What is the state?

We are taught to think of the state as “all of us” organized together, like a club we all belong to. Look closer and it turns out to be something quite different: the one organization in society that may take your money without asking and punish you if you compete with it.

A definition

The German sociologist Max Weber gave the most widely used definition in his lecture Politics as a Vocation (1919): the state is the human community that successfully claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

Two features stand out, and libertarians add a third.

• Territorial monopoly. Within its borders, the state is the final judge in all disputes, including disputes with itself. Nobody else may offer competing courts or police.
• Legitimacy. People generally accept the state’s violence as lawful in a way they would never accept the same acts from anyone else.
• Compulsory funding. Murray Rothbard adds that the state is the only organization that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services, but by coercion: taxation.

Your football club, employer, church and bank may be annoying, but none of them can lock you up for refusing to pay. That is the difference.

Two ways to get rich

The sociologist Franz Oppenheimer wrote in The State (1908) that there are only two ways to obtain wealth.

• The economic means: producing something and exchanging it voluntarily with others.
• The political means: taking what others have produced, by force.

Oppenheimer defined the state as “the organization of the political means”. Historically, he argued, states arose when conquering groups settled down among the conquered and turned occasional plunder into regular tribute. The tax collector replaced the raider; the tribute became a tax.

Rothbard built on this in Anatomy of the State (1974), a short essay that remains one of the clearest introductions to how states work.

Why do people obey?

No ruler can personally force millions of people. Even the cruellest regime depends on most people going along with it most of the time. As the philosopher David Hume observed in 1741, “as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion”.

The French writer Étienne de La Boétie made the same point around 1550 in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: tyrants have only the power that people give them. “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.”

So states invest heavily in legitimacy. Rothbard identified the classic tools:

• Divine or historical mission. Once kings ruled “by the grace of God”; today states rule in the name of “the people”, “the nation” or “democracy”.
• Intellectuals. Courts, universities and media that depend on state funding or licenses have good reasons to explain why the state is necessary.
• Fear. Of foreign enemies, of crime, of disease, of chaos without the state.
• Inevitability. “There has always been a state, and there always will be.”
• Identification. “We are the government.” If the state is “us”, resisting it seems like resisting yourself.

Democracy: rule by consent?

Democracy is often presented as the answer: the state is legitimate because we choose it. Libertarians raise several objections.

• You never signed. Lysander Spooner pointed out in No Treason (1867–1870) that no living person ever agreed to the US Constitution. A contract signed by people long dead binds no one today.
• Majority is not consent. If 51% vote to take the property of 49%, the 49% have not consented. As Spooner put it, a man is no less a slave because he may choose a new master every few years.
• Votes do not decide much. One vote in millions almost never changes an outcome. Public choice economists such as James Buchanan (Nobel Prize 1986) showed that politicians and officials pursue their own interests like anyone else, and that small, organized groups win benefits at the expense of large, dispersed ones.
• Short horizons. Hans-Hermann Hoppe argued in Democracy: The God That Failed (2001) that elected rulers, as temporary caretakers, have less reason than hereditary owners to preserve a country’s long-term value. They maximize spending and debt during their term. Hoppe did not defend monarchy; he argued that both are worse than a society without a state.

None of this means democracy is no better than dictatorship. Peaceful transfers of power and free elections are real achievements. But they do not turn taking into giving.

The state and the “social contract”

Many philosophers, from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls, justify the state as a kind of implied contract: we accept its rules in exchange for protection. David Hume answered this already in 1748 with an image. Saying that people consent to the state because they do not emigrate is like saying that a man carried on board a ship while asleep consents to the captain’s rule, because he could always jump into the ocean.

A real contract has clear terms, can be refused, and binds both sides. The “social contract” has none of these features. The state may change its terms at will, and it decides alone whether it has kept them.

Why states grow

The economist Robert Higgs showed in Crisis and Leviathan (1987) a recurring pattern: during wars, depressions and emergencies, government power expands sharply. When the crisis ends, it shrinks a little, but never back to where it was. Income tax, wartime controls, surveillance powers and emergency budgets often outlive the emergency that justified them by decades.

Add the incentives described above, concentrated benefits, dispersed costs and short horizons, and growth is the normal state of the state. In most European countries, government spending was around 10–15% of GDP before the First World War. Today it is typically 40–55% (Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht, Public Spending in the 20th Century, 2000; Eurostat).

The human cost

The 20th century was the century of the state at its most powerful. In Death by Government (1994) the political scientist R. J. Rummel estimated that between 1900 and 1987 governments killed about 170 million people outside of combat, mostly their own subjects, through executions, famines, camps and purges. That is several times more than died in battle in all the century’s wars. Central Europeans need no reminder: Nazism and communism were both, at their core, the state without limits.

This is the libertarian concern in its starkest form. An institution that claims the right to take, command and punish will attract people who want to take, command and punish.

If not the state, then what?

Criticizing the state is the easy part. The harder question is how law, security and public services would work without it. This site tries to answer:

• Private law and defense: courts, arbitration and security without a monopoly.
• Public goods without a state: roads, lighthouses and help for the poor.
• Stateless societies in history: medieval Iceland, merchant law, the American West and more.
• Is taxation theft?: the state’s funding under the microscope.