One of my favorite quotes from the quotable Thomas
Paine is a mere footnote in his treatise, Rights of Man, Part Second, in which he wrote:
It is scarcely possible to touch on any subject, that will not suggest an allusion to some
corruption in governments.
Paine was referring to “the splendor of the throne,”
which he said “is no other than the corruption of the state. It is made
up of a band of parasites, living in luxurious indolence, out of the public
taxes.” He thought the U.S. federal government, newly created by the
Constitution, provided hope against political corruption because of the
limitations it imposed on the government. Paine was in England at the
time and had no idea that the new government, whose intellectual leader was
Alexander Hamilton, was busy interpreting those limitations out of existence.
Paine also didn’t know the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was in fact a
coup d'état. The participants had been authorized only to amend the
Articles of Confederation, but the nationalists, at least, wanted to replace
the Articles with a new government that would be more “energetic.”
Knowing that Washington’s presence at the convention would be critical to its
success, Henry Knox told the retired general that he would be given the
president’s chair, and moreover, that he would not be presiding over some
middling conference of officials tinkering with the “present defective
confederation,” but instead would lead a prestigious body of men as they
created an “energetic and judicious system,” one which would “doubly” entitle
him to be called The Father of His Country.
In a previous note Knox had awakened Washington’s interest by lying about the
meaning of Shays’s Rebellion. According to
Knox, former Revolutionary War officer Daniel Shays had organized the
riffraff of Western Massachusetts to shut down the courts to avoid paying
their taxes. They were levelers, Knox said, who sought to annihilate
all debts through “the weakness of government.” Washington, who owned
some 60,000 acres in the Virginia backcountry, thought that such people were
“a wretched lot, not to be trusted, and certainly not to be the bone and
sinew of a great nation.”
In truth, as historian Leonard L. Richards has
shown, Shays’s Rebellion was
not an uprising of poor indebted farmers, but a protest against the
Massachusetts state government and its attempt to enrich the few at the
expense of the many through a regressive tax system. The rebellion began as
peaceful petitioning and escalated into violence only after the state
repeatedly ignored the petitions. Though they were described in various
disparaging terms, the rebels saw themselves as regulators whose purpose was
“the suppressing of tyrannical government in the Massachusetts State.”
They drew their inspiration from the Declaration of Independence that said
people should throw off any government that is destructive of their rights.
But the rebellion was finally crushed and has since been interpreted as proof
that a stronger central government was necessary. Following
ratification, “We the people” were headed down the long road to serfdom at an
accelerated pace.
Is there an exit on that road?
A few thinkers have argued that there is.
In 1849 in Paris, Gustav de Molinari and his laissez-faire colleagues met to
discuss Molinari’s new book, Les Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare, a
series of fictional dialogues between a conservative, a socialist, and
himself, whom he referred to as the economist. Molinari argued that the
free market could produce the state’s traditional function of security
without monopoly, or as he put it in another essay, “the production of security should . . . remain subject to the law
of free competition.”
His friends at the meeting included Charles Coquelin, Frederic Bastiat, and
Charles Dunoyer. None of them accepted his
thesis. In the absence of a monopoly state, Coquelin
asserted, competition was “impossible to put into practice or even to
conceive of it.” Bastiat said the only way to
guarantee justice and security is with force, and that requires a “supreme
power,” not spread over bodies “equal amongst themselves.” Coquelin later wrote a review of Molinari’s arguments, correctly describing the latter’s position
as one in which
the
State would be nothing but a kind of insurance company, a rival to many
others, and each person would, just as he pleases, freely subscribe to this
one or to that one to guarantee himself against the troubles that threaten
him, exactly as one would guarantee his house against fire or his ship
against shipwreck.
Murray Rothbard describes the Belgian-born Molinari as the
most “consistent, longest-lived and most prolific of the French laissez-faire
economists.” He was proposing life without a state, and there were
virtually no takers.
Almost simultaneously in England a young Herbert Spencer was advancing a
nearly identical thesis in his book, Social Statics. Spencer argued that government would inevitably become smaller
and “decay” as the voluntary institutions of the market replaced it. As
David Hart points out, “it must be assumed that the two thinkers arrived at their positions
independently of one another, suggesting that anti-statism
is inherent in the logic of the free market.”
A disciple of Spencer’s, Auberon Herbert, agreed
with Molinari that the market, unhampered by the state, could satisfy every
want that we have, including protection services. David Hart:
Neither Spencer nor Herbert went as far as
Molinari's suggestion that these voluntary defense agencies would be fully
professional business organizations whose prices would be determined on the
market by competition. They merely limited themselves to criticizing the
monopoly of the state and arguing that the individual had the right to
organize freely.
However reasonable their views might sound, they
never had a wide following. Molinari believed that the state would die
a natural death, that full liberty and a free market
were inevitable, yet in the last half of the 19th century he witnessed the
rise of statism in all its virulent forms.
David Hart:
Molinari had well understood the fact that these
groups which controlled or had access to the state,
comprised a class which would not willingly give up the privileges that power
bestowed. Unfortunately, he had badly over-estimated the readiness of the
exploited classes, the workers, the consumers and the industrialists who did
not seek state privileges, to identify government intervention as the enemy
of progress. [emphasis added]
The State: Protector or Predator?
Before dismissing Molinari as a hopeless idealist we should refresh ourselves
on what the state actually is. As Rothbard
has written in “The Anatomy of the State,”
one can acquire economic goods either by production or predation.
Following the line of thought of German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, Rothbard says the state, as a monopolist of violence, “is
the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.”
More precisely,
The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic
channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure,
and relatively "peaceful" the lifeline of the parasitic caste in
society.
With this understanding, its hardly surprising that the state’s biggest
problem is ideological. To stay in control, it needs the support of the
majority of its subjects, even if such support is only grudging acceptance.
Political leaders alone cannot muster the needed support. The rulers
need intellectuals to persuade the masses that the state is “good, wise and,
at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable
alternatives.” In return for this support, the state sees that its
intellectuals are well-taken care of.
From this it follows that the greatest danger to the state is the person who
publicly proclaims the nakedness of the emperor.
This is our cue. The state will continue to grow relentlessly if people
are convinced that at the very least it is a necessary evil, as Paine once put it. But the state’s abundant historical record is clear: It isn’t
at all necessary. It
is simply evil.
