The Siren's Call of the State

The state is the most destructive institution humans have ever devised – a conflagration that, at best, can only be contained for a brief period before it breaks out of its makeshift confines and spreads its flames everywhere.

Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the ability of individuals in civil society to defend themselves from the depredations of the state, thereby increasing the multifaceted victimization of the public at the hands of state officials. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency – war and other crises comparable to war in the seriousness of the threats they pose.

States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war – not always against foreign enemies, of course, but always against their own subjects. The most fundamental purpose of the state, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is theft. The state sustains itself through robbery, ideologically beautifying it by giving it a different name (taxation) and striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary. State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate, even moral duty to pay taxes to the state that governs their society.

They fall into this moral misjudgment because they are incessantly told that the tribute they pay is actually a sort of price paid for essential services received, and that for certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty, and property, only the government can provide the service effectively. However, they are not allowed to test this claim by resorting to competing providers of law, order, and security, because the government imposes a monopoly on the production and distribution of its supposed “services” and resorts to violence against potential competitors. In doing so, it reveals the fraud at the core of its brazen claims and provides ample evidence that it is not a genuine protector but merely a mafia-like protection racket.

All governments are, as they must be, oligarchies: only a relatively small number of people have substantial discretionary power to make critical decisions about how the state's power will be exercised. Beyond the oligarchy itself and the police and military forces that make up its Praetorian Guard, somewhat larger groups constitute a support coalition. These groups provide significant financial and other support to the oligarchs and seek compensatory rewards from them – legal privileges, subsidies, jobs, exclusive franchises and licenses, financial income and wealth transfers, in-kind goods and services, and other spoils – channeled to them at the expense of the mass of the people. Thus, the political class in general – that is, the oligarchs, the Praetorian Guard, and the support coalition – uses the power of government (meaning, ultimately, the police and the military) to exploit everyone outside that class, wielding or threatening to use violence against all who fail to pay the tribute the oligarchs demand or to obey the rules they dictate.

Democratic political forms and rituals, such as elections and formal administrative procedures, disguise this class exploitation and delude the masses, leading them to believe that the operation of the government brings them net benefits. In the most extreme form of misconception, the general populace convinces itself that, because of democracy, they themselves “are the government”.

Individuals crossing the border between the political class and the exploited class witness, however, nothing more than the cunningly planned flexibility and openness of the system. Although the system is inherently exploitative and cannot exist in any other form, it allows some leeway at the margins in determining which specific individuals will be the screwed and which the screwers. At the top, a modest degree of “elite circulation” within the oligarchy also serves to mask the essential character of the political system.

However, it is a valid interpretative rule that anything that cannot be accomplished without the aid of threats or the actual use of violence against harmless individuals cannot be beneficial for everyone. The masses' belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of large-scale Stockholm syndrome. Nevertheless, no matter how widely this syndrome may extend, it cannot alter the basic fact that, due to the operation of government as we know it, that is, government without genuine, expressed, and individual consent, a minority lives at the expense of the rest, and the rest, therefore, lose out in the process, while the oligarchs (elected or not, it matters little) preside over the vast web of criminal organizations we know as the State.

Despite the ideological enchantment with which high official priests and statist intellectuals deceive the plundered class, many members of this class retain the capacity to recognize at least some of their losses and, therefore, sometimes resist new incursions against their rights by publicly expressing their grievances, supporting political challengers who promise to lighten their burdens, fleeing the country, and, most importantly, evading or avoiding taxes and violating legal bans and regulatory restrictions on their actions, as in the so-called underground economy, or “black market”.

These various forms

of resistance together compose a force that opposes the constant pressure of the government to expand its dominion. These two forces, working against each other, establish a locus of “equilibrium,” a border between the set of rights the government has nullified or seized and the set of rights that the plundered class has somehow managed to retain, whether through formal constitutional restrictions or through everyday tax evasion, black market transactions, and other defensive violations of the government's oppressive rules.

