Hoppe cogently explains why the State is not the answer to the provision of law and order: As a territorial monopolist of ultimate decision making and law enforcement, the state is not just like any other monopoly, such as a milk or a car monopoly that produces milk and cars of comparatively lower quality and higher prices. In contrast to all other monopolists, the state not only produces inferior goods, but bads (nongoods). In fact, it must first produce bads (such as taxes) before it can produce anything that might be considered a (inferior) good. If an agency is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict, then it is also judge in all conflicts involving itself. Consequently, instead of merely preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision making will also cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. That is, if one can only appeal to the state for justice, justice will be perverted in the favor of the state, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding. These constitutions and courts are state constitutions and courts, and whatever limitations on state action they may set or find are invariably decided by agents of the very same institution under consideration. Predictably, the definition of property and protection will be continually altered and the range of jurisdiction expanded to the states advantage. The idea of some given eternal and immutable law that must be discovered will disappear and be replaced by the idea of law as legislation — as arbitrary, state-made law. Moreover, as ultimate judge the state is also a monopolist of taxation, i.e., it can unilaterally, without the consent of everyone affected, determine the price that its subjects must pay for the states provision of (perverted) law. However, a tax-funded life-and-property protection agency is a contradiction in terms: an expropriating property protector. Motivated, as everyone is, by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but equipped with the unique power to tax, state agents will invariably strive to maximize expenditures on protection — and almost all of a nations wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection — and at the same time to minimize the actual production of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work for it, the better off one will be. -Hans Hermann Hoppe
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 18:06:41 +0000
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