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Nothing Outside the State

by Robert Higgs

A popular slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was, “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state). I recall this expression frequently as I observe the state’s far-reaching penetration of my own society.

What of any consequence remains beyond the state’s reach in the United States today? Not wages, working conditions, or labor-management relations; not health care; not money, banking, or financial services; not personal privacy; not transportation or communication; not education or scientific research; not farming or food supply; not nutrition or food quality; not marriage or divorce; not child care; not provision for retirement; not recreation; not insurance of any kind; not smoking or drinking; not gambling; not political campaign funding or publicity; not real estate development, house construction, or housing finance; not international travel, trade, or finance; not a thousand other areas and aspects of social life.

One might affirm that the state still keeps its hands off religion, but it actually does not. It certifies certain religious organizations as legitimate and condemns others, as many young men discovered to their sorrow when they attempted to claim (more…)

I wrote this a dozen years ago, and I’ve posted it here before. It’s apposite today, because, to all indications, we are all about to be involuntarily inducted into a cannibal cult. My question for you: Will you choose to be devoured by your neighbors, or will you elect to devour them instead? –GSS

 
What I want to discuss is Socrates’ question about whether it is better to inflict an injury or to have an injury inflicted upon you. It’s a favorite of sophists and sophomores, I know, but I think it strikes at the very core of justice. The justice I seek and seek to defend is not “out there”, apart from myself. Justice (or injustice) is not what others do to me, it’s what I do to myself and to others. Where I find myself availing myself of the fallacies tu quoque or two wrongs make a right, I am rationalizing injustice, and the worst havoc I am wreaking is upon my own ego.

The Nazarene’s answer to Socrates was this: It is better to have an injury inflicted upon you, because redemption is still possible to one who has not inflicted injury upon another. I don’t believe in an afterlife (more…)

We have been cursed, as a civilization, because so much of the social sciences side of the university quadrangle has for so long been in the thrall of Marxism. It has been difficult for intellectuals to see the world for what it is, so avidly have they sought to portray it as the product of their preconceptions. Nothing changes quickly, but it is nice to see academics actually testing their theories in reality, rather than just blathering on out of prejudice.

Why am I in such a celebratory mood? Anthropologists in Canada have discovered that the so-called “noble savage” is quite a bit less than noble, while the much maligned greedy capitalists of the West are in fact kinder, gentler, more trusting people. This is the sort of thing that should be obvious to anyone with eyes, but it takes an effort, apparently, to get a social scientist to take note of the territory instead of insisting on the sacred validity of the truth presented by the map.

From Canada’s National Post:

Free-enterprising, impersonal markets may seem cutthroat and mean-spirited, but a provocative new study says markets have been a force for good over the last 10,000 years, helping to drive the evolution of (more…)

Technology “expert” Clifford Stoll precisely 15 years ago in Newsweek:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try (more…)

I wrote this coming on four years ago, one of my last posts to PresenceOfMind.net, my philosophical/political/literary home on the web. The planned strike of our undocumented friends has come and gone, but the underlying idea — a strike against the looters on June 1st — still resonates with me. What say you? Is this something worth pursuing? –GSS

Francisco looked silently out at the darkness. The fire of the mills was dying down. There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible.

“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco D’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.” –Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The photo above is the Sonoran Desert, a vast unpopulated wasteland in the midst of which is Metropolitan Phoenix, home to three million children of Cain.

Contrary to popular opinion, the desert was not designed by Walt Disney, and it will (more…)

I thought about making a short movie addressing a host of common questions about the political philosophy we’ve been discussing, but I decided to undertake the task in text, instead. A video would be faster for me, but not so much for you. Plus, text is easy to search and easy to revisit, where video can be ungainly. So: FAQ-style:

What does this have to do with real estate?

Human liberty begins when you have a redoubt that is yours to defend from any would-be usurper. That’s real estate, and, as I write every year at Independence Day, the civilizations we associate with human freedom are those where ordinary people had the power to claim, own, use, enjoy, buy and sell the land. If you want for a real estate weblog to concern itself solely with surface-level bread-and-butter real estate news, you’ve come to the wrong place. If, on the other hand, you want to learn how better to defend your liberties, including your power to buy, sell and broker real estate, stay tuned. None of this is easy, but it is fundamental for understanding real estate as philosophy.

Isn’t anarchy a creed of chaos and violence?

1. No, that would be socialism in its (more…)

National Review Online:

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?