loud and
I'm gonna read you the book Anatomy of the State by Murray N. Rothbard. I believe
everyone should read this book because so often people have difficulty understanding
why Bitcoin is needed because they don't understand the extent of the problem, the
extent of the state's overreach and predation. Anatomy of the State was published in 1974,
but like any good book, the lessons are timeless and highly relevant today. Rothbard
begins with the idea that the state is not a natural or voluntary organization, but rather
a system that maintains its existence through coercive tax theft and a monopoly on violence.
He argues that the state can never be considered neutral or benign as its very existence relies
on expropriating resources from the citizenry. As you listen, think about the fact that the
state's monopoly on violence allows it to maintain its monopoly on money and how Bitcoin
is a direct challenge to that status quo. Without further ado, let's get into it.
Anatomy of the State by Murray N. Rothbard. The greatest danger to the state is independent
intellectual criticism. What the State is Not
The state is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists
venerate the state as the apotheosis of society, others regarded as an amiable, though often
inefficient, organization for achieving social ends, but almost all regarded as a necessary
means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the private sector,
and often winning in this competition of resources. With the rise of democracy, the identification
of the state with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed
which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense, such as, we are the government.
The useful collective term we has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over
the reality of political life. If we are the government, then anything a government does
to an individual is not only just and unturanical, but also voluntary on the part of the individual
concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public
debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, the reality of
this burden is obscured by saying that, we owe it to ourselves. If the government conscripts
a man or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is doing it to himself, and
therefore nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by
the Nazi government were not murdered. Instead, they must have committed suicide, since they
were the government, which was democratically chosen, and therefore anything the government
did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor
this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of people hold this fallacy to a greater or
lesser degree. 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. But even if it did, even if 70% of the people
decided to murder the remaining 30%, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary
suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide
that we are all part of one another must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.
If then, the state is not us. If it is not the human family getting together to decide
mutual problems. If it is not a lodge meeting or country club, what is it?
Briefly, this state is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly
on 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, while other individuals or institutions obtain
their income by production of goods and services, and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of
these goods and services to others. This state obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion,
that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.
Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the state generally goes on to regulate
and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects. One would think that simple observation
of all states throughout history and over the globe would be proof enough of this assertion.
But the miasma of myth has lain so long over state activity that elaboration is necessary.
What the state is.
Man is born naked into the world and needing to use his mind to learn how to take the resources
given him by nature and to transform them, for example by investment in capital, into
shapes and forms and places where the resources can be used for the satisfaction of his wants
and the advancement of his standard of living. The only way by which man can do this is by
the use of his mind and energy to transform resources, production, and to exchange these
products for products created by others. Man has found that through the process of voluntary
mutual exchange, the productivity and hence the living standards of all participants in
exchange may increase enormously. The only natural course for man to survive and to attain
wealth therefore is by using his mind and energy to engage in the production and exchange
process.
He does this first by finding natural resources and then by transforming them by mixing his
labor with them as Locke puts it, to make them his individual property and then by exchanging
this property for the similarly obtained property of others. The social path dictated by the
requirements of man's nature therefore is the path of property rights and the free market
of gift or exchange of such rights. Through this path, men have learned how to avoid the
jungle methods of fighting over scarce resources so that A can only acquire them at the expense
of B and instead to multiply those resources enormously in peaceful and harmonious production
and exchange.
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. It should be clear that the peaceful
use of reason and energy in production is the natural path for man, the means for his
survival and prosperity on this earth. It should be equally clear that the coercive,
exploitative means is contrary to natural law. It is parasitic for instead of adding
to production, it subtracts from it. The political means siphons production off to a parasitic
and destructive individual or group, and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number
of producing, but also lowers the producer's incentive to produce beyond his own substance.
In the long run, the robber destroys his own substance by dwindling or eliminating the
source of his own supply. But not only that, even in the short run, the predator is acting
contrary to his own true nature as a man. We are now in a position to answer more fully
the question, what is the state? The state, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the organization
of the political means. It is the systemization of the predatory process over a given territory.
