The Reluctant Anarchist

Shade · Jan 19, 2010

The Reluctant Anarchist

by Joseph Sobran

My arrival (very recently) at philosophical anarchism has disturbed some of my conservative and Christian friends. In fact, it surprises me, going as it does against my own inclinations.

As a child I acquired a deep respect for authority and a horror of chaos. In my case the two things were blended by the uncertainty of my existence after my parents divorced and I bounced from one home to another for several years, often living with strangers. A stable authority was something I yearned for.

Meanwhile, my public-school education imbued me with the sort of patriotism encouraged in all children in those days. I grew up feeling that if there was one thing I could trust and rely on, it was my government. I knew it was strong and benign, even if I didn't know much else about it. The idea that some people â€“ Communists, for example â€“ might want to overthrow the government filled me with horror.

G.K. Chesterton, with his usual gentle audacity, once criticized Rudyard Kipling for his "lack of patriotism." Since Kipling was renowned for glorifying the British Empire, this might have seemed one of Chesterton's "paradoxes"; but it was no such thing, except in the sense that it denied what most readers thought was obvious and incontrovertible.

Chesterton, himself a "Little Englander" and opponent of empire, explained what was wrong with Kipling's view: "He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reason. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English." Which implies there would be nothing to love her for if she were weak.

Of course Chesterton was right. You love your country as you love your mother â€“ simply because it is yours, not because of its superiority to others, particularly superiority of power.

This seems axiomatic to me now, but it startled me when I first read it. After all, I was an American, and American patriotism typically expresses itself in superlatives. America is the freest, the mightiest, the richest, in short the greatest country in the world, with the greatest form of government â€“ the most democratic. Maybe the poor Finns or Peruvians love their countries too, but heaven knows why â€“ they have so little to be proud of, so few "reasons." America is also the most envied country in the world. Don't all people secretly wish they were Americans?

That was the kind of patriotism instilled in me as a boy, and I was quite typical in this respect. It was the patriotism of supremacy. For one thing, America had never lost a war â€“ I was even proud that America had created the atomic bomb (providentially, it seemed, just in time to crush the Japs) â€“ and this is why the Vietnam war was so bitterly frustrating. Not the dead, but the defeat! The end of history's great winning streak!

As I grew up, my patriotism began to take another form, which it took me a long time to realize was in tension with the patriotism of power. I became a philosophical conservative, with a strong libertarian streak. I believed in government, but it had to be "limited" government â€“ confined to a few legitimate purposes, such as defense abroad and policing at home. These functions, and hardly any others, I accepted, under the influence of writers like Ayn Rand and Henry Hazlitt, whose books I read in my college years.

Though I disliked Rand's atheism (at the time, I was irreligious, but not anti-religious), she had an odd appeal to my residual Catholicism. I had read enough Aquinas to respond to her Aristotelian mantras. Everything had to have its own nature and limitations, including the state; the idea of a state continually growing, knowing no boundaries, forever increasing its claims on the citizen, offended and frightened me. It could only end in tyranny.

I was also powerfully drawn to Bill Buckley, an explicit Catholic, who struck the same Aristotelian note. During his 1965 race for mayor of New York, he made a sublime promise to the voter: he offered "the internal composure that comes of knowing there are rational limits to politics." This may have been the most futile campaign promise of all time, but it would have won my vote!

It was really this Aristotelian sense of "rational limits," rather than any particular doctrine, that made me a conservative. I rejoiced to find it in certain English writers who were remote from American conservatism â€“ Chesterton, of course, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, Michael Oakeshott.

In fact I much preferred a literary, contemplative conservatism to the activist sort that was preoccupied with immediate political issues. During the Reagan years, which I expected to find exciting, I found myself bored to death by supply-side economics, enterprise zones, "privatizing" welfare programs, and similar principle-dodging gimmickry. I failed to see that "movement" conservatives were less interested in principles than in Republican victories. To the extent that I did see it, I failed to grasp what it meant.

