What is the State?

When libertarians use the word "state," we tend to have a very specific meaning in mind.  We generally mean "a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation/judicial services."  This definition has much to recommend it, especially that most, if not all, governments currently in existence today are states of this kind.  This definition also has, or at least had, some currency outside of libertarian circles--Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, and even Robert Nisbet, all major conservative thinkers, used the word state in this sense.  However, not everyone follows the libertarian standard.  For example, Edmund Burke used the word more to indicate the constellation of forces in a society, and many thinkers didn't even use the word "state" simply because they wrote in a language other than English.  What I want to do here is tease out some of the varied meanings of state and elaborate on some consequences of these meanings.

As in my last post, I'm going to use a distinction between Leftist and Rightist notions of the state without going into detail on why I'm using those adjectives.  There are reasons for my usage, some of which should be discernible to readers with some familiarity with 18th and 19th century intellectual history, but, as before, my choice of these descriptors does not necessarily correspond with any particular people or groups today that share them.

Let's look at what I'll call the Leftist idea of the state.  The buzzword associated with this idea is "consent."  Supposedly, the state is an agency created by the governed population to pursue certain collective ends.  The legitimacy of the state is dependent on the continued consent of the population to the rule of the state.  This condition goes two ways: on the one hand, an agency need only have the consent of the population, and on the other, if a state ever loses the consent of the population, then it immediately loses legitimacy.  And since the consent of the people is critical to the legitimacy of a state, it is the will of the populace that is sovereign.  Whatever the particular organizational structure of the state--whether monarchical, oligarchic, or democratic--democracy in the sense of popular rule is the ideal.

There are a couple aspects of the Leftist state that are rather fuzzy, and this fuzziness causes serious problems.  For one, what constitutes consent?  One might say that, in some sense, a woman who stops fighting back against a rapist has "consented" to being raped, but this disgusting extreme does violence to our usual notion of consent as well as the victim.  Implicit consent--meaning consent that is genuine according to our usual notion, but not expressed in any explicit manner--is a popular standard, but it really doesn't make much of an improvement.  The problem with implicit consent is that it is impossible to tell if it actually has been granted.  The evidence of consent would be a functioning government, but just as with the rape victim who stopped resisting, this may be indistinguishable from a situation without genuine consent.  Thus, the people who perform the functions of the state cannot know who is really under their legitimate jurisdiction so they necessarily either do nothing or commit gross injustices.  Explicit expression of consent might seem to solve this problem, but it really doesn't since there is the issue of verifying whether the consent is genuine.  Whether someone pays taxes, votes, or otherwise participates in acts and offices of the state, these might simply indicate a desire to secure oneself from its depredations rather than a genuine consent to its authority.  I defer here to Lysander Spooner, whose No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority deals with this matter in great detail.  However, something to point out in modern states, which are ostensibly of the Leftist type, with the exception of (legal) immigrants, no one is lining up to make an objective and explicit declaration of their consent to the state, mostly because there isn't one, but also because it wouldn't make any difference--whether you consent or not, the state still rules you.

The other region of fuzziness concerns what the state may legitimately do, and this hinges on what sort of agencies actually count as states.  Neither Microsoft nor Planned Parenthood is a state, but the US government is.  What makes the difference?  All of them are in principle dependent on the consent of their people, but one has a decidedly broader scope.  That the US government may legitimately use violence, is actually less important, according to the Leftist idea, than its charter to provide for the common defense and the general welfare (and we will, for now, leave aside the issue of Constitutional interpretation).  The US government, on the assumption that it is legitimate, is thus justified in doing whatever is required to secure those ends, perhaps with some restrictions.  There is the Constitution which prescribes and proscribes certain actions, but it can be amended, and not always explicitly.  While the US government is a particular state, the abstract notion of the Leftist state does include a charter of some kind which must be followed in the pursuit of its ends.  However, in actual practice, and especially since the state is always the arbiter in such cases of dispute on this matter, the constitutional restrictions on state action, insofar as they exist at all, will progressively be loosened and ignored.  This raises another issue regarding consent--does "consent" mean consent to every action of the state or merely to the state as such?  The standard answer, which is really the only reasonable one, is the second.  This does, however, lead to the absurd situation that if a state claims that authority to murder people and this does not prompt an overthrow, and then the state murders someone, that the person who was murdered consented to being killed.  There are a lot more gems like this that can be considered, but the important thing is that the Leftist obsession with "consent" is practically speaking a great joke.

Now let us consider what I'll call the Rightist notion of the state.  Whereas the Leftist idea centers around the notion of consent, the key idea behind the Rightist state is rather "deference."  Due to the natural inequalities between men, some people are superior in certain respects than others.  The most obvious example of this is economic division of labor--some people are better at hunting, others at farming, others at pottery, others at solving partial differential equations.  Respecting these differences is a major feature of a Rightist state.  In terms of social direction, those people at the head of a Rightist state would be those people best suited to leading and organizing people.  However, there is something more to a Rightist state that makes it different from pure meritocracy, a moral component.  In the Leftist state, the distinction between states is binary: a state is either legitimate or illegitimate.  Beyond the criterion of legitimacy, there is very little room for principle-significant differences.  A Leftist state can to a large extent do whatever it wishes as long as it retains legitimacy without any praise or condemnation.  Some states might be more palatable to a given philosopher than others, but that is not a matter of principle.  For the Rightist state, on the other hand, the goals of the state are subject to criticism.  A famous example of such a critique is in Plato's Republic with his system of Five Regimes.  Plato discusses the nature of states in which virtue and truth, honor and glory, wealth, public opinion, and violence are the factors which determine to whom deference is granted.  In each of Plato's regimes the division of labor, or something analogous to it, persists since not everyone is as virtuous as everyone else, nor as capable in war or in commerce or in demagoguery or in criminal violence.  Under Plato's schema, in fact, a Leftist state has a place as a democracy, which Plato ranked very low.