For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain. The parasitism is ephemeral and the coercive,
parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The state
provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property. It
renders certain, secure, and relatively peaceful the lifetime of the parasitic caste in society.
Since the 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. The classic paradigm was a conquering tribe pausing in its time-honored
method of looting and murdering a conquered tribe to realize that the time span of plunder
would be longer and more secure and the situation more pleasant, if the conquered tribe were
allowed to live and produce, with the conquerors settling among them as rulers exacting a steady
annual tribute. One method of the birth of a state may be illustrated as follows. In
the hills of southern Ruritania, a bandit group manages to obtain physical control over
the territory, and finally the bandit chiefed and proclaimed himself King of the sovereign
and independent government of South Ruritania. And, if he and his men have the force to maintain
this rule for a while, lo and behold, a new state has joined the family of nations, and
the former bandit leaders have been transformed into the lawful nobility of the realm.
How the State Preserves Itself
Once a state has been established, the problem of the ruling group, or caste, is how to maintain
their rule. While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long-run problem is ideological.
For in order to continue in office, any government, not simply a democratic government, must have
the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be
active enthusiasm. It may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of
nature, but support in the sense of acceptance of some sort it must be. Else the minority
of state rulers would eventually be outweighed by the active resistance of the majority of
the public. Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily
true that the class constituting the state, the full-time bureaucracy, and nobility, must
be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important
groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the
active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens. Of course, one method of
securing support is through the creation of vested economic interests. Therefore, the
king alone cannot rule. He must have a sizable group of followers who enjoy the prerequisites
of rule, for example, the members of the state apparatus, such as the full-time bureaucracy
or the established nobility. But this still secures only a minority of eager supporters,
and even the essential purchasing of support by subsidies and other grants of privilege
still does not obtain the consent of the majority. For this essential acceptance, the majority
must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise, and at least inevitable, and
certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is
the vital social task of the intellectuals. For the masses of men do not create their
own ideas, or indeed, think through these ideas independently. They follow passively
the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are,
therefore, the opinion-molders in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion
that the state most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the state
and the intellectuals becomes clear. It is evident that the state needs the intellectuals.
It is not so evident why the intellectuals need the state. Put simply, we may state
that the intellectuals' livelihood in the free market is never too secure, for the
intellectual must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men. And
it is precisely characteristic of the masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual
matters. The state, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure
and permanent birth in the state apparatus, and thus a secure income and the panoply of
prestige. For the intellectuals will be handsomely rewarded for the important function they perform
for the state rulers, of which group they now become a part.
The alliance between the state and the intellectuals was symbolized in the eager desire of professors
at the University of Berlin in the 19th century to form the intellectual bodyguard of the
House of Hohenzahn. In the present day, let us note the revealing comment of an eminent
Marxist scholar concerning Professor Wittvogel's critical study of ancient Oriental despotism.
The civilization which Professor Wittvogel is so bitterly attacking was one which could
make poets and scholars into officials. Of innumerable examples, we may cite the recent
development of the science of strategy in the service of the government's main violence-wielding
arm, the military. A venerable institution, furthermore, is the official or court historian,
dedicated to purveying the ruler's views of their own and their predecessors' actions.
Many and varied have been the arguments by which the state and its intellectuals have
induced their subjects to support their rule. Basically, the strands of argument may be
summed up as follows. A. The state rulers are great and wise men. They rule by divine
right. They are the aristocracy of men. They are the scientific experts. Much greater and
wiser than the good but rather simple subjects.
And B. Rule by the extent government is inevitable, absolutely necessary, and far better than
the indescribable evils that would ensue upon its downfall.
The union of church and state was one of the oldest and most successful of these ideological
devices. The ruler was either anointed by God or, in the case of the absolute rule of
the many of the Oriental despotisms, was himself God. Hence, any resistance to his
rule would be blasphemy. The state's priestcraft performed the basic intellectual function
of obtaining popular support and even worship for the rulers. Another successful device
was to instill fear of any alternative systems of rule or non-rule. The present rulers, it
was maintained, supply to the citizens an essential service for which they should be
most grateful, protection against sporadic criminals and marauders.
