I am intellectually honest and open to reason. If you would like to fix my unrealistic political philosophy, I eagerly await your enlightenment! I'm so sick and tired of being wrong.
Just a few things first; below are a few quotes that represent a nice summation of my anti-statist political philosophy. To cure me of my ills, you will need to adequately address the following.
Please help me!
"This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of [a free society] and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the [voluntarist] alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives.
Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt.
And suppose then that someone suggested: "We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other."
I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of "who will guard the guardians?" becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence." - Society Without a State, Rothbard Assume a group of people, aware of the possibility of conflicts; and then someone proposes, as a solution to this eternal human problem, that he (someone) be made the ultimate arbiter in any such case of conflict, including those conflicts in which he is involved. I am confident that he will be considered either a joker or mentally unstable and yet this is precisely what all statists propose.— Hans-Hermann Hoppe The state operates in a legal vacuum. There exists no contract between the state and its citizens. It is not contractually fixed, what is actually owned by whom, and what, accordingly, is to be protected. It is not fixed, what service the state is to provide, what is to happen if the state fails in its duty, nor what the price is that the “customer” of such “service” must pay. Rather, the state unilaterally fixes the rules of the game and can change them, per legislation, during the game. Obviously, such behavior is inconceivable for freely financed security providers. Just imagine a security provider, whether police, insurer or arbitrator, whose offer consisted in something like this: I will not contractually guarantee you anything. I will not tell you what I oblige myself to do if, according to your opinion, I do not fulfill my service to you - but in any case, I reserve the right to unilaterally determine the price that you must pay me for such undefined service. Any such security provider would immediately disappear from the market due to a complete lack of customers. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe “A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms - an expropriating property protector - and will inevitably lead to more taxes and less protection. Even if, as some - classical liberal - statists have proposed, a government limited its activities exclusively to the protection of pre-existing private property rights, the further question of how much security to produce would arise. Motivated (like everyone else) by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but endowed with the unique power to tax, a government agent’s answer will invariably be the same: To maximize expenditures on protection - and almost all of a nation’s wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection - and at the same time to minimize the production of protection.”
— Hans-Hermann Hoppe As for the kindergarten [level] argument, it does not follow from the fact that the state provides roads and schools that only the state can provide such goods. People have little difficulty recognising that this is a fallacy. From the fact that monkeys can ride bikes it does not follow that only monkeys can ride bikes. And second, immediately following, it must be recalled that the state is an institution that can legislate and tax; and hence, that state agents have little incentive to produce efficiently. State roads and schools will only be more costly and their quality lower. For there is always a tendency for state agents to use up as many resources as possible doing whatever they do but actually work as little as possible doing it. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Reflections on the Origin and the stability of the State Originally Posted by Does the State Defend us? Acquiescence - Is the most consequentially neglected word in political science. Alone it establishes that tax is theft and government criminal by giving a name for something that is between consent and confrontation.
The concept of acquiescence, and even the word, is often lumped incorrectly with consent, thereby confusing submission in the face of overwhelming force with consent chosen freely. For example, if people evade tax, they face imprisonment and further extortion. So the payment of tax no more proves consent than the payment of a ransom transforms kidnapping into mere babysitting.
This is not to say that everyone who lives under government would rise up against it if they could. Rather, it is to point out that acquiescing to government is no evidence of consent. So defenders of government cannot point to widespread acquiescence as evidence of consent. They must get written, signed and witnessed contracts if they want to say they are legitimate. And such an institution, with written, signed and witnessed contracts, would resemble a free market entity, not government. - Benjamin Marks
What are your arguments for the state as defined above?
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