For most people, "anarchy" is a disturbing word, suggesting chaos, violence, antinomianism - things they hope the state can control or prevent. The term "state," despite its bloody history, doesn’t disturb them. Yet it's the state that is truly chaotic, because it means the rule of the strong and cunning. They imagine that anarchy would naturally terminate in the rule of thugs. But mere thugs can't assert a plausible right to rule. Only the state, with its propaganda apparatus, can do that. This is what 'legitimacy' means. Anarchists obviously need a more seductive label.
Source: The Reluctant Anarchist (2002)
[link] #77"But what would you replace the state with?" The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be "replaced."
Source: The Reluctant Anarchist (2002)
[link] #341The real triumph of the state occurs when its subjects refer to it as "we," like football fans talking about the home team.
Source: What Do We Owe the State? (2002)
[link] #417The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.
Source: Anarchy without Fear (2002)
[link] #418Most men today can hardly imagine living without the parasitic force-systems we call states. However bad the state may be, they assume that anarchy would be somehow even worse, even after a century of world war, mass murder, and general waste and destruction claiming hundreds of millions of lives and creating poverty where there might have been plenty. By now, if men learned from experience, they would talk about the state in the same tones in which Jews talk about Nazis. Instead, they continue to imagine the state as their savior and protector, and as the natural solution to all their problems. Yet it’s self-evident that the bigger the state, the larger the ratio of force in human life, and the smaller the scope of free action.
Source: Anarchy without Fear (2002)
[link] #438There is no getting away from it: at bottom, the state is nothing but organized force. Its only abiding rule is this: "Obey, or we will hurt you."
Source: Anarchy without Fear (2002)
[link] #489The state pretends that all its demands, however arbitrary, are moral obligations, even though those demands rest on force. If it were confined to demanding only what decent people do anyway -- refraining from murder, robbery, et cetera -- it might be bearable. But it never stops with reasonable moral demands; at a minimum, even the most "humane" and "democratic" states use the taxing power to extort staggering amounts of money from their subjects. The predatory tendency of the state is inherent and expansive, and nobody has found a way to control it. No control can long withstand the monopolistic "right" to demand obedience in every area of human activity the state may choose to invade. Systematized force -- which is all the state really is -- follows its own logic. Legal forms, moral rhetoric, and propaganda may disguise force as something it is not. The idea of "democracy" has persuaded countless gullible people that they are somehow "consenting" when they are being coerced.
Source: What Do We Owe the State? (2002)
[link] #714About Joseph Sobran
Michael Joseph Sobran Jr. (February 23, 1946 - September 30, 2010) was a paleoconservative American journalist. He wrote for the National Review magazine and was a syndicated columnist. During the 1970s, he frequently used the byline M. J. Sobran.
In his columns, Sobran was moralistic, opposed to big government, and an isolationist critic of U.S. foreign policy. When he fired Sobran from his longtime job at National Review in 1993, publisher William F. Buckley termed some of Sobran's writings "contextually anti-Semitic". In the early 2000s, Sobran was a speaker for a Holocaust denial group.
Throughout much of his career, Sobran identified as a paleoconservative like his colleagues Samuel T. Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Peter Gemma. He claimed to support a strict interpretation of the United States Constitution. He asserted that the Tenth Amendment meant that almost every federal government act since the Civil War had been illegal. In 2002, Sobran announced his philosophical and political shift to libertarianism (paleolibertarian anarcho-capitalism), citing inspiration by theorists Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. He referred to himself as a "theo-anarchist".
