Quote of the Day: The State is a Soulless Machine

It is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and fail to develop nonviolence at any time. The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence

This quote is from Mahatma Gandhi, a political leader and inspiration to India’s independence via non-violent resistance movement, from his The Non Violent State Essay

Quote of the Day: The State Owes its Existence to Civilization

Primitive (“tribal”) societies are primitive not because they don’t have states, but because they don’t have a developed tradition of private property. This necessarily results in economic autarky and extreme poverty. Autarky and poverty in turn result in both inter-tribal biological competition (constant warfare) and the fact that there is not enough wealth to support a parasitic state. It is private property and the division of labor that led both to a decline in inter-tribal warfare and enough wealth in societies for parasitic states to feed off.

The state owes its existence to civilization, not vice versa.  And the wars that interrupt the process of civilization have been made more frequent and more bloody by the encroachment of the state on market-and-civil society.

This is from Mises Institute editor Daniel James Sanchez at the Mises Blog logically refuting the misleading comparison of the levels of violence between state and pre-state societies.

Violence from Prohibition Laws: Atimonan Killing

I have been repeatedly pointing out here that prohibition statutes engender unnecessary violence. Worst, violence have always been arbitrary instituted by political authorities in the name of supposed moral uprightness. 

Today’s headlines shows of a good example, from the Inquirer.net

The gun battle in Atimonan town, Quezon province, that left 13 people dead on Sunday was the culmination of a three-month police operation approved by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) headed by Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa Jr.

But Ochoa denied there was any mission order from the commission authorizing the police-military operation in Atimonan.

The operation, code-named “Coplan Armado,” had only one target: Victor “Vic” Siman, operator of the numbers racket “jueteng” disguised as government-sanctioned Small Town Lottery (STL) in Laguna and Batangas provinces in southern Luzon…

A Philippine Daily Inquirer source in the Philippine National Police described the 12 others killed  in the alleged shootout between security forces and Siman’s group as “collateral damage.”

Such violence has been exercised against alleged crimes based on “vices” or what American individualist and anarchist Lysander Spooner calls as “Vices are not crimes”

It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others.

Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property — no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.

Jueteng is about gambling and personal vice. The ban on this has created a shadow industry, like all others, prostitution, drugs and etc... Ironically, on the other hand, the Philippine government promotes the "casino" industry.

Yet the war on jueteng has been an endless crusade by the Philippine government that has hardly attained proximity to its stated political ‘moral’ goals.

As pointed out in the past, the downfall of the ousted administration in EDSA II, has been tied to this. The difference is that because the involved had been the top political brass, then “no killing” had been dispensed with.

But of course, application of laws has been different with people with lower levels of political power.  I call this political inequality.

Unfortunately, the public has been benumbed or inured to “collateral damage”, which echoes on the my edited version of Stalin’s axiom “one death is a tragedy, one million dozen is a statistic”, or that “collateral damage” has been perceived as “reasonable” for as long as government does it, or has been carried out with good intentions, and or for as long as this happens to the others (and not to them)

The tragedy here is that the public doesn’t realize which has been more immoral: violence as a means to a (questionable) end or personal vices.

Yet the above example exhibits the institutional violence inherent in all governments, as the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises once pointed out (bold mine)

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

To draw attention to this fact does not imply any reflection upon government activities. In stark reality, peaceful social cooperation is impossible if no provision is made for violent prevention and suppression of antisocial action on the part of refractory individuals and groups of individuals. One must take exception to the often-repeated phrase that government is an evil, although a necessary and indispensable evil. What is required for the attainment of an end is a means, the cost to be expended for its successful realization. It is an arbitrary value judgment to describe it as an evil in the moral connotation of the term. However, in face of the modern tendencies toward a deification of government and state, it is good to remind ourselves that the old Romans were more realistic in symbolizing the state by a bundle of rods with an ax in the middle than are our contemporaries in ascribing to the state all the attributes of God.

In upholding an unjust populist edict, the recourse to violence means that government creates more victims via repression than attaining its political goal. It also means the government has hardly been about the fiction of social justice but about the preservation, expansion and the showcase of political power.

Archeological Findings: The Origin of the State: War

Sociologist Franz Oppenheimer theorized that the state was born out of war.

From Mr. Oppenheimer

The State, completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first stages of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors."

No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner. [1] Wherever a reliable tradition reports otherwise, either it concerns the amalgamation of two fully developed primitive states into one body of more complete organisation, or else it is an adaptation to men of the fable of the sheep which made a bear their king in order to be protected against the wolf. But even in this latter case, the form and content of the State became precisely the same as in those states where nothing intervened, and which became immediately 'wolf states'." (p. 15)

Recently some archeologists have found evidence in support of Mr. Oppenheimer’s theory.

From the New York Times, (bold emphasis mine) [hat tip Charles Burris]

Some archaeologists have painted primitive societies as relatively peaceful, implying that war is a reprehensible modern deviation. Others have seen war as the midwife of the first states that arose as human population increased and more complex social structures emerged to coordinate activities.

A wave of new research is supporting this second view. Charles Stanish and Abigail Levine, archaeologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, have traced the rise of the pristine states that preceded the Inca empire. The first villages in the region were formed some 3,500 years ago. Over the next 1,000 years, some developed into larger regional centers, spaced about 12 to 15 miles apart. Then, starting around 500 B.C., signs of warfare emerged in the form of trophy heads and depictions of warriors, the two archaeologists report in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…

Dr. Stanish believes that warfare was the midwife of the first states that arose in many regions of the world, including Mesopotamia and China as well as the Americas.

The first states, in his view, were not passive affairs driven by forces beyond human control, like climate and geography, as some historians have supposed. Rather, they were shaped by human choice as people sought new forms of cooperation and new institutions for the more complex societies that were developing. Trade was one of these cooperative institutions for consolidating larger-scale groups; warfare was the other.

Warfare may not usually be thought of as a form of cooperation, but organized hostilities between chiefdoms require that within each chiefdom people subordinate their individual self-interest to that of the group.

“Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it,” the anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley writes in his book “War Before Civilization” (Oxford, 1996).

The primary innate instinct of every state is to establish and preserve political control through violence.