For the state, to preserve its own monopoly of predation did indeed see to it that private
and unsystematic crime was kept to a minimum. The state has always been jealous of its own
preserve. Especially has the state been successful in recent centuries in instilling fear of
the other state rulers. Since the land area of the globe has been parceled out among particular
states, one of the basic doctrines of the state was to identify itself with the territory
it governed. 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
usage. If Rurotania was being attacked by Waldavia, the first task of the state and its
intellectuals was to convince the people of Rurotania that the attack was really upon
them and not simply upon the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers was converted
into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the
erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of nationalism has only
been successful in western civilization in recent centuries. It was not too long ago
that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of
nobles. Many and subtle are the ideological weapons that the state has wielded through
the centuries. One excellent weapon has been tradition, the longer that the rule of a state
has been able to preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon. For then, the X dynasty
or the Y state has the seeming weight of centuries of tradition behind it. Worship of one's
ancestors then becomes a none too subtle means of worship of one's ancient rulers.
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 razor 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. For since any given
rule implies majority acceptance, any ideological danger to that rule can only start from one
or a few independently thinking individuals. The new idea, much less the new critical idea,
must needs begin as a small minority opinion. Therefore, the state must nip the view in
the bud by ridiculing any view that defies the opinions of the mass. Listen only to your
brothers or adjust to society, thus became ideological weapons for crushing individual
descent. By such measures, the masses will never learn of the nonexistence of their emperor's
clothes. It is also important for the state to make its rule seem inevitable. Even if
its reign is disliked, it will then be met with passive resignation as witness the familiar
coupling of death and taxes. One method is to induce historiographical determinism as
opposed to individual freedom of will. If the ex-dynasty rules us, this is because the
inexorable laws of history, or the divine will, or the absolute, or the material productive
forces, have so decreed, and nothing any puny individual may do can change this inevitable
decree. It is also important for the state to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to
any conspiracy theory of history. For a search for conspiracies means a search for motives
and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed
by the state, or venality or aggressive war, was caused not by the state rulers, but by
mysterious and arcane social forces, or by the imperfect state of the world, or if in
some way everyone was responsible, we are all murderers, proclaims one slogan. Then there
is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds.
Furthermore, an attack on conspiracy theories means that the subjects will become more gullible
in believing the general welfare reasons that are always put forth by the state for engaging
in any of its despotic actions. A conspiracy theory can unsettle the system by causing
the public to doubt the state's ideological propaganda. Another tried and true method
for bending subjects to the state's will is inducing guilt. Any increase in private
well-being can be attacked as unconscionable greed, materialism, or excessive affluence.
Profit-making can be attacked as exploitative and usury, mutually beneficial exchanges denounced
as selfishness, and somehow, with the conclusion always being drawn, that more resources should
be siphoned from the private to the public sector. The induced guilt makes the public
more ready to do just that. For while individual persons tend to indulge in selfish greed, the
failure of the state's rulers to engage in exchanges is supposed to signify their devotion
to higher and nobler causes, parasitic predation being apparently moral and aesthetically lofty
as compared to peaceful and productive work. In the present more secular age, the divine
right of the state has been supplemented by the invocation of a new god, science. State
rule is now proclaimed as being ultra-scientific, as constituting planning by experts. But while
reason is invoked more than in previous centuries, this is not the true reason of the individual
and his exercise of free will. It is still collectivist and determinist, still implying
holistic aggregates and coercive manipulation of passive subjects by their rulers.
The increasing use of scientific jargon has permitted the state's intellectuals to weave
obscurantist apologia for the state rule that would have only been met with derision by
the populace of a simpler age. A robber who justifies 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, and so the assault on common
sense proceeds, each age performing the task in its own ways.
Thus, ideological support being vital to the state, it must unceasingly try to impress
the public with its legitimacy to distinguish its activities from those of mere brigands.
