The election is upon us. We wonder whether we have to have war, tariffs, and deficit spending, regardless of whom we support. What are we to do? Faced with the intractable problems of misgovernment, we need to look deeper. Following the great Murray Rothbard, we should ask, do we need a State at all? Rothbard’s answer was a clear “No.” And not only do we not need a State; the State is a menace.
Following Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, Rothbard identified the State as a predatory organism. It is the “organization of the political means.” The State produces nothing by itself but takes what other people have produced. Froom this we can deduce a vital fact. Society must have existed before the State. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the State to take.
But you may wonder, how is this possible? Whatever its defects, don’t we need a State to ensure that we have law and order? If we have property rights, don’t we need a legal order defining these rights? The answer is that we do need law and order, and we do need a legal system. But people can establish law and order without the State.
We know this because in any society that consists of a small group of people, certain conventions will naturally tend to arise. People will agree that they shouldn’t kill or assault each other. Otherwise, they couldn’t survive. They will also agree that they need private property, and a simple rule will naturally suggest itself: The first user of unowned land becomes the owner.
What happens, though, if there are disputes over who the first user was or about the boundaries of the land that has been acquired by the first user? The disputants will seek an impartial arbitrator, whose decisions will be respected. After a while, certain natural leaders will emerge from among these judges. But they won’t constitute a State, because they lack the power to extract resources through taxation.
Hellbound and Down 