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The American State was a Predatory Gang of Robbers

2,020 views · Published 24 March 2015 · 18:02 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: Samuel Ezerzer · 2015 · News & Politics

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The American State was a Predatory Gang of Robbers 
This essay is adapted from David Gordon’s talk at the Costa Mesa Mises Circle. Click here to register for January’s Houston Mises Circle.

I want to jump from Plato and Aristotle to a much later writer. I’m omitting all discussion of the Middle Ages and Renaissance: as I said before, this talk is not intended as a historical survey. The thinker I want to discuss is the great French classical liberal Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850), who wrote a pamphlet, The Law, that was published in June, 1850, the year of his death. By the way, this book made a great impression on me when I read it in junior high more than fifty years ago, and it continues to impress me. Bastiat challenged the fundamental assumption behind the rejection of anarchism in ancient political thought. This is the notion that we need to have a class above the mass of the people, who need to be molded by those of superior wisdom. This is clear in Plato, with his class of guardians; but even in Aristotle, the citizens who deliberate on the good of the city rule over those in the city who aren’t citizens. Bastiat asked, why should we assume this? Where did the supposed superior class get its “wisdom” and what gives this class the right to rule over the rest of us?

Bastiat raised a point that could be taken in an anarchist direction, although he didn’t apply it that way himself: If we start with the premise that each person has the rights to life, liberty, and property, then any power that the state has can come only if people agree to give it this power. The crucial point Bastiat makes is that even if people agree to establish a state, it cannot acquire new rights that individuals don’t have. The state couldn’t acquire additional rights. The anarchist implication of this point is that if individuals don’t have the right to monopolize protective services in a given territory, neither does the state. The road to anarchism is clear.

Bastiat’s argument destroys the intellectual basis of the state. We don’t need to have a superior group of the wise rule over us, and such a group has no right to do so. But if we accept this argument, we then have to face the question: why do states exist?

I want to mention two thinkers who help us answer this question, Franz Oppenheimer (1863–1943) and his disciple Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945). Oppenheimer was a German sociologist who went into exile after Hitler came to power in 1933. He taught in the United States and died in Los Angeles, not very far away from where we are now. He wrote The State, which was published in 1908 and translated into English in 1915. Nock wrote Our Enemy the State in 1935.

Oppenheimer and Nock said that there were two ways to acquire wealth; one was peaceful production and trade. This they called the economic means. Unfortunately, there is another way as well to get wealth. This is to seize wealth from those who have produced it. They called this the political means. They define the state as the organization of the political means. On this view, the state is a predatory organization, a gang of robbers.

This is a very interesting theory, but how do we know it’s true? History isn’t an a priori discipline. We can’t deduce just by using logic that certain particular events had to occur. The only way to show that Oppenheimer and Nock were on the right track is through historical investigation.

This is just what Oppenheimer and Nock did: they provided historical examples to support their theory of the state.Oppenheimer made a careful study of anthropological literature. Every state he was able to find described in this literature began as a predatory group. He went through the ancient world as well, and carried his study through the Middle Ages down to his own time. The state always was predatory.


Bastiat challenged the ancient teaching that people needed to be ruled by a superior elite. Oppenheimer and Nock showed that the state is a gang of robbers. The views of these thinkers are very helpful in combating what Nietzsche calls “that coldest of all cold monsters, the state.”
http://mises.org/library/thinkers-who-challenged-state-0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?edit=vd&v=6QS41xgBIj0

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wish someone a happy new year
Countdown to 2022
Happy New Year 2022

Fireworks from All over the World 
Pass it on
more new years video
https://youtu.be/X7TyHE3lFB4

NEW YEARS PLAYLIST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usCY3JgByeg&list=PLLG1X5CCzQ1UNFxLYZEc4S4pbthiYbRfJ
check out my channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZju...

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