Quote of the Day: Political Insanity

It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organise something, to institutionalise this-or-that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure-groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for six thousand years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again. This being so, it seems highly probable that the hope for any significant improvement of society must be postponed, if not forever, at any rate to a future so far distant that consideration of it at the present time would be sheer idleness.

This is from Albert Jay Nock from Memoirs of a Superfluous Man p.308 (pdf)

Quote of the Day: Origin of the State

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive, State known to history originated in any other manner. On the negative side, it has been proved beyond peradventure that no primitive State could possibly have had any other origin.s Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State IS the economic exploitation of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class-State. Oppenheimer defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution "forced on a defeated group by a conquering group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. This domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered group by the victorious group."

Albert J. Nock, Our Enemy the State p.44-45

The genesis of government is from violence and plunder, and definitely not an outcome of attempts at resolving market imperfections.