Authors > Robert Higgs
Robert Higgs Quotes
Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.
Source: Facebook (2012) #14
People and their values are almost infinitely diverse, and people will never agree on many elements of social arrangements that might be subjected to uniform rules of governance. Hence, the greater the scope of strictly individual self-determination, the lesser the scope of governance, and the greater the tolerance with which people live and let live among their fellows, the more peaceful and flourishing society will be.
Source: Against Libertarian Infighting (2014) [link] #34
Opponents of anarchism cannot bring themselves to believe that any possible stateless society could provide security, justice, and social peace through market transactions, yet they apparently believe that government as we know it -- government without explicit, voluntary, individual consent -- does, or at least might, provide these goods. Go figure.
Source: Facebook (2015) #78
In regard to the so-called social contract, I have often had occasion to protest that I haven't even seen the contract, much less been asked to consent to it. A valid contract requires voluntary offer, acceptance, and consideration. I've never received an offer from my rulers, so I certainly have not accepted one; and rather than consideration, I have received nothing but contempt from the rulers, who, notwithstanding the absence of any agreement, have indubitably threatened me with grave harm in the event that I fail to comply with their edicts.
Source: Consent of the Governed? (2010) [link] #95
If anarchists are idealists, they may simply be likened to someone who finds himself swimming in a cesspool and, rather than paddling about looking for the area with the least amount of floating feces, seeks to climb out of the pool completely.
Source: Facebook (2014) #100
Everyone can see the immense harm the state causes day in and day out, not to mention its periodic orgies of mass death and destruction. In the past century alone, states caused hundreds of millions of deaths, not to the combatants on both sides of the many wars they launched, but to “their own” populations, whom they have chosen to shoot, bomb, shell, hack, stab, beat, gas, starve, work to death, and otherwise obliterate in ways to grotesque to contemplate calmly ... People are vile and corruptible, the state, which holds by far the greatest potential for harm and tends to be captured by the worst of the worst, is much too risky for anyone to justify its continuation. To tolerate it is not simply to play with fire, but to chance the total destruction of the human race.
Source: If Men Were Angels (2007) [link] #107
The government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged "services" and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.
Source: The Siren Song of the State (2007) [link] #141
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am -- not stuck in the middle, but hovering above the entire farcical spectrum, weeping as I behold my fellow man's devotion to political illusion and self-destruction.
Source: Facebook (2015) #149
Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime.
Source: Can a Libertarian Be Pro-War? (2006) [link] #153
Perhaps the most tiresome of all objections to (my type of) anarchy is that human beings are too inclined towards violence and mayhem against their fellows to be set free of government as we know it. The thoughtlessness of this objection is stunning. After all, the state invariably falls under control of the most vicious, violent, and rapacious individuals in society – it's a matter of comparative advantage. So all that one accomplishes by retention of the state is to ensure that such creeps and sociopaths will possess monopoly control of the powerful institutions that constitute the state, and thereby possess a far more effective means of wreaking death and destruction than they ever could have acquired absent the state. In short, in regard to mankind's innate inclination toward evil, the state is much less the cure than it is an acute strain of the disease.
Source: Facebook (2016) #159
Once people accept the claim that taxation is legitimate, all hope of their society's becoming or remaining free has been thrown out the window, and a necessary -- and perhaps sufficient -- condition has been established for their perpetual subjugation by the ruling oligarchy.
Source: Facebook (2018) #167
Notwithstanding what some regard as the institutionalization of compassion, the transfer society quashes genuine virtue. Redistribution of income by means of government coercion is a form of theft. Its supporters attempt to disguise its essential character by claiming that democratic procedures give it legitimacy, but this justification is specious. Theft is theft, whether it be carried out by one thief or by a hundred million thieves acting in concert. And it is impossible to found a good society on the institutionalization of theft.
Source: Nineteen Neglected Consequences of Income Redistribution (1994) [link] #179
People who insist that the government take charge of a certain task are confessing that the only tool in their toolbox is a gun.