Politics in the broadest sense can be seen as the struggle to push this boundary one way or the other. For members of the political class, the crucial question is always: how can we push the frontier, how can we increase the dominion of the government and plunder, with net gain for ourselves, the exploiters who live not from honest production and voluntary exchange, but from extorting those who do?

National emergency – war or a similar threatening crisis – answers the crucial question of the political class more effectively than anything else, because such a crisis has a unique and effective ability to dissipate the forces that would otherwise obstruct or oppose the expansion of the government.

Practically any war will suffice, at least for a while, because in modern nation-states the outbreak of war invariably leads the masses to “rally around the flag,” regardless of their previous ideological stance towards the government.

We need not go far to find the cause of this tremendous and rationally unjustified “rallying” around the flag. These public reactions are always driven by a combination of fear, ignorance, and uncertainty within a context of intense chauvinistic nationalism, a popular culture predisposed to violence, and a general inability to distinguish between the state and the general populace.

Because the government incessantly sings the siren's song, incessantly propagandizing the public to consider it their protector – such supposed protection is the main excuse for its routine robbery and violation of their natural rights – and because the mass media incessantly amplifies and spreads government propaganda, it will be no surprise at all if this propaganda comes to penetrate deeply into the thinking of many people, especially when they are in a state of near-panic. Unable to think clearly in an informed manner, most people resort to a childish us-against-them style of understanding the perceived threat and what must be done about it.

The so-called war on terror has given rise to a massive industry that has sprung up almost from scratch over the past few years. According to a 2006 Forbes report, the Department of Homeland Security and its predecessor agencies paid private contractors at least $130 billion after September 11, and other federal agencies spent a comparable amount. Thus, in addition to the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC), we now have a parallel homeland-security-industrial-congressional complex (HSICC).

Between 1999 and 2006, the number of federal homeland security contractors increased from nine firms to 33,890, and a multibillion-dollar industry selling security-related goods and services emerged complete with specialized newsletters, magazines, websites, consultants, trade shows, job search services, and an actual army of lobbyists working non-stop to widen the river of money flowing to these opportunists. As Paul Harris wrote: “The US is in the grip of a fear-based business.” The last thing these vultures want, of course, is a decrease in the perceived terrorist threat, and we can count on them to exaggerate any sign of an increase in such threats and, of course, to fill the trough, gleefully sucking up taxpayer money.

What chance does peace have when millions of wealthy and politically connected opportunists of all hues depend on the continuation of a state of war for their personal financial success? For members of Congress, the Department of Homeland Security has rapidly become the most magnificent dispenser of favors in decades. Everyone is happy here, except for the common citizens under siege, whose pockets are being picked and whose freedoms are being revoked by politicians and private-sector predators with utter disdain for the intelligence and rights of the people. Yet, as long as people continue to be consumed by fear and fall for the old hoax that the government seeks only to protect them, these abuses will never end.

A state of peace is an impossibility. Even a state that refrains from fighting foreigners continues to fight its own subjects continuously, to keep them under its control and suppress competitors who might try to enter the domain of its protection racket. People clamor for security, but do not take responsibility for their own protection and, like the sailors in Greek mythology, immediately leap into the sea in response to the state's siren song.

When the Israelites fled their captivity in Egypt, they lived for centuries only with judges, but they were not satisfied and ultimately demanded a king, crying out:

“We want to have a king. We will be like all the other nations; a king will govern us, and go out before us and fight our battles.” – Samuel 8:19–20

Well, they got a king, yes, just as we

have adopted one of our own, although we call ours president. The Israelites, as the prophet Samuel warned, were no better off for having a king: King Saul merely led them from one slaughter to another (1 Samuel 14:47–48).

Likewise, our rulers have led us from one unnecessary slaughter to another; and, to make matters worse, they have exploited each of these occasions to tighten their chains around us more firmly. Like the ancient Israelites, we will never have real and lasting peace as long as we give our allegiance to a king – that is, in our case, to the entire conglomerate of institutionalized exploiters and murderers we know as the state.

By: Robert Higgs