The unremitting determination of its assaults on common sense is no accident, for as Menkel
vividly maintained, the average man, whatever his errors otherwise, at least sees clearly
that the government is something lying outside him and outside the generality of his fellow
men, that it is a separate, independent and hostile power, only partly under his control
and capable of doing him great harm. Is it a fact of no significance that robbing the
government is everywhere regarded as a crime of less magnitude than robbing an individual
or even a corporation? What lies behind all this, I believe, is a deep sense of the fundamental
antagonism between the government and the people it governs. It is apprehended not as
a committee of citizens chosen to carry on a communal business of the whole population,
but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population
for the benefit of its own members. When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy
man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift. When the government is robbed,
the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers may have less money to play with
than they had before. The notion that they have earned that money is never entertained.
To most sensible men, it would seem ludicrous.
How the State Transcends Its Limits As Bertrand de Juvenel has sagesly pointed
out, through the centuries men have formed concepts desired to check and limit the exercise
of state rule, and, one after another, the state, using its intellectual allies, has
been able to transform these concepts into intellectual rubber stamps of legitimacy and
virtue to attach to its decrees and actions. Originally, in Western Europe, the concept
of divine sovereignty held that the kings may rule only according to divine laws. The
kings turned the concept into a rubber stamp of divine approval for any of the kings'
actions. The concept of parliamentary democracy began
as a popular check upon the absolute monarchical rule. It ended with parliament being the essential
part of the state, and its every act totally sovereign. As de Juvenel concludes,
Many writers on theories of sovereignty have worked out one of these restrictive devices,
but in the end, every single such theory has, sooner or later, lost its original purpose,
and come to act merely as a springboard to power, by providing it with the powerful aid
of an invisible sovereign with whom it could in time successfully identify itself.
Similarly, with more specific doctrines, the natural rights of the individual enshrined
in John Locke and the Bill of Rights became a statist right to a job. Utilitarianism turned
from arguments for liberty to arguments against resisting the state's invasions of liberty,
etc. Certainly the most ambitious attempt to impose
limits on the state has been the Bill of Rights and other restrictive parts of the American
Constitution, in which written limits on government became the fundamental law to be interpreted
by a judiciary supposedly independent of the other branches of government. All Americans
are familiar with the process by which the construction of limits in the Constitution
has been inexorably broadened over the last century.
But few have been as keen as Professor Charles Black to see that 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.
For if a judicial decree of unconstitutional is a mighty check to government power, an
implicit or explicit verdict of constitutional is a mighty weapon for fostering public acceptance
of even greater government power. Professor Black begins his analysis by pointing out
that the crucial necessity of legitimacy for any government to endure, this legitimation
signifying basic majority acceptance of the government and its actions. Acceptance of
legitimacy becomes a particular problem in a country such as the United States, where
substantive limitations are built into the theory on which the government rests.
What is needed, adds Black, is a means by which the government can assure the public
that its increasing powers are indeed constitutional, and this, he concludes, has been the major
historical function of judicial review. Let Black illustrate the problem.
The supreme risk to the government is that of disaffection and a feeling of outrage widely
disseminated throughout the population, and loss of moral authority by the government
as such, however long it may be propped up by force or inertia or the lack of an appealing
and immediately available alternative. Almost everybody living under a government of limited
powers must sooner or later be subjected to some governmental action which, as a matter
of private opinion, he regards as outside the power of government or positively forbidden
to government. A man is drafted, though he finds nothing in the constitution about being
drafted. A farmer is told how much wheat he can raise, he believes, and he discovers
that some respectable lawyers believe with him that the government has no more right
to tell him how much wheat he can grow than it has to tell his daughter whom she can marry.
A man goes to the federal penitentiary for saying what he wants to, and he paces his
cell reciting, Congress shall make no laws abridging the freedom of speech. A businessman
is told what he can ask and must ask for buttermilk.
