It is sometimes helpful to preface an essay with a strong quote or two to give the reader direction in what follows. In this case, I found many quotes worthy of that task, so I cite the following and ask the reader’s forbearance:
“Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war, and every measure will be taken to win it. Americans understand the costs of conflict because we have paid them in the past. War has no certainty, except the certainty of sacrifice.” — President George W. Bush, prior to initiating Operation Iraqi Freedom, a war resulting in 4,418 US military deaths
“The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” — Eugene V. Debs
“He is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.” — Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
“War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” — Carl von Clausewitz
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” — Major General Smedley D. Butler, two-time Medal of Honor recipient
“War is sweet to those who have no experience of it.” — Pindar
“[In war] the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men.” — Randolph Bourne, The State
“One to destroy, is murder by the law;
And gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe;
To murder thousands, takes a specious name,
War’s glorious art, and gives immortal fame.” — Edward Young, Love Of Fame, The Universal Passion. In Seven Characteristical Satires
“WAR IS PEACE” — George Orwell, 1984
War is a special preoccupation of governments. And governments, we all learn at a young age, are the foundation of civilization. Without government who would protect us from foreign and domestic threats? Trump finds Iran a threat, as George W. Bush found Iraq under Saddam a threat. A threat to whom? The American people, most of whom happen to live on the other side of the Atlantic.
In today’s world and for most of history, “government” means an organization with a territorial monopoly of force and is usually called a state. It is sovereign within this territory. To be under its jurisdiction is to grant approval of government’s right to enforce its commands or laws, one of which is the demand that it be supported economically.
Involuntary extraction of wealth in some manner is the hallmark of states, especially surreptitious wealth transfer through deliberate depreciation of the money. Government itself needs constant protection from the population it governs, which vastly outnumbers it. It thus has an nearly insatiable appetite for as much wealth as it can acquire without arousing the resistance of its denizens. For this reason, propaganda—which includes fallacies about the need to control the money supply—proves invaluable.
Rothbard and many others have written extensively on the seemingly endless ways states have confiscated the earnings of its people while sitting as the judge of its own actions. In Rothbard’s words, “If anyone but the government proceeded to ‘tax,’ this would clearly be considered coercion and thinly disguised banditry.” Or, more to the point, the state is a bandit gang writ large. But, through repeated propaganda, the people have come to believe “taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” Substitute “organized theft” for “taxes” and see if it still rings true. But the state must be careful not to destroy its source of wealth, or kill the golden goose, which is the market, the sum of voluntary transactions. Thomas Paine expressed this idea succinctly:
The portion of liberty enjoyed in England is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by despotism, and that as the real object of all despotism is revenue, a government so formed obtains more than it could do either by direct despotism, or in a full state of freedom, and is, therefore on the ground of interest, opposed to both.
War, and the taxes required to fund it, are among the means of sustaining and growing the state, provided the state is not in over its head with the enemy. Otherwise, real or imagined threats posed by other states will have to do to keep the population obedient.
Is There a Better Way to Organize Society?
In Chapter 7 of his Betrayal of the American Right, Rothbard discusses how he came to reject the state altogether:
My conversion to anarchism was a simple exercise in logic. . . While condemning taxation [on moral grounds], I had still felt that taxation was required for the provision of police and judicial protection and for that only.
His insight came when he recognized that laissez-faire was incompatible with this viewpoint:
. . .I saw the total incompatibility of the insights of Oppenheimer and Nock on the nature of the State as conquest, with the vague “social contract” basis that I had been postulating for a laissez-faire government. I saw that the only genuine contract had to be an individual’s specifically disposing of or using his own property.
Naturally, the anarchism I had adopted was individualist and free-market, a logical extension of laissez-faire. . .
Anarchism might be morally consistent but how do you make it work? One objection, addressed by Robert P. Murphy, is the threat of warlords taking over. As he argues, life under anarchy would not be better if a society was filled with “evil, ignorant savages,” rather than “enlightened, law-abiding citizens who live under limited government.” What Murphy claims is,
. . .for any given population, the imposition of a coercive government will make things worse. The absence of a state is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to achieve the free society.
Would a given community remain lawful under a government, but break down into continual warfare “if all legal and military services were privatized”? Unlike governments, private agencies own the assets under their control and would be motivated not to engage in reckless confrontations.
The warlords argument also assumes the danger of warlords is worse than the danger of limited government. Under anarchy, if warlords want to conquer all of society,
. . .these would-be rulers would have to start from scratch. In contrast, under even a limited government, the machinery of mass subjugation is ready and waiting to be seized.
Conclusion
Imposing a state on society doesn’t make life better. In a lecture given at Mises University in July, 2013 titled “The State Is Too Dangerous to Tolerate,” Robert Higgs, repeating Facebook comments he made a year earlier, said,
Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a “Great Leap Forward” that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.
In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.