There are a couple things to note about the Rightist state as well.  For one, there is no issue of legitimacy or illegitimacy: the state simply is.  No one consents to the state as such, but rather participates in it by their own living and choosing.  It also does not depend on any explicit charter or formal organization; it merely consists of a group of people who are committed to living together in peace and cooperation.  The powers of such a state are likely less formally defined than in a Leftist state, but the control that the populace has over the state is also somewhat tighter, since deference is a more concrete phenomenon than "consent."  Also, a Rightist state does not depend on the use of violence, just like a Leftist state.  However, the notion of a monopoly of legitimate violence makes little sense under a Rightist state as opposed to a Leftist one.  If a Leftist state utilizes violence, it makes sense that it have no competition with other agencies since, provided it is legitimate, competition makes it harder for the state to pursue its goals of common defense and general welfare.  A Rightist state, on the other hand, is not necessarily a single organization, but is more likely a constellation of multiple cooperating agencies.  Thus, the segmented character of the state makes the notion of a monopoly of violence simply inapplicable.

The second noteworthy characteristic of a Rightist state is that the quality of a state is not a binary factor as it is according to the Leftist idea.  Just as rape is an act and an evil one, a tyranny is a state and an evil one.  However, evil comes in degrees, and states can be more or less evil and destructive.  Typically, the standard for a good state is one which maintains peace and cultivates virtue--this is, for example, a major part of Plato's system.  There can be some talk of trying to improve a state by bringing the people closer to virtue, but for the state that is not wholly given over to evil, enforced proclamations do little good.  Fundamentally, it is the character of the people rather than the explicit rules they obey which determines the quality of a state.

Now, I would not go so far as to say that the dichotomy of Leftist and Rightist states covers all ideas about the word, but there is a great deal of variation within these two categories, so we can analyze currently existing "states" under both schema.  If we look at the US government today as a Leftist state, we see that the question of whether it has the consent of the governed is wide open, even leaving aside the logical issue of how consent could be ascertained at all.  Thus, what we have is likely an illegitimate state, but there may be some hope for it.  Under the Rightist lens, however, the US government appears incredibly grotesque.  As a class, politicians and bureaucrats are universally despised, yet they are the ones who hold much of the power.  Captains of industry earn their money by catering to the whims of the American mob in the democracy of consumerism.  And there are countless examples of criminal violence by the state's agents across the country every day.  At best, the US government is a swiftly declining democracy; at worst, a vicious tyranny.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm much more a fan of the Rightist notion of the state than of the Leftist type, even though both have the possibility of evil variations.  However, as a closing remark, I want to comment on how the Rightist notion of the state highlights the importance and brilliance of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's grand strategy of secession.  What Hoppe's proposal essentially amounts to is taking local states, constellations of authority, and separating them from the corrupt state that currently holds sway.  This procedure would allow suppressed natural states to regain predominance and provide a vastly superior ordering for social life.

Fairness and Taxes

The notion that "the rich ought to pay their fair share" in taxes is one that has been with us a long time and has recently gained a great deal more currency.  This is usually, though not always, thundered by socialists, fellow-travelers, and poor people who don't pay much in taxes themselves.  However, the notion simply does not hold water, regardless of the level of taxation under either of two views of taxes.

We can think of taxes in two different ways, which I will call the Leftist and the Rightist views for reasons I will not explain here--simply note that the reasons are complex and so should not necessarily be associated with people bearing the labels Leftist or Rightist in other contexts.  The Leftist view is that taxes are involuntary contributions exacted under threat of force and of a degree determined by the state.  The Rightist view is that taxes are essentially voluntary contributions granted to the extent that the interests and abilities of the payers permit.  The Leftist view describes what actually prevails today in the United States, but the Rightist view might be associated better with other times and places.  One simple way to differentiate between the two types would be thus: under the Rightist type, the state is under the effective control of the major taxpayers and there is no thought of externalizing those costs; under the Leftist type, either the state is controlled by non-taxpayers or the costs of the state are externalized to people not in control of the state.

If we consider taxes under the Leftist view, we find that taxes are a burden inflicted upon people by the state.  In this case, "fairness" is not an issue--the most "fair" level of taxation would be no tax at all, or if one must have some taxes, a capitation tax.  But let us suppose a more complex scenario that one might say changes things.  Consider the case that a Rightist state is in a fiscal crisis and the ruling group tries to externalize the costs.  Would it not be fair to say that the classes who control the state are not paying their fair share because they should not be externalizing the costs?  What this claim actual demands is that the Rightist type of taxation be maintained rather than a Leftist one instituted.  And the complaint is properly not that the ruling classes are not paying their fair share, but that people whose "fair share" is zero are being taxed at all.

Under the Rightist system, class fairness does not enter either.  Particular individuals may pay more or less than they can afford, but since the ruling class is also the taxpaying class, there is no issue of whether it as a whole pays its fair share.  If there is a mismatch between the abilities of particular individuals and the needs of the state, those are to be addressed on an individual basis, not on a class basis, and there is certainly no reason for a major public discussion on the subject of whether the Smiths and the Joneses are paying their "fair share" in taxes.

A libertarian will notice that I've used the term state in a loose sense that is different from the one we customarily use.  I do so for the sake of generality, since many other thinkers have used the term in a different sense than we do, and I will hopefully explain this in a later post.