One of the most pernicious beliefs held by Americans is the conflation of the state with society. This belief is causing them acquiesce to government actions that threaten the destruction of American civilization if not stopped.
The word society comes to us from the Latin societas, which meant a group of people bound by friendship or a common interest. The societies we participate in are the manifold groups that people join in order to accomplish various goals, for protection, for commerce, for companionship. When compared to a life of autarky, of isolated independence, the benefits of societies become clear. The defining characteristic of society is that membership in a society is voluntary. Whenever a person feels that a society no longer meets their needs, they can exit it – choosing another one to replace it or even going without.
Of course, one of the primary functions of the societies we join are to fulfill those needs we have that we cannot fulfill ourselves. We depend on our families, friends, fraternal organizations, etc to care for us when we are sick, to provide for us when we cannot provide for ourselves. These acts of charity, when provided to us by people who do it voluntarily using the means that they have acquired through peaceful means, are a necessary component of civilization. Remove charitable interactions from society and we cease to live in a state of civilization and return to a state of barbarism.
The state, on the other hand, is an organization that is distinguished by violent action. It acquires resources not through peaceful economic interaction but through threats of violence. When it threatens wrong-doers – such as thieves, rapists or murderers – it can be useful; scaring other would be thieves, rapists and murderers from committing similar crimes. But all too often, such as when it orders the destruction of livestock in order to raise the market price of meat, it is a social bad that leaves everyone worse off.
The state is powerful. It can commandeer vast resources. It does not have to make anything; it does not need to trade for anything; it merely takes what it wants. However, the state is not all powerful; tomorrow the people could rise up and hang all the officers of the state from the lamp-posts. Its officers must ensure that their plunder or violence does not rise to such a level as to incite too much active resistance. These men and women therefore promote the fiction that the state is not a predator but engaged in trade with the people, exchanging protection and other services for “contributions” as they term the taxes they extort from the populace.
Over the last 100 years, the state has systematically weakened or coopted the institutions of society. It has, via the welfare system, taken over much of the provisioning of charity. It controls commerce via regulation. It dicates what insurance companies can and cannot do. It tightly controls medical care. Most dangerously, it has taken over the education of the young. And everything it has taken over has taken on the characteristics that typically accompany violence and extortion; shoddy service, excessive prices or compelled payments, and draconian punishments.
And far too many people, never having experienced society where these institutions or social needs were provisioned voluntarily rather than by the state, are left ignorant of any idea that that is even possible. And so, when they are warned that Medicare and Social Security threaten economic ruin, they think that the speaker is contemplating casting the old and sick out on the street to die. When they hear a call for the abolition of govenrment schooling, they imagine the speaker must want the broad mass of children to be left uneducated. When they hear the call for the end of medical licensing or pharmaceutical regulations, they imagine that people will be subjected to all sorts of quackery. When they hear a call for an end of standing armies and the purchase of expensive weapons systems, they imagine that the speaker must naively want to invite a tyrant to waltz in and take over.
Too many people, no doubt from their experiences in schools where the classrooms are presided over mostly benevolent dictators called teachers, assume that society must be arranged in a similar vein, with leaders who make and enforce the rules, where there is no right of refusal or exit.
In the end, though, while it can commandeer impressive resources, and thus accomplish mighty things, the state invariably consumes more and produces less than organizations that it replaces. It replaces the civilization of people voluntarily bonding together with the barbarism of compelled relationships, compelled production and compelled trade.
Today, the various governments that rule over Americans, taken together, commandeer or consume some 40% of production. The more production the government seizes, the worse off we will be. The greater the control government exercises over society, the worse off we all are.
One way to put things in perspective is, when considering how some need is to be supplied, to ask if you would be comfortable with the Mafia providing it. After all, the mafia is really a proto-government, using extortion and violence to commandeer resources. Both are protection rackets, although the Mafia takes far less than the government. While most people wouldn’t be too upset with the idea of the mafia punishing a rapist, most would laugh derisively at the idea of the mafia running a school, or operating a hospital. This recognition arises from the fact that no-one conflates the Mafia with society. If only they were so wise about the state!
I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.