Still, the last thing I expected to become was an anarchist. For many years I didn't even know that serious philosophical anarchists existed. I'd never heard of Lysander Spooner or Murray Rothbard. How could society survive at all without a state?

Now I began to be critical of the US Government, though not very. I saw that the welfare state, chiefly the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, violated the principles of limited government and would eventually have to go. But I agreed with other conservatives that in the meantime the urgent global threat of Communism had to be stopped. Since I viewed "defense" as one of the proper tasks of government, I thought of the Cold War as a necessity, the overhead, so to speak, of freedom. If the Soviet threat ever ceased (the prospect seemed remote), we could afford to slash the military budget and get back to the job of dismantling the welfare state.

Somewhere, at the rainbow's end, America would return to her founding principles. The Federal Government would be shrunk, laws would be few, taxes minimal. That was what I thought. Hoped, anyway.

I avidly read conservative and free-market literature during those years with the sense that I was, as a sort of late convert, catching up with the conservative movement. I took it for granted that other conservatives had already read the same books and had taken them to heart. Surely we all wanted the same things! At bottom, the knowledge that there were rational limits to politics. Good old Aristotle. At the time, it seemed a short hop from Aristotle to Barry Goldwater.

As is fairly well known by now, I went to work as a young man for Buckley at National Review and later became a syndicated columnist. I found my niche in conservative journalism as a critic of liberal distortions of the US Constitution, particularly in the Supreme Court's rulings on abortion, pornography, and "freedom of expression."

Gradually I came to see that the conservative challenge to liberalism's jurisprudence of "loose construction" was far too narrow. Nearly everything liberals wanted the Federal Government to do was unconstitutional. The key to it all, I thought, was the Tenth Amendment, which forbids the Federal Government to exercise any powers not specifically assigned to it in the Constitution. But the Tenth Amendment had been comatose since the New Deal, when Roosevelt's Court virtually excised it.

This meant that nearly all Federal legislation from the New Deal to the Great Society and beyond had been unconstitutional. Instead of fighting liberal programs piecemeal, conservatives could undermine the whole lot of them by reviving the true (and, really, obvious) meaning of the Constitution. Liberalism depended on a long series of usurpations of power.

Around the time of Judge Robert Bork's bitterly contested (and defeated) nomination to the US Supreme Court, conservatives spent a lot of energy arguing that the "original intent" of the Constitution must be conclusive. But they applied this principle only to a few ambiguous phrases and passages that bore on specific hot issues of the day â€“ the death penalty, for instance. About the general meaning of the Constitution there could, I thought, be no doubt at all. The ruling principle is that whatever the Federal Government isn't authorized to do, it's forbidden to do.

That alone would invalidate the Federal welfare state and, in fact, nearly all liberal legislation. But I found it hard to persuade most conservatives of this. Bork himself took the view that the Tenth Amendment was unenforceable. If he was right, then the whole Constitution was in vain from the start.

I never thought a constitutional renaissance would be easy, but I did think it could play an indispensable role in subverting the legitimacy of liberalism. Movement conservatives listened politely to my arguments, but without much enthusiasm. They regarded appeals to the Constitution as rather pedantic and, as a practical matter, futile â€“ not much help in the political struggle. Most Americans no longer even remembered what "usurpation" meant. Conservatives themselves hardly knew.

Of course they were right, in an obvious sense. Even conservative courts (if they could be captured) wouldn't be bold enough to throw out the entire liberal legacy at once. But I remained convinced that the conservative movement had to attack liberalism at its constitutional root.

In a way I had transferred my patriotism from America as it then was to America as it had been when it still honored the Constitution. And when had it crossed the line? At first I thought the great corruption had occurred when Franklin Roosevelt subverted the Federal judiciary; later I came to see that the decisive event had been the Civil War, which had effectively destroyed the right of the states to secede from the Union. But this was a very much a minority view among conservatives, particularly at National Review, where I was the only one who held it.

I've written more than enough about my career at the magazine, so I'll confine myself to saying that it was only toward the end of more than two happy decades there that I began to realize that we didn't all want the same things after all. When it happened, it was like learning, after a long and placid marriage, that your spouse is in love with someone else, and has been all along.

