“The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”—Frédéric Bastiat
Bastiat’s insight grows more prophetic by the day. Watch what happens in any crisis. The reaction is predictable: people fracture into warring tribes, each certain it’s fighting for survival. Neighbors become informants, families split over ideology, and communities turn against themselves. While citizens exhaust one another in moral crusades, something else advances quietly—the concentration of power. Bureaucracies expand, authority tightens, and the machinery of control grows ever more intricate.
This is no accident. A system built on coercion needs division like oxygen. It must invent internal enemies to justify its dominance, to keep people dependent on its “protection.” When citizens are busy fighting one another—over politics, culture, race, or faith—they are not asking the fundamental question: why should anyone rule them at all?
Every orchestrated “emergency,” every financial panic, or culture war, serves the same purpose: to make the expansion of centralized power appear both natural and necessary. Randolph Bourne was right—war is the health of the state—but in our time, war takes subtler forms: propaganda, inflation, surveillance, and fear.
The only antidote is self-ownership, voluntary exchange, and the refusal to play the game of masters and subjects.
The Architecture of Manufactured Crisis
The mechanism works because it attacks the foundation of voluntary cooperation. When the future becomes unpredictable, people retreat into tribes that promise certainty. The state doesn’t need to impose order directly; it manufactures chaos until you beg for chains. Uncertainty becomes the pretext for control.
This is the logic of all monopolies: break the alternatives, then present yourself as the only solution. The state degrades money through inflation, creating desperation. It regulates commerce until only the well-connected can operate. It monopolizes justice until people accept its courts as inevitable, then points to the resulting disorder and demands more power to “fix” what it broke.
Every culture war, every financial panic, every “emergency” follows the same script. While you rage at your neighbor over flags, slogans, or party lines, the central bank drains your savings. While you argue about which scandal matters more, regulators quietly entrench the monopolies they serve. While you drown in outrage and distraction, public-private alliances construct the machinery of surveillance and control.
The genius is that you participate willingly. You accept restrictions you once would have rejected. You inform on dissenters. You cheer when the “wrong” people are silenced. And all the while, as attention is harvested, power concentrates quietly—until compliance feels like virtue and ownership becomes an illusion.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s the natural behavior of a system that produces nothing and can only survive by extracting from those who do. A parasite must keep its host alive enough to feed, but confused enough not to notice the blood loss.
The Death of Voluntary Exchange
Civilization rests on a simple premise: two people trade only because both expect to benefit. That exchange presupposes, not just self‑ownership—the claim that you control your body, your labor, and the fruits of your work—but a minimal mutual recognition of that same claim in others. As Hans‑Hermann Hoppe puts it, any attempt to justify norms presupposes property in one’s body, and denying another’s self‑ownership while engaging them is a performative contradiction. Even when we disagree on everything else, the very act of peaceful interaction signals a thin but vital respect: we concede each other’s standing as owners of ourselves, and with it, a right to live and to pursue our own ends.
War liquidates that respect, not just war between nations, but the permanent war‑psychology the state cultivates. Under its spell, the other side stops being a potential partner in exchange and becomes an enemy to be broken. Your neighbor stops being a peer and becomes a threat. Disagreement stops being a difference of judgment and becomes disloyalty and betrayal.
This inversion is not a side effect; it is the point. Voluntary exchange and free association are the only forces that reliably limit political power, because people who can move, trade, and reorganize their lives retain leverage. Once you are herded into hostile camps, suspicious of outsiders, and dependent on central authorities for security and survival, that leverage disappears. Governance ceases to serve as umpire among equals and assumes its preferred role: master of a managed conflict.
From there, the priorities follow logically. Attack money, and you can insert yourself into every transaction. Attack communication, and you can script what coordination is possible. Attack property, and you can decide who may accumulate, keep, or lose the means of independence.
The resulting breakdown is portrayed as accidental: institutions “fail,” systems “collapse,” trust “erodes.” In reality, decay is the predictable outcome of policies that displace consent with command. As the old systems crumble under their own contradictions, the state grows more desperate—more authoritarian—cloaking its decay in patriotic slogans and moral crusades. Yet no volume of coercion can conjure what has been systematically undermined: a society grounded in self‑ownership, reciprocal respect, and the willingness to deal with one another as equals rather than enemies.
Hellbound and Down 