I witnessed an exchange recently online where one fellow kept saying we need the state because chaos would rule supreme, and a larger gang with a bigger gun will come along and take over without it. The voluntaryist arguing against him was exasperated, saying he was delusional and brainwashed. Myself, when I’d get involved in these seemingly endless arguments and debates online, I used to get miffed at the “power vacuum” argument, thinking it spurious, but after careful consideration, I realized that it’s actually not spurious; it’s consistent with history. The statists are wrong that we “need” a government; we don’t. But I do agree with them that a state is inevitable.
When I was majoring in mathematics in college, one of the things the profs always lectured about when tackling a problem, the first thing you should do, is appeal to the definition. To build your proof, you break the problem down into smaller and smaller components and getting to the definition of each element. Then you can start on the problem itself, once you understand it.
Let’s do that with the problem of the state. I’ve broken it down into 3 questions:
What is the state?
Why do we have it?
How can we get rid of it?
1) Definition of the State
The state is basically a gang which makes itself legal through the art of law. What is law? It amounts to sacred writ created by politicians (who are not known for their honesty nor integrity). It is also created by unelected bureaucrats (regulations) and judges (law from the bench). But in the end, the state is imposed on society over the barrel of a gun. People will say: but there is democracy! We can vote! To that I say that the ballot box is merely a suggestion box for the slaves on the plantation, and we are the animals being farmed (through taxation, borrowing against future production and inflation of the money supply). Law and voting are just window dressing to try to make the state appear legitimate. There is no such thing as “consent to be governed (aka ruled).” No one gives their consent, rulers do not need consent.
2) Why we have the State
We have a state not because there is some deficiency of philosophy in its subjects. It has nothing to do with having an informed electorate or not. When I hear people complaining that democracy only works with an informed electorate, I view this as nothing but victim blaming. It doesn’t matter how you vote, you cannot vote for more freedom (you can try, the best you can hope for is a Pyrrhic victory). It is irrelevant the subject of the eduction of the electorate, the state rules no matter how you vote. So when I see voluntaryists trying to reach out to others to educate them in hopes that if we have a large enough majority we can overthrow the state, I shake my head (I used to believe this as well). You cannot overthrow the state, because another will spring up in its place. That’s because we are not striking at the root of the problem, just hacking at the branches.
It is true that state school has dumbed down generations of children, instilling in them that the highest virtue is unquestioning obedience to authority. This does make it easier to rule people, but that’s still not why we have a state. We have it because it’s a question of economics. As long as there is a return on violence (like a return on investment), the state will continue to exist. As long as it pays. We can guarantee there will always be a gang with the bigger gun because there is so much to gain from transgression and theft. From owning people and forcing them to pay tribute. The unproductive do not want to work hard to leach off of the productive.
So now that we’ve clearly defined the problem, that the state is a gang and is inevitable, that no amount of philosophy or voting will change this, nor limit its scope, how do we go about resolving this?
3) How we can get rid of the State
I’m sure first of all that we can all agree that the good things the state does (like build roads, bring water and gas to homes, sewage and garbage collection, and peace keeping in the streets) is something desirable. However, I’m sure that in the end we can figure out a way to do those things without robbing people and subjecting them to being ruled. So where the voluntaryists are right, is that the state is not necessary. Where the statists are right, is that the state is inevitable. Until we address the root problem it will continue to be that way.
So how do we get government off our backs for good? How do we finally kill the giant beast that is the state? How do we free humanity? We have to find a way to take their fuel away.
Published in 1999, the book “The Sovereign Individual” talks about how the state exists due to economics, but they foresaw that people would be moving their wealth into cyberspace, making it harder to abscond with by the state. They didn’t have any idea about Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, but they foresaw something like it. As they posit, people are subject to what the authors call, “the tyranny of place.” If you have, say, a warehouse full of gold, this is something a group of armed men can invade and commandeer for themselves. And you have a war trying to protect it, or you just walk away if you’re lucky enough to have your life. This is true for all matter of wealth, be it a restaurant, a factory, a residence, you name it.
However, there is no “warehouse of Bitcoin” which can be captured by armed mercenaries. In order to extract Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) from people, due to the nature of how blockchain technology works, you have to capture each individual holder of Bitcoin and force them to divulge their keys. Or hack their individual computers and devices to drain their wallets. This is orders of magnitude much harder than just taking over the vault that contains the gold, banknotes or bonds.
The more wealth people move out of the banking system, the more wealth people convert to cryptocurrencies, the further that wealth gets from the otherwise long arm of the state.
Though it does not solve the problems of having physical businesses subject to gang and state regulation, but if the owners solely dealt with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, stable coins and privacy coins like Monero, and put all of their wealth on the blockchain, this makes it harder for the state to extract taxes. By using cryptocurrencies and abandoning fiat currencies, government can no longer inflate the money supply to pay for itself. This will have long overdue effect of shrinking state power. Sure, the government can still come and regulate businesses, and try to force them to pay, but they have no banking system to garnish wages, withhold taxes, levy fines and impose financial restrictions.
However, there are purely remote businesses which have smaller physical footprints to tyrannize. Take a small business run out of a website, for example. The owner can, in theory, run this business from anywhere in the world, removing the large target of a brick-and-mortar shop. Imagine a world where the larger businesses are almost non-existent and all that remains are smaller, one-person businesses which partner one with the other to form a network of decentralized market actors, all bringing people products and services, but in a totally non-traditional way.
The point is, the more decentralized business becomes, the more funds and goods are moved into cyberspace, the smaller the factories become (due to technology like 3D printing) and the interconnectedness which is the Internet, the harder it becomes for a lumbering, gigantic centralized entity like a government to continue to exist. The traditional banking structure will fail, as will fiat currencies. This means that governments will break down into smaller and smaller entities, and literally will only be there as much as people want them to be. Maybe they will change their roles entirely and become service-providers subject to market conditions. But in such an environment, it will be much more difficult for the “gang with the biggest gun” to take over when businesses can just disappear into the Internet, where there are fewer targets to hit and where they have to literally shake out the keys of everyone they wish to extort from.
Let’s face it: violence is expensive. It’s only profitable for governments and gangs to use because they pass their costs to their shakedown victims (aka taxpayers). Without this ability to leach wealth from the productive, this raises the cost of that violence making it less and less attractive to use in order to obtain wealth.
I often say the state will not go out with a bang, but instead with a whimper (to borrow from T.S. Eliot). Revolutions only replace one despotic state with another. The true revolution will be a monetary one, where the individual becomes sovereign by getting complete, 100% control over the fruits of his efforts. The state will no longer thrive in such an environment.