Once upon a time, I was a statist. This is not astonishing because most people are statists. Sometimes this term is used pejoratively to describe fascists, nationalists, and totalitarians like Benito Mussolini or Francisco Franco. While it is true that they were statists, that truth isn't usually important because George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gandhi were also statists.

Liberals and Conservatives both tend to be statist. Even minarchists (like I was) and objectivists are statist. Oligarchies, plutocracies, most theocracies, and all modern democracies are forms of statism. Statism is so engrained in our political and legal perspectives that it is hard to understand what it really is and even harder to comprehent what life would be without it.

(See some of my statist works here: http://www.campaignforliberty.com/profile.php?member=Ishpeck )

The State Defined

A state is a corporation (that is a formalized organization of people) that makes a claim to land ownership by fiat. That is to say that a state is a group of people who will exercise all powers of ownership of a geographic area and uphold their claim exclusively by force or threats thereof.

Some consider this claim to ownership indistinguishable from any other. However, if we consider the Classical Liberal thinker, John Locke [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm], he wrote of a different basis for assessing ownership.

The Lockean principle is one that grants title of ownership to an individual or group who are the first users and cultivators of land (these are the homesteaders) or the most recent consensual recipient(s) of that estate either from the homesteader or from another such transferee of the title.

The distinction between a state's claim to ownership and another's is measured in productivity. Where the title of ownership is derived from labors and cultivation, the goods that result from that work then enter society as tradable commodities -- thus benefitting everyone the cultivator trades with.

If a person were simply to sit with a rifle atop a tower and say "trespassers will be shot," that person is doing some of the same things any other owner might but no usable goods are produced. His claim to ownership is not based on productive labors but upon the reach of his weapon and his ability to notice trespassers.

All property rights -- indeed, all rights -- are upheld by force. Statism is characterized not by its application of force but by the lack of any criteria other than force to demonstrate the claim of ownership.

Productive owners labor first before exercising the force of ownership. A state exercises force of ownership first and will only labor if it is convenient or inescapable thereafter.

A statist is a person who believes in the legitimacy of a state's fiat claim to land ownership.

Powers of Ownership

All owners of property exercise control over the resources they own according to their pleasure. One might say that an owner will govern his own property. Because one vests labor in the cultivation of property, that person may seek to protect it against fire with prohibitions on smoking. Because owners are tied by their labors to property, they may seek to make the environment more pleasant for themselves by imposing rules against the use of foul language. It may be the case that a land owner makes it a habit of shooting rabbits found on the grounds to protect crops from being eaten. These are natural consequences of any claim to ownership.

States too seek to exercise the powers entitled to owners. The world of politics puts great emphasis on the kinds of controls that a state exercises over its land; with many divergent opinions as to which controls represent abuse of power and which are within the "proper role of government."

Constitutions, democratic systems, and trials by jury are imposed to help prevent the state from naturally doing what all land owners are inclined to do: impose their will upon their property for the protection of its productive resources and the convenience of the owner who cultivates it.

In order to preserve public support for their fiat claims to land ownership, states purport themselves to offer people the service of law at low or ideal costs. People want the protections of law to make their lives and enterprise safer and more efficient.

Because states, like all corporations, are predisposed to cartelize and secure monopolies, it is common for people to conflate law and states. States often encourage people to believe that Statism is the only means by-which the benefits of law can be delivered to society.

This is the principle source of confusion for people trying to understand criticism of the state: If one cannot distinguish a state from law, they may construe arguments against Statism as arguments against governance all together. Law can and has existed without requiring a fiat claim to land ownership.

Democratic statism

States throughout history have had varying amounts benevolence and cruelty. Enough cruelty provokes insurgency and bloodshed. The contemporary trend among states is to protect against public retaliation by conceding some control through democratic mechanisms. The contemporary infatuation with democracy runs deep enough that a people who are generally pacifist are willing to drop bombs on others in Democracy's name. Democracy is purported to be the ideal form of statism (which may or may not be true) as it supposedly diffuses the powers of the state's magistrates with a buffer of populism.

Democracy supposes that the people at large are compassionate or decent and not inclined to profound acts of brutality. They can therefore be trusted with the reigns of government. Thus all people are granted the power to nominate from among themselves those who are to rule over them. However, the people at large are scarcely represented in American democracy. Less than a quarter of the population voted for the current president. When slightly more than half of the population attends the polls, it is "record attendance." If the people at large are supposed to be the safeguards against oligarchy but are not attending the polls, where is the protection of democracy?

Barring compulsory voting, democracy will not be a representation of the majority of all people but the majority of people who care to vote. Because most people are rationally uninterested in politics, this leaves only the few with acute interest in the affairs of the state to choose from among themselves the rulers that all people must answer to.

The assertion of qui tacet consentit, or "silence implies consent," is only considered just within the statist context. Absences of signature can not bind one to a contract. Refusal to speak does not mean a woman is consenting to sex. If one does not protest against the acts of his murderer does that make it an assisted suicide? Why is refusal to vote construed as approval of the elected official or his deeds?

Some claim that applying arbitrary restrictions to democracy in establishing a republic can protect against tyranny from the political elites. Such a notion tends to acknowledge that if 51% of voters were for the legalization of rape, it would still be wrong. (Even if, by some miracle, all people were to attend the polls.)

