The State

This page describes a concept which is part of our glossary

When talking to people about freedom, liberty and the ideals of creating a new Agorist society which is free from state-tyranny, many people are confused and can't understand how a civilised society would even be possible without the state. But all aspects of society such as technology, health, education and even financing of industry, justice and policing can all be carried out more effectively in a free market context than by the state mechanism.

This is because the state is by it's very nature corrupt, and can only ever tend towards greater inefficiency and oppression. To understand why this is it's important to remember that the state originated through rape, pillage and plunder and has changed only in it's increased magnitude and by evolving better methods of keeping it's true nature hidden from the people.

The origin of the state

When most of humanity settled into peaceful farming communities, with perhaps larger marketplaces (remember the original agora of Greece) in towns, some people discovered a means of surviving parasitically from the productivity of others. They formed robber bands and attacked towns and settlements, plundering, raping, and murdering. Probably the original barbarian hordes were hunters who took to hunting man when their game died out rather than taking to farming, trading, or productive manufacture.

These roving groups were a small minority (or their victims would have died out and they as well) but large as compared to a single town or village. Somewhere along the way, one of them discovered that they could allow the peasants to live with enough to survive on and come back at the next harvest for another raid.

Then these raiders had another idea: they would stay in the same towns, steal lightly but regularly, murder enough to keep the peasants and merchants in line, and live well. Other areas, seeing these petty kingdoms arise, decided to submit themselves to their own home-grown warlords so that they would not fall prey to foreign warriors.

Parasites must remain a minority or kill their hosts. So they discovered religion (and later ideology) as a means to intimidate peasants and win the all-important sanction of the victim (an apt phrase of Ayn Rand's). Brutal thugs became "kings by divine right" and some very powerful statists called Emperors, Pharaohs, or Tsars were said to be divine, the unstoppable choice of gods.

And so these barbarian raiders institutionalized plunder (taxation), murder (execution and warfare), and even rape (droit de seigneur, for example). They took control of roads to plunder the caravans (tolls, tariffs), they suppressed all rival criminal gangs with their own (police), and established their own churches, schools, judges, and even philosophers, minstrels, and artists to work in their royal courts. Thus was born the State.

— Samuel Edward Konkin III, The Agorist Primer

Quotes

	Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression.
	— Herbert Spencer, 1850

	This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies.
	— Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1922

It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.

— Henry L. Mencken, 1926

See also

• Our Enemy The State - by Albert Jay Nock, 1935
• Agorism
• Money
• Privatization of Roads and Highways: The Human and Economic Factors - a book by Walter Block available from the Mises institute