Editor’s Pick. Written by Robert Higgs. State power is the most dangerous force in modern life. State rulers, seeking their own aggrandizement and enrichment, employ this power systematically to plunder and abuse their subjects. Of course, they cannot act in this way without the assistance of many others, among whom some assist willingly, some in…
Tag: rulers
The State: Human Parasite
Send him mail. “The Self Owner” is an original weekly column appearing every Wednesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Spencer W. Morgan. Spencer is a husband and father, and has studied History and Philosophy at the University of Utah. Archived columns can be found here. OVP-only RSS feed available here. In previous columns, we discussed the way…
The Power of the State versus the Power of Love
Editor’s Pick. Written by Robert Higgs. Hardheaded people mock the idea that “love is the answer” to the people’s dire situation. They insist that evil forces and evil men are afoot in the world, men who care nothing for love and seek only vile ends, and that such malevolence can be fended off effectively only…
Nationalism, the Bane of the Modern Age
Editor’s Pick. Written by Robert Higgs. Everyone, it seems, has a hollow space in his makeup. Perhaps he has no faith, no hope, no charity; no sense that he is basically a lord or a priest or a peasant; no comfort in knowing his personal latitude and longitude in the great scheme of things; no…
The State: Crown Jewel of Human Social Organization
Editor’s Pick. Written by Robert Higgs. Since the earliest stage of human history (say, the time of Cain and Abel), human beings have been homicidal maniacs. Yet, for untold ages, something was missing, something with the capacity to raise their murderous mania to truly magnificent heights. Only very late in human history—perhaps 10,000 years ago…
Cypriots and the President’s Ability to Kill
Send him mail. “One Voluntaryist’s Perspective” is an original bi-weekly column appearing every other Monday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by the founder and editor Skyler J. Collins. Archived columns can be found here. OVP-only RSS feed available here. There are so many concepts and ideas swirling in my head this week, but nothing with enough concreteness to…
Who Will Be Master?
Respect for the Law
Written by Paul Hein for Strike-The-Root.com. If you have any–that is, respect for the law–you ought to reconsider. We are controlled, after all, by psychology, and the “law” is a key player in the ploy. There is a division of the company called the State that writes down, solemnly, the desires of the company, and…
For Reasons of State
Written by Michael Bakunin, circa 1867, as published in The Voluntaryist, April 1992. We shall now examine what the State, thus constituted, should be in relation to other states, its peers, as well as in relation to its own subject populations. This examination appears to us all the more interesting and useful because the State,…
What Makes Anarchy Peaceful or Violent?
Imagine a world in which all members of the ruled class – that is, ordinary individuals who do not belong to the structures of power – suddenly disappear without a trace, the only people remaining being the members of the ruling class – politicians, bureaucrats, and their enforcers. Now, since in order to be a…