Republicanism, too, has some quandaries: If popularity cannot justify a policy, what can? Is there a set of values that can be said to be the One True Ethical System? Would people be just in constitutionally imposing that system of values if they were in the minority? Or if they were a two thirds majority?

While every person would like to live under a government that upholds his or her own values, imposing those values on others represents a severe danger; at what point is anybody justified in using force to compel others to agree with them?

Every politician considers himself to be a bastion of reason and decency amid a raging sea of corruption, greed and ineptitude. Each one of them has an opponent who claims the same thing. Whose claims to rational, moral capability do we believe when we attend the polls or when drafting a constitutional charter?

A monarch will claim to own an arbitrary region of land and will treat all people who live within that area as tenants: Requiring rent, setting down rules of conduct, and having certain requirements designed to either protect his claim to the property or to satisfy his prejudices. Democracies behave the same way; arbitrarily defining an area where their will is imposed like that of an owner and seeking to impose upon all tenants on their land whatever rules satisfy their prejudices. In the end, both the monarchy and the democracy claim their power out of vacuum rather than demonstrating it through productive labor. While the decision-making process in one may be more convoluted and unpredictable than the other, the nature of both claims to power is identical.

Inevitable political strife

Statists continue to hope against all reason that it is possible to have their ideal form of government while also permitting all other people to participate in the shaping of policy. They will argue that democracy affords us the ability to replace politicians who've gone horribly awry -- and yet somehow 80% of Congress gets reelected every term [http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php] (even during the heyday of the Tea Party) while 89% of Americans disapprove of the work Congress does [http://www.gallup.com/poll/151628/Congress-Ends-2011-Record-Low-Approval.aspx].

Many complain that American politics have become sadly divisive. Partisans from both of the major camps are ravenous in their zeal to compel others to subsidize infanticide either by clinical or martial means and the electorate is content to live with their false dichotomies. Both factions claim that their ideals reflect that of the majority (as majoritarianism is the only morality in democracy) and that dissent is evidence of stupidity, malice, or both (because theory of mind risks losing votes).

The source of contention is found in the fiat nature of Statism: Constitutions notwithstanding, Statism claims full ownership of a region and therefore full power over the people who reside within it. Because this claim was always rooted in force and no other criteria, the state is perfectly within its element when exercising force against any people for any reason and only hesitates in the use of force when it fears the retaliation could be greater than its ability to withstand.

People intuitively, but not always consciously, understand this aspect of the state. This is why political partisans will always feel threatened by each other: They both seek to control the destructive power of the state and to apply it toward their own satisfaction. In the face of the state's tremendous might and its arbitrary nature, is it any wonder why campaign rhetoric gets so hysterical? Every politician ultimately seeks to use force to compel others to agree with himself. That carries with it the implicit threat against any who might disagree.

Confronted with these quandaries, it is strangely rare for anybody to ask if democracy in the American republic is actually serving its declared or even implied purposes. Many assert that the statist-democratic premise is sound and that all that needs to happen is for the people who operate the machine to change their nature, opinions, values, or maybe just their hair styles. This sentiment has been good for cable news channels and satirists.

A Fantasy Crushed

When I was a statist, I don't know if anybody could have been more in love with the Constitution than I was. I was so certain that it had all the trappings necessary to secure liberty for the people who lived under it. Yet time and time again, history and current events combined to dash these hopes. Much like the Kremlin who argued that the failures of the Soviet Union were a result of insufficient devotion to socialism, I argued that the failures of the American political process were a result of insufficient respect for the Constitution.

But one day, while having two simultaneous Internet debates with a left-wing gun-grabber and a right-wing Patriot Act apologist, I had an epiphany: I was being a total hypocrite. On the one hand, I argued that scribbling on paper does nothing to protect people from thugs and thus, gun control was totally futile. On the other hand, I argued that the scribblings in the Constitution were all we needed to harmonize liberty and security and that more textual vigor needed to be added to the legal code to bolster this claim.

I was wrong. Members of the Democrat and Republican parties are as indifferent to the Constitution as members of the Bloods and Crips are to statutes against murder. Politicians and gangs alike have tacit contempt for the documents we use to protect ourselves from their aggression. They limit this aggression not by what is printed in statute but by what they believe they can get away with.

Sometimes people believe that this precedent is a novel one and that it would shame America's "founding fathers." But there was never any ambiguity regarding the literal nor intended meaning of the First Amendment when President John Adams decided to corral Americans into concentration camps. Politicians past were as wont to ignore the unambiguous protections of the Constitution as George W. Bush ever was. Contrary to the revisionist romance, the United States Government was never wholly rooted in a respect for human rights.

All the claims I have made to justify the state were false:

I have implored others to help reconcile Statism with facts and reason and have been grossly unsatisfied with their efforts. Why should law require a fiat land claim in order to operate? What mechanisms cause all collective action that is not centered around corporations of fiat land claim to fall short of supplying people with necessary defense? By what means can we be so certain that this is the case? Most responses are invective or other non-sequitr. I do not believe that it is absurd to request the logical steps that lead to justifying a state and am still quite eager to see if anybody can provide them.

In the mean time, I have no more excuses. I am compelled to abandon my statism.

Reading material:

 
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