If you happened to be a fly on the wall at a Libertarian National Convention, you might see this happen: Someone will take a microphone and ask for a point of information. Then, he will ask, “Is taxation theft?” The Chair will then answer, “Yes.” Then the convention-goers will laugh, and clap, and pass over this momentary interruption, and get back to deciding who they want to run for the positions at the head of this gang of thieves.
Why expend so much time, money, and energy trying to gain seats at the top of this band of robbers? Because the alternative that every voluntary organization must offer is denied to them: exit.
The Root of State Coercion
There are plenty of things that a state does that are coercive, such as taxation, conscription, and eminent domain. However, of all the coercive acts in a state’s arsenal, I argue that the worst is dominion, because it makes all the others possible.
What is dominion? Dominion is the property right a state enforces over plots of land within its territory, even those that are supposedly privately owned. John Locke described it like this:
By the same act therefore, whereby any one unites his person, which was before free, to any common-wealth; by the same he unites his possessions, which were before free, to it also; and they become, both of them, person and possession, subject to the government and dominion of that common-wealth, as long as it hath a being.
When a person or group joins a state, that state claims a partial property right over their land. However, the state does not usually go so far as to claim ownership of the land. Dominion is much more insidious.
Unlike ownership, which can be transferred voluntarily, the owners of the land can never retract their transfer of dominion. Those who inherit land must either agree to obey the state, or they must leave their homes and ownership rights behind (assuming the state allows them).
The obvious question is, why can people join a state with land, but not leave it? Why is this right of dominion alienable from people, but not from states?
One common argument is that, if secession was allowed, people would be leaving all the time! No state could possibly deal with the constant confusion of people joining and leaving. It would need to constantly redraw borders and figure out how and where to deploy its forces to serve the people who are members today.
Of course, every single voluntary organization, including those that provide security, arbitration, construction of roads, fire protection, etc., figures out how to cope with this “chaos” without the ability to tax, conscript, or gain a permanent property right in their clients’ lands.
Dominion is what prevents taxation from being a subscription fee. It ensures that conscription is slavery, rather than a contractual agreement for common labor and sacrifice toward common defense. It even creates a justification for aggressive war-making: to gain more territory. Without dominion, people unsatisfied with some state’s services could simply leave. The state’s territory would shrink, and consistently bad states would wither and die.
Servant of the People?
Modern States usually pretend to be servants of the people. This position lends them credibility and legitimacy, and discourages dissenters from causing unrest. A government can either be a servant of the people or a master, and a government of masters cannot complain when the slaves rise up. “Might makes right,” taken to its logical conclusion, is ultimately self-defeating because the slaves are always justified in testing their might.
If the state is a legitimate servant of the people, then it must rest upon some kind of consent. Dominion takes this consent and corrupts it in several ways:
- If an individual’s circumstances change, he might want to go his own way, but his land is still bound to the state permanently;
- If the state changes what it does over time, the standard for new consent is reduced or eliminated;
- If the person who joined the state dies, his heir’s consent is assumed, unless he gives up his rights of ownership and leaves the state’s territory
Voluntary organizations do not work this way. In the first case, virtually no one would sign a contract that gives a hired servant perpetual property rights over his land. A government, acting as servant, cannot force such terms on its citizens. In the second case, virtually no one would sign a contract that gives the other party unbounded power to alter its terms. In the third, no father can assume the power to bind his son to slavery. Or, as Lysander Spooner put it,
...when a man says he is planting a tree for himself and his posterity, he does not mean to be understood as saying that he has any thought of compelling them, nor is it to be inferred that he is such a simpleton as to imagine that he has any right or power to compel them, to eat the fruit.
Modern States may pretend to be servants of the people, but their insistence on dominion destroys that illusion. Ludwig von Mises promoted the idea of self-determination, even down to the individual if it could be managed, but states today generally ignore his helpful suggestions in favor of more restrictive policies.
The Pressure Cooker
Even if everyone consented to the state in the beginning, over time, some people find reasons to retract that consent. Perhaps the services provided by the state aren’t worth the price, or the state has chosen to pursue unauthorized or undesirable policies. Maybe a better state has sprung up nearby. However, the state’s dominion over their property holds them in a relationship with the state against their will.
Usually these dissenting minorities start out small, with no hope of swaying the political process by their numbers. They may lose faith in the process and stop participating, making their movement appear smaller than it really is. Over time, the majority may work against the minority’s interests, to the point that some fraction of the unhappy dissenters come to believe that the state is an intolerable evil. That tension may find release in anything from mere grumbling, to civil disobedience, to violence directed at the state or the majority.
As time passes and things get worse, more dissatisfied minorities spring up. However, these different minorities are not necessarily friends because they all see the state as a common enemy. Instead, squabbles over tiny chunks of authority get more and more contentious, as there is only one way to agree, and an infinite number of ways to disagree. The pressure builds.
On the other side, we have the state agents themselves. If someone decided to secede the day after the state was formed, state agents might feel very little possessiveness toward his land. “Tear up the contract and let him go,” they might say. A constant stream of daily entries and exits might maintain this flexibility.
However, when decades pass with no secession, dominion becomes second nature, and any loss of territory is seen as a violent assault against the state itself. State agents desire stricter and stricter sanctions against anyone with the gall to want to leave. The state sees its role more and more as maintaining control over its subjects and the things they believe they own. Thus, pressure builds from the other side.
As this process moves forward, state authority is used more and more for its own benefit, holding itself together with force and bribes, rather than any attempted or pretended benefit to the people. This, of course, makes things even worse for the dissenters. Not only are they forced into an association they find repugnant, they are also threatened with violence for simply having that view. This doesn’t improve things, but forces the dissent underground.
Conclusion
This buildup of pressure is somewhat analogous to the effects of credit expansion on the boom-bust cycle. The disastrous results are baked into the original mistake. Attempts to hold things together cannot make those mistakes go away; they only compound the problem. Critics of secession worry about the “chaos” that might come from allowing secession. But that chaos is merely the release of the pressure that their own efforts have built up, just like credit expansion builds up malinvestments.
Better that dominion never be enforced so greedily, but where it exists, the pressure from angry citizens and entitled state agents is best released as early and as peacefully as possible. History shows that when the state can no longer contain the pressure, the resulting catastrophe is a tornado compared to the gentle breeze of occasional secession. Better still that we give up on the idea of holding people together by force, and reject the notion that such force can be legitimate entirely, as Rothbard did.
