"Nock’s unsparing pessimism blinded him to the possibilities of his own material. Read Our Enemy, the State closely enough and it dawns on you that Nock’s caustic version of history might well provide the ideological basis for conservative governance. The state, according to Nock, is an instrument for “the economic exploitation of one class by another.” He was especially contemptuous of the New Deal, which he described as a “coup d’état” in which the shiftless “masses” rip off the hardworking few and indirectly “loot their own treasury” through such devices as Social Security. But Nock included virtually every government in his condemnation. All states are built to steal and exploit, including the American state founded in 1776. “Wherever the state is, there is villainy,” Nock has taught generations of young conservatives: Governments are instituted among men in order to help one group in society exploit another; governments are then captured by some other class, which sets about exploiting some other group, and so on. Albert Jay Nock didn’t approve of any of this, but that was merely because his cynical nerve failed in the end. If we contemplate this thing with the nihilistic eye of the conservative warrior, the answer to the problem of the state becomes obvious. Since there is no possible moral difference between modes of government, it doesn’t matter whether the beast is “big” or “small”; all that matters is who has captured it and whose interests it serves. The object of the political war is not really to shrink the state or shut it down; it is to capture the thing and run it—or run it into the ground—for your constituents’ benefit."
Posted on: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 02:17:51 +0000
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