Not that I was betrayed. I was merely blind. I have no one to blame but myself. The Buckley crowd, and the conservative movement in general, no more tried to deceive me than I tried to deceive them. We all assumed we were on the same side, when we weren't. If there is any fault for this misunderstanding, it is my own.

In the late 1980s I began mixing with Rothbardian libertarians â€“ they called themselves by the unprepossessing label "anarcho-capitalists" â€“ and even met Rothbard himself. They were a brilliant, combative lot, full of challenging ideas and surprising arguments. Rothbard himself combined a profound theoretical intelligence with a deep knowledge of history. His magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State, had received the most unqualified praise of the usually reserved Henry Hazlitt â€“ in National Review!

I can only say of Murray what so many others have said: never in my life have I encountered such an original and vigorous mind. A short, stocky New York Jew with an explosive cackling laugh, he was always exciting and cheerful company. Pouring out dozens of big books and hundreds of articles, he also found time, heaven knows how, to write (on the old electric typewriter he used to the end) countless long, single-spaced, closely reasoned letters to all sorts of people.

Murray's view of politics was shockingly blunt: the state was nothing but a criminal gang writ large. Much as I agreed with him in general, and fascinating though I found his arguments, I resisted this conclusion. I still wanted to believe in constitutional government.

Murray would have none of this. He insisted that the Philadelphia convention at which the Constitution had been drafted was nothing but a "coup d'Ã©tat," centralizing power and destroying the far more tolerable arrangements of the Articles of Confederation. This was a direct denial of everything I'd been taught. I'd never heard anyone suggest that the Articles had been preferable to the Constitution! But Murray didn't care what anyone thought â€“ or what everyone thought. (He'd been too radical for Ayn Rand.)

Murray and I shared a love of gangster films, and he once argued to me that the Mafia was preferable to the state, because it survived by providing services people actually wanted. I countered that the Mafia behaved like the state, extorting its own "taxes" in protection rackets directed at shopkeepers; its market was far from "free." He admitted I had a point. I was proud to have won a concession from him.

Murray died a few years ago without quite having made an anarchist of me. It was left to his brilliant disciple, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, to finish my conversion. Hans argued that no constitution could restrain the state. Once its monopoly of force was granted legitimacy, constitutional limits became mere fictions it could disregard; nobody could have the legal standing to enforce those limits. The state itself would decide, by force, what the constitution "meant," steadily ruling in its own favor and increasing its own power. This was true a priori, and American history bore it out.

What if the Federal Government grossly violated the Constitution? Could states withdraw from the Union? Lincoln said no. The Union was "indissoluble" unless all the states agreed to dissolve it. As a practical matter, the Civil War settled that. The United States, plural, were really a single enormous state, as witness the new habit of speaking of "it" rather than "them."

So the people are bound to obey the government even when the rulers betray their oath to uphold the Constitution. The door to escape is barred. Lincoln in effect claimed that it is not our rights but the state that is "unalienable." And he made it stick by force of arms. No transgression of the Constitution can impair the Union's inherited legitimacy. Once established on specific and limited terms, the US Government is forever, even if it refuses to abide by those terms.

As Hoppe argues, this is the flaw in thinking the state can be controlled by a constitution. Once granted, state power naturally becomes absolute. Obedience is a one-way street. Notionally, "We the People" create a government and specify the powers it is allowed to exercise over us; our rulers swear before God that they will respect the limits we impose on them; but when they trample down those limits, our duty to obey them remains.

Yet even after the Civil War, certain scruples survived for a while. Americans still agreed in principle that the Federal Government could acquire new powers only by constitutional amendment. Hence the postwar amendments included the words "Congress shall have power to" enact such and such legislation.

But by the time of the New Deal, such scruples were all but defunct. Franklin Roosevelt and his Supreme Court interpreted the Commerce Clause so broadly as to authorize virtually any Federal claim, and the Tenth Amendment so narrowly as to deprive it of any inhibiting force. Today these heresies are so firmly entrenched that Congress rarely even asks itself whether a proposed law is authorized or forbidden by the Constitution.

