Always and everywhere, political institutions are controlled by elites. It doesn’t matter if the regime type is democratic or monarchical. It doesn’t matter if there is a written constitution or not. All political institutions—and certainly every sovereign state—are run by a group of elites who control the means of coercion.The myth of “rule by the people” is precisely that: a myth. 

Murray Rothbard saw the state as an inherently predatory institution that seeks total control over the individual. To achieve this control, he believed that the state seeks to weaken or destroy intermediate institutions—most notably the nuclear family.