Source: Facebook (2019) #192
It is so tiresome to see people reacting to the idea of anarchism by confidently proclaiming that anarchy would certainly result in terrible conditions X, Y, and Z, when X, Y, and Z are exactly what lie at the heart of the current statist system of rule, so deeply embedded there that people no longer even recognize the state's institutionalized criminality, oppression, and plunder.
Equally tiresome is the claim that anarchy presupposes that people are angels, when it is precisely because anarchists fully recognize people's capacity for evil that they oppose a system that gives monopoly power over life and death to a cabal of evil politicians and their self-serving financial backers.
Equally tiresome is the claim that anarchy presupposes that people are angels, when it is precisely because anarchists fully recognize people's capacity for evil that they oppose a system that gives monopoly power over life and death to a cabal of evil politicians and their self-serving financial backers.
Source: Facebook (2020) #201
People get the bulk of their food, clothing, housing, consumer durables, and other essential goods and services from private competitive suppliers. Only a hardcore Marxist would want to switch to monopoly government suppliers of these things. Yet across the political spectrum, almost everyone regards reliance on private competitive suppliers of personal and community security as an insane idea. It would appear that the brainwashing has had the desired effect.
Source: Facebook (2019) #203
The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised -- a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o'erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.
Source: The Song That Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction (2007) [link] #236
Like any ideology that has attracted a substantial following, libertarianism has splintered into a variety of sects. ... Unfortunately, many libertarians devote substantial energy to quarreling with other libertarians. To some extent, such quarreling helps to refine people's thinking, but for the most part it is a waste of time and does nothing to move us closer to the goal that all libertarians share--the shrinkage of the state as it now exists.
Source: Against Libertarian Infighting (2014) [link] #244
I don't have all the answers. I may not have any of them. But I am convinced that if people are free, rather than constrained and kicked around as they are under government as we know it, they will find better, more genuine and workable answers than any that the government's bureaucrats, kept intellectuals, and running dogs can devise. Freedom is not a blueprint for society; it's a process by which people alter society for the better without using force to do so.
Source: Facebook (2019) #268
States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war -- not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects. The state's most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is robbery. The state gains its very sustenance from robbery, which it pretties up ideologically by giving it a different name (taxation) and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary. State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral duty to pay taxes to the state that rules their society.
Source: The Song That Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction (2007) [link] #289
Perhaps the most perplexing objection to genuine self-government that I've seen is the one that goes, Human nature is such that some people will always be vicious and antisocial; hence anarchy cannot work. Instead, such objectors argue, we must have a government in which the manifestly (by virtue of self-selection) most vicious and antisocial persons in society are endowed with a monopoly of great violent power over the rest of us. Yes, that's certainly a knockdown argument -- unless one gives it a few moments of thought or knows even a tiny bit about history.
Source: Facebook (2013) #316
It is a sound interpretive rule, however, that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all.
Source: The Song That Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction (2007) [link] #334
To say that solving a perceived social or economic problem requires political action is tantamount to saying that it has no real solution, only fake solutions that usually make it even worse. A hammer is not a suitable tool for negotiating an agreement; a government is not a suitable institution for solving a social or economic problem. Indeed, government is itself the greatest of all social and economic problems, the dark storm cloud in whose shadow such problems arise, worsen, and provoke social decay, deteriorating economic performance, internal and external turmoil, violence, and war. Of all the false gods ever touted, government is the falsest of all.
Source: Facebook (2015) [link] #394
Those who give a free hand to the government in its foreign and defense policy-making will ultimately discover that they have handed their rulers the key that opens all doors, including the doors that obstruct the government's invasion of our most cherished rights to life, liberty, and property. The war-making key is, so to speak, the master key for any government, because when critical tradeoffs must be made, war will override all other concerns and, as an ancient maxim aptly informs us, inter armas silent leges.
Source: Can a Libertarian Be Pro-War? (2006) [link] #439
When the typical person encounters an advocate of anarchism, his immediate reaction is to identify a list of critical government functions--preservation of social order, maintenance of a legal system for resolving disputes and dealing with criminals, protection against foreign aggressors, enforcement of private property rights, support of the weak and defenseless, production and maintenance of economic infrastructure, and so forth. This reaction, however, shoots at the wrong target. Libertarian anarchists do not deny that such social functions must be carried out if a society is to function successfully. They do deny, however, that we must have government (as we know it) to carry them out. Libertarian anarchists prefer that these functions be carried out by private providers with whom the beneficiaries have agreed to deal.
