security State Power
The reach and coercive capacity of the state
play_circle Videos
format_quote Quotes
"The essays collected in this volume challenge the conventional wisdom that the state is necessary for the provision of security. Defense, like any other service, can be produced competitively on the free market, and there is no economic or ethical reason why this one category of goods should be exempt from market competition."
menu_book The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production
View Full Quote"Private insurance agencies, competing for clients, face a powerful incentive to minimize conflict and aggression: each unresolved conflict imposes costs on the insurer. A territorial monopoly state, by contrast, profits from insecurity; it can externalize the costs of war and aggression onto its tax-paying subjects."
menu_book The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production
View Full Quote"If no one can appeal to justice except to government, justice will be perverted in favor of the government, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding."
menu_book The Private Production of Defense
View Full Quote"There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state."
menu_book A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics
View Full Quote"Without the erroneous public perception and judgment of the state as just and necessary and without the public's voluntary cooperation, even the seemingly most powerful government would implode and its powers evaporate. Thus liberated, we would regain our right to self-defense and be able to turn to freed and unregulated insurance agencies for efficient professional assistance in all matters of protection and conflict resolution."
menu_book The Private Production of Defense
View Full Quote"States everywhere are highly intent on outlawing or at least controlling even the mere possession of arms by private citizens—and most states have indeed succeeded in this task—as an armed man is clearly more of a threat to any aggressor than an unarmed man. It bears much less risk for the state to keep things peaceful while its own aggression continues, if rifles with which the taxman could be shot are out of the reach of everyone except the taxman himself!"
menu_book A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics
View Full Quote"In order to provide us with all this protection, the state managers expropriate more than 40 percent of the incomes of private producers year in and year out."
menu_book The Private Production of Defense
View Full Quote"Every state is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making and taxation. Because it is a monopoly, it will inevitably produce its goods at higher cost and lower quality than would competing private providers, and it will use its compulsory revenue to further entrench and expand its power."
menu_book The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production
View Full Quote"The state spends much time and effort persuading the public that it is not really what it is and that the consequences of its actions are positive rather than negative."
menu_book A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics
View Full Quote"Modern government is a black hole for gratuitous goods. It does not operate gratuitously, but in all its activities is deeply interested in its own survival and flourishing. The main beneficiaries of the state are its own servants, especially its bureaucratic and political leadership, whereas it systematically destroys the true sources of gratuitous goods: families, friendship, private associations, businesses, and the market process."
menu_book Abundance, Generosity, and the State
View Full QuoteView Full Quote"It is a sharing of plunder, not a gift, the state is not the legitimate owner of what it has taken from the taxpayer."
"For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him."
menu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
View Full Quote"Be resolved to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."
menu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
View Full Quote"This single tyrant need not be combated, need not be defeated; he is automatically defeated if the country refuses to consent to its own enslavement. It is not necessary to deprive him of anything; simply give him nothing. There is no need for the country to do anything for itself, provided it does nothing against itself."
menu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
View Full Quote"He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. From where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves?"
menu_book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
View Full Quote"The State has no moral or scientific justification; it is the pure product of the emergence of violence in human societies."
menu_book Libéralisme
View Full Quote"Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
menu_book Democracy in America
View Full Quoteauto_stories Books
Abundance, Generosity, and the State
An Austrian economics analysis of generosity and giving, arguing that free markets foster genuine charity through wealth creation, while state redi...
Read MoreDiscourse on Voluntary Servitude
Written around 1549 by the young French magistrate Étienne de La Boétie and first published posthumously in 1576, this founding text of libertarian...
Read MoreThe Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production
An anthology of essays edited by [Hans-Hermann Hoppe](/library/authors/hoppe-hans-hermann/) challenging the conventional argument that defense is a...
Read MoreThe Private Production of Defense
In a free market, private insurance agencies competing for clients can deliver security and conflict resolution more efficiently and fairly than st...
Read MoreLa Tyrannie fiscale
Exposes the French tax system as arbitrary, economically destructive, and morally indefensible, showing that high taxation is not a neutral technic...
Read More