The danger is real enough that each of these people, and who is not of their number, will
confront the concept of government limitation with the reality, as he sees it, of the flagrant
overstepping of actual limits, and draw the obvious conclusion as to the status of his
government with respect to its legitimacy. This danger is averted by the states propounding
the doctrine that one agency must have the ultimate decision on constitutionality, and
that this agency, in the last analysis, must be part of the federal government. For while
the seeming independence of the federal judiciary has played a vital part in making its actions
a virtual, holy writ for the bulk of the people, it is also and ever true that the judiciary
is part and parcel of the government apparatus and appointed by the executive and legislative
branches. Black admits that this means the state has set itself up as a judge in its
own cause, thus violating a basic judicial principle for aiming at just decisions. He
brusically denies the possibility of any alternative. Black adds, the problem then is to devise
such a governmental means of deciding as will, hopefully, reduce to a tolerable minimum the
intensity of the objection that government is judge in its own cause. Having done this,
you can only hope that this objection, though theoretically still tenable, will practically
lose enough of its force that legitimating work of the deciding institution can win acceptance.
In the last analysis, Black finds the achievement of justice and legitimacy from the state's
perpetual judging of its own cause as something of a miracle. Applying his thesis to the
famous conflict between the Supreme Court and the New Deal, Professor Black keenly chides
his fellow pro-New Deal colleagues for their short-sightedness in denouncing judicial obstruction.
The standard version of the story of the New Deal in the court, though accurate in its
way, displaces the emphasis. It concentrates on the difficulties. It almost forgets how
the whole thing turned out. The upshot of the matter was, and this is what I like to
emphasize, that after some twenty-four months of balking, the Supreme Court, without a single
change in the law of its composition or indeed in its actual manning, placed the affirmative
stamp of legitimacy on the New Deal and on the whole new conception of government in America.
In this way, the Supreme Court was able to put the quietest on the large body of Americans,
who had had strong constitutional objections to the New Deal. Of course, not everyone was
satisfied. The Bonnie Prince Charlie of constitutionally commanded Lausée Faire still stirs the hearts
of a few zealots in the highlands of Kholric on reality. But there is no longer any significant
or dangerous public doubt as to the constitutional power of Congress to deal as it does with
the national economy. We had no means other than the Supreme Court for imparting legitimacy
to the New Deal. As Black recognizes, one major political theorist who recognized, and
largely in advance, the glaring loophole in a constitutional limit on government of placing
the ultimate interpreting power in the Supreme Court, was John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was not
content with the miracle, but instead proceeded to a profound analysis of the constitutional
problem. In his Disquisition, Calhoun demonstrated that the inherent tendency of the state to
break through the limits of such a constitution. A written constitution certainly has many
considerable advantages, but it is a great mistake to suppose that the mere insertion
of provisions to restrict and limit the power of the government, without investing those
for whose protection they are inserted with the means of enforcing their observance, will
be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers. Being the party
in possession of the government, they will, from the same constitution of man which makes
government necessary to protect society, be in favor of the powers granted by the constitution
and opposed to the restrictions intended to limit them. The minor or weaker party, on
the contrary, would take the opposite direction and regard them, the restrictions, as essential
to the protection against the dominant party. But where there are no means by which they
could compel the major party to observe the restrictions, the only resort left to them
would be a strict construction of the constitution. To this, the major party would oppose a liberal
construction. It would be construction against construction, the one to contract and the other
to enlarge the powers of the government to the utmost. But of what possible avail could
the strict construction of the minor party be against the liberal construction of the
major, when the one who would have all the power of the government to carry its construction
into effect, and the other be deprived of all means of enforcing its construction?
In a contest so unequal, the result would not be doubtful. The party in favor of the
restrictions would be overpowered, the end of the contest would be the subversion of
the constitution, the restrictions would ultimately be annulled, and the government be converted
into one of unlimited powers.
One of the few political scientists who appreciated Calhoun's analysis of the constitution was
Professor J. Allen Smith. Smith noted that the constitution was designed with checks
and balances to limit any one governmental power, and yet had then developed a supreme
court with the monopoly of ultimate interpreting power. If the federal government was created
to check invasions of individual liberty by the separate states, who was to check the
federal power?