Source: Why We Couldn't Abolish Slavery Then and Can't Abolish Government Now (2009) [link] #448
Experiment lies at the heart of progress. Whether in science, technology, or economic organization, the rivalrous process of trial and, often, error -- to weed out what does not work -- constitutes the indispensable means by which the more successful (more explanatory, more productive, more profitable) displaces the less successful and thereby gives rise to genuine progress. Notice, however, that the progress so visible over the ages in science, technology, and economic organization has no counterpart in government. Today's government might as well be the government in the classic Greek tragedies of the fifth century BC. The reason is that government by its very nature punishes experiment, calls it treason and murders those who sponsor it. The state wants no experiment; it wants only to cement in place every predatory policy and project that butters the bread of its leaders, funders, and running dogs. Where other realms of human endeavor understand the necessity of competitive experimentation, the state understands only violence veiled in heavy layers of lies and propaganda. Experiment at your own peril, citizen.
Source: Facebook (2016) [link] #501
The problem is not having the wrong person in charge of the government. The problem is having such a government - a government without the explicit, voluntary, individual consent of every adult subject to its authority - in the first place.
Source: Unknown #507
Libertarians should never concede the moral high ground to those who insist on coercively interfering with freedom.
Source: Freedom: Because It Works or Because It's Right? (2012) [link] #521
Politics is the disease; the nonaggression principle is the cure; but almost no one wants to swallow it.
Source: Facebook (2024) [link] #551
The idea that anarchism must fail because under anarchy no one can make others obey the rules is stunningly stupid. On any given day, even in a world pervaded by states and their dictates, nearly everything that people do or refrain from doing is so not because the state threatens them with violence for acting otherwise, but because they find conformity with rules -- honesty, promise keeping, careful handling of goods, avoidance of opportunism, and so forth -- to be in their interest. The world does not run on the state's threats of violence; it runs in spite of those threats. Many sanctions besides violence and threats of violence may be -- and are even in the world in which we now live -- effective sanctions for adherence to law and order. Ostracization of dishonest dealers, for example, works wonders, and in the world of modern communications it can be more effective than ever.
Source: Facebook (2016) #588
About Robert Higgs
(From Wikipedia)
Robert Higgs (born 1 February 1944) is an American economic historian and economist combining material from Public Choice, the New institutional economics, and the Austrian school of economics; and describes himself as a "libertarian anarchist" in political and legal theory and public policy. His writings in economics and economic history have most often focused on the causes, means, and effects of government power and growth.
Higgs earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the Johns Hopkins University and has held teaching positions at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, and Seattle University. He has also been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University. He held a visiting professorship at the University of Economics, Prague in 2006, and has supervised dissertations in the Ph.D. program at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, where he is currently an honorary professor of economics and history.
Higgs has been a Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute since September 1994. He has served at Editor at Large of The Independent Review since 2013, after having been Editor from 1995 to 2013.
In his ''Crisis and Leviathan'', Higgs first elaborated in detail on his ratchet hypothesis as part of a more general interpretation of governmental growth. Higgs aimed to demonstrate that contemporary models to explain the growth of government did not explain why growth historically occurred in spurts, rather than continuously.. Higgs formulated the ratchet effect to explain this phenomenon. He theorized that most government growth occurred in response to real or imagined national "crises" and that after the crises, some, but rarely all, of the new interventions ceased. "Crisis and Leviathan" surveys the history of the American federal government from the 1880s to the 1980s, applying the ratchet effect to the period. He cites economic crises and wars as the chief sources for the growth of government.
During the 2008 presidential election, Higgs defended then-presidential candidate Ron Paul in response to Bret Stephens's article from The Wall Street Journal and made the case why "war, preparation for war, and foreign military interventions have served for the most part not to protect us, as we are constantly told, but rather to sap our economic vitality and undermine our civil and economic liberties."
Additional Resources
The State Is Too Dangerous to Tolerate | Robert Higgs (YouTube)Robert Higgs: The Independent Institute