In short, the US Constitution is a dead letter. It was mortally wounded in 1865. The corpse can't be revived. This remained hard for me to admit, and even now it pains me to say it.

Other things have helped change my mind. R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii calculates that in the twentieth century alone, states murdered about 162,000,000 of their own subjects. This figure doesn't include the tens of millions of foreigners they killed in war. How, then, can we speak of states "protecting" their people? No amount of private crime could have claimed such a toll. As for warfare, Paul Fussell's book Wartime portrays battle with such horrifying vividness that, although this wasn't its intention, I came to doubt whether any war could be justified.

My fellow Christians have argued that the state's authority is divinely given. They cite Christ's injunction "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" and St. Paul's words "The powers that be are ordained of God." But Christ didn't say which things â€“ if any â€“ belong to Caesar; his ambiguous words are far from a command to give Caesar whatever he claims. And it's notable that Christ never told his disciples either to establish a state or to engage in politics. They were to preach the Gospel and, if rejected, to move on. He seems never to have imagined the state as something they could or should enlist on their side.

At first sight, St. Paul seems to be more positive in affirming the authority of the state. But he himself, like the other martyrs, died for defying the state, and we honor him for it; to which we may add that he was on one occasion a jailbreaker as well. Evidently the passage in Romans has been misread. It was probably written during the reign of Nero, not the most edifying of rulers; but then Paul also counseled slaves to obey their masters, and nobody construes this as an endorsement of slavery. He may have meant that the state and slavery were here for the foreseeable future, and that Christians must abide them for the sake of peace. Never does he say that either is here forever.

St. Augustine took a dim view of the state, as a punishment for sin. He said that a state without justice is nothing but a gang of robbers writ large, while leaving doubt that any state could ever be otherwise. St. Thomas Aquinas took a more benign view, arguing that the state would be necessary even if man had never fallen from grace; but he agreed with Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all, a doctrine that would severely diminish any known state.

The essence of the state is its legal monopoly of force. But force is subhuman; in words I quote incessantly, Simone Weil defined it as "that which turns a person into a thing â€“ either corpse or slave." It may sometimes be a necessary evil, in self-defense or defense of the innocent, but nobody can have by right what the state claims: an exclusive privilege of using it.

It's entirely possible that states â€“ organized force â€“ will always rule this world, and that we will have at best a choice among evils. And some states are worse than others in important ways: anyone in his right mind would prefer living in the United States to life under a Stalin. But to say a thing is inevitable, or less onerous than something else, is not to say it is good.

For most people, "anarchy" is a disturbing word, suggesting chaos, violence, antinomianism â€“ things they hope the state can control or prevent. The term "state," despite its bloody history, doesn't disturb them. Yet it's the state that is truly chaotic, because it means the rule of the strong and cunning. They imagine that anarchy would naturally terminate in the rule of thugs. But mere thugs can't assert a plausible right to rule. Only the state, with its propaganda apparatus, can do that. This is what "legitimacy" means. Anarchists obviously need a more seductive label.

"But what would you replace the state with?" The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be "replaced."

Christians, and especially Americans, have long been misled about all this by their good fortune. Since the conversion of Rome, most Western rulers have been more or less inhibited by Christian morality (though, often enough, not so's you'd notice), and even warfare became somewhat civilized for centuries; and this has bred the assumption that the state isn't necessarily an evil at all. But as that morality loses its cultural grip, as it is rapidly doing, this confusion will dissipate. More and more we can expect the state to show its nature nakedly.

For me this is anything but a happy conclusion. I miss the serenity of believing I lived under a good government, wisely designed and benevolent in its operation. But, as St. Paul says, there comes a time to put away childish things.
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I identify very closely with this, as I kind of feel like I'm in the transition of 'Constitutionalist-Libertarian' to 'Anarcho-capitalist Libertarian' at the moment. In any case, thought it was a good read to share. Enjoy.

EbencoyE · Jan 19, 2010

He met Rothbard himself, eh