Smith maintained that implicit in the check and balance idea of the constitution was a
concomitant view that no one branch of government may be conceited the ultimate power of interpretation.
It was assumed by the people that the new government could not be permitted to determine
the limits of its own authority, since this would make it, and not the constitution, supreme.
The solution advanced by Calhoun and seconded in this century by such writers as Smith,
was of course the famous doctrine of the concurrent majority. If any substantial minority interest
in the country, specifically a state government, believed that the federal government was exceeding
its powers and encroaching on that minority, the minority would have the right to veto
this exercise of power as unconstitutional. Applied to state governments, this theory
implied the right of nullification of a federal law or ruling within a state's jurisdiction.
In theory, the ensuing constitutional system would assure that the federal government check
any state invasion of individual rights, while the states would check excessive federal power
over the individual. And yet, while limitations would undoubtedly be more effective than at present,
there are many difficulties and problems in the Calhoun solution. If indeed a subordinate
interest should rightfully have a veto over matters concerning it, then why stop with
the states? Why not place veto power in counties, cities, wards?
Furthermore, interests are not only sectional, they are also occupational, social, etc.
What of bakers or taxi drivers or any other occupation? Should they not be permitted
a veto power over their own lives? This brings us to the important point that the nullification
theory confines its checks to agencies of government itself.
Let us not forget that the federal and state governments, and their respective branches,
are still states, are still guided by their own state interests rather than the interests
of the private citizens. What is to prevent the Calhoun system from working in reverse,
with states tyrannizing over their citizens, and only vetoing the federal government when
it tries to intervene to stop that state tyranny, or for states to acquiesce in federal tyranny?
What is to prevent federal and state governments from forming mutually profitable alliances
for the joint exploitation of the citizenry? And even if the private occupational groupings
were to be given some form of functional representation in government, what is to prevent them from
using the state to gain subsidies and other special privileges for themselves, or for
imposing compulsory cartels on their own members?
In short, Calhoun does not push his pathbreaking theory on concurrence far enough. He does
not push it down to the individual himself. If the individual, after all, is the one whose
rights are to be protected, then a consistent theory of concurrence would imply veto power
by every individual. That is, some form of unanimity principle.
When Calhoun wrote that it should be, impossible to put or keep it, the government, in action
without the concurrent consent of all, he was perhaps unwittingly implying just such
a conclusion.
But such speculation begins to take us away from our subject. For down this path lie political
systems which could hardly be called states at all.
For one thing, just as the right of nullification for a state logically implies its right of
secession, so a right of individual nullification would imply the right of any individual to
secede from the state under which he lives. Thus, the state has invariably shown a striking
talent for the expansion of its powers beyond any limits that might be opposed upon it.
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 anti-capitalist.
In a sense, our position is the reverse of the Marxist dictum that the state is the executive
committee of the ruling class in the present day, supposedly the capitalists. Instead, the
state, the organization of the political means, constitutes and is the source of the ruling
class, rather ruling caste, and is in permanent opposition to genuinely private capital. We
may therefore say with de Juvenel, only those who know nothing of any time but their own,
who are completely in the dark as to the manner of powers behaving throughout thousands of
years with regard to these proceedings, nationalization, the income tax, etc., as the fruit of a particular
set of doctrines. They are, in fact, the normal manifestations of power, and differ not at
all in their nature from Henry VIII's confiscation of the monasteries. The same principle is at
work. The hunger for authority, the thirst for resources, and in all of these operations,
the same characteristics are present, including the rapid elevation of the dividers of the
spoils. Whether it is socialist or whether it is not, power must always be at war with
the capitalist authorities and to spoil the capitalists of their accumulated wealth. In
doing so, it obeys the law of its nature. What the State Fears
What the state fears above all, of course, is any fundamental threat to its own power
and its own existence. The death of a state can come about in two major ways. A. Through
conquest by another state, or B. Through revolutionary overthrow by its own subjects, in short by
war or revolution. War and revolution, as the two basic threats, invariably arouse in
the state rulers their maximum efforts and maximum propaganda among the people. As stated
above, any way must always be used to mobilize the people to come to the state's defense
in the belief that they are defending themselves. The fallacy of the idea becomes evident when
conscription is wielded against those who refuse to defend themselves and are, therefore, forced
into joining the state's military band. Needless to add, no defense is permitted them against
this act of their own state. In war, state power is pushed to its ultimate,
and under the slogans of defense and emergency, it can impose a tyranny upon the public, such
as might be openly resisted in time of peace. War thus provides many benefits to a state,
and indeed every modern war has brought to the warring peoples a permanent legacy of
increased state burdens upon a society. War, moreover, provides to a state tempting opportunities
for conquest of land areas over which it may exercise its monopoly of force. Randolph
Born was certainly correct when he wrote that, war is the health of the state, but to any
particular state a war may spell either health or grave injury. 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? The gravest crimes in the state's lexicon
are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own
contentment, for example treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register
for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes
against the state as counterfeiting its money or evasion of income tax. Or compare the degree
of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman with the attention that the state
pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the state's openly assigned
priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its
presumed raison d'etre.
How States Relate to One Another
Since the territorial area of the earth is divided among different states, interstate
relations must occupy much of a state's time and energy. The natural tendency of a state
is to expand its power, and externally such expansion takes place by conquest of a territorial
area. Unless a territory is stateless or uninhabited, any such expansion involves an inherent conflict
of interest between one set of states' rulers and another. Only one set of rulers can obtain
a monopoly of coercion over any given territorial area at any one time. Complete power over
a territory by state X can only be obtained by the expulsion of state Y. War, while risky,
will be an ever-present tendency of states punctuated by periods of peace and by shifting
alliances and coalitions between states. We have seen that the internal or domestic
attempt to limit the state in the 17th through 19th centuries reached its most notable form
in constitutionalism. Its external, or foreign affairs, counterpart was the development of
international law, especially such forms as the law of war and the neutral rights.
Parts of international law were originally purely private, growing out of the need of
merchants and traders everywhere to protect their property and adjudicate disputes. Examples
are Admiralty Law and the Law Merchant. But even the governmental rules emerged voluntarily
and were not imposed by any international super-state. The object of the laws of war
was to limit interstate destruction to the state apparatus itself, thereby preserving
the innocent civilian public from the slaughter and devastation of war.
The object of the development of neutral's rights was to preserve private civilian international
commerce, even with enemy countries, from seizure by one of the warring parties. The
overriding aim, then, was to limit the extent of any war, and particularly to limit its
destructive impact on the private citizens of the neutral and even warring countries.
The jurist F. J. P. Ville charmingly describes such civilized warfare as it briefly flourished
in 15th century Italy.
The rich burgers and merchants of medieval Italy were too busy making money and enjoying
life to undertake the hardships and dangers of soldiering themselves, so they adopted
the practice of hiring mercenaries to do their fighting for them, and, being thrifty, business-like
folk, they dismissed their mercenaries immediately after their services could be dispensed with.
Wars were, therefore, fought by armies hired for each campaign. For the first time, soldiering
became a reasonable and comparatively harmless profession. The generals of that period maneuvered
against each other, often with consummate skill, but when one had won the advantage,
his opponent generally either retreated or surrendered. It was a recognized rule that
a town could only be sacked if it offered resistance. Immunity could always be purchased
by paying a ransom.
As one natural consequence, no town ever resisted, it being obvious that a government too weak
to defend its citizens had forfeited their allegiance. Civilians had little to fear from
the dangers of war which were the concern only of professional soldiers.
The well-nigh absolute separation of the private civilian from the state's wars in 18th century
Europe is highlighted by Neff.
Even postal communications were not successfully restricted for long in wartime. Letters circulated
without censorship, with a freedom that astonishes the 20th century mind. The subjects of two
warring nations talked to each other if they met, and when they could not meet, corresponded,
not as enemies, but as friends. The modern notion hardly existed that subjects of any
enemy country are partly accountable for the belligerent act of their rulers, nor had the
warring rulers any firm disposition to stop communications with subjects of the enemy.
The old inquisitorial practices of espionage in connection with religious worship and belief
were disappearing, and no comparable inquisition in connection with political or economic communications
was even contemplated. Passports were originally created to provide safe conduct in time of
war. During most of the 18th century, its seldom occurred to Europeans to abandon their
travels in a foreign country, which their own was fighting.
And trade being increasingly recognized as beneficial to both parties, 18th century warfare
also counterbalances a considerable amount of trading with the enemy. How far states
have transcended rules of civilized warfare in this century needs no elaboration here.
In the modern era of total war, combined with the technology of total destruction, the very
idea of keeping war limited to the state apparatus seems even more quaint and obsolete than the
original constitution of the United States. When states are not at war, agreements are
often necessary to keep frictions at a minimum. One doctrine that has gained curiously wide
influence is the alleged sanctity of treaties. This concept is treated as the counterpart
of the sanctity of contract, but a treaty and a genuine contract have nothing in common.
A contract transfers, in a precise manner, titles to private property. Since a government
does not, in any proper sense, own its territorial area, any agreements that it concludes do
not confer titles to property. If, for example, Mr. Jones sells or gives his land to Mr. Jones,
Mr. Smith, Jones' heir cannot legitimately descend upon Smith's heir and claim the land
as rightfully his. The property title has already been transferred. Old Jones' contract
is automatically binding upon Young Jones. Because the former had already transferred
the property, Young Jones, therefore, has no property claim. Young Jones can only claim
that which he has inherited from Old Jones, and Old Jones can only bequeath property which
he still owns. But if, at a certain date, the government of, say, Ruritania is coerced
or even bribed by the government of Waldavia into giving up some of its territory, it is
absurd to claim that the governments or inhabitants of the two countries are forever barred from
a claim to reunification of Ruritania on the grounds of the sanctity of a treaty. Neither
the people nor the land of Northwest Ruritania are owned by either of the two governments.
As a corollary, one government can certainly not bind by the dead hand of the past a later
government through treaty. A revolutionary government which overthrew the king of Ruritania
could, similarly, hardly be called to account for the king's actions or debts, for a government
is not, as is a child, a true heir to its predecessor's property.
History as a race between state power and social power
Just as the two basic and mutually exclusive interrelations between men are peaceful cooperation
or coercive exploitation, production or predation, so the history of mankind, particularly its
economic history, may be considered as a contest between these two principles. On the one hand,
there is creative productivity, peaceful exchange and cooperation, on the other, coercive dictation
and predation over those social relations. Albert J. Nock happily termed these contesting
forces social power and state power. Social power is man's power over nature,
his cooperative transformation of nature's resources and insight into nature's laws
for the benefit of all participating individuals. Social power is the power over nature, the
living standards achieved by men in mutual exchange. State power, as we have seen, is
the coercive and parasitic seizure of this production, a draining of the fruits of society
for the benefit of nonproductive, actually anti-productive, rulers. While social power
is power over nature, state power is power over man. Through history, man's productive
and creative forces have, time and time again, carved out new ways of transforming nature
for man's benefit. These have been the times when social power has spurted ahead of state
power and when the degree of state encroachment over society has considerably lessened. But
always, after a greater or smaller time lag, the state has moved into these new areas to
cripple and confiscate social power once more. If the 17th through 19th centuries were, in
many countries of the West, times of accelerating social power and a corollary increase in freedom,
peace and material welfare, the 20th century has been primarily an age in which state power
has been catching up, with a consequent reversion to slavery, war and destruction. In this century,
the human race faces, once again, the virulent reign of the state, of the state now armed
with the fruits of man's creative powers confiscated and perverted to its own aims.
The last few centuries were times when men tried to place constitutional and other limits
on the state, only to find that such limits, as with all other attempts, have failed. Of
all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts
and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the state in check.
The problem of the state is evidently as far from solution as ever. Perhaps new paths of
inquiry must be explored if the successful, final solution of the state question is ever
to be attained.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Out Loud episode of The Bitcoin Podcast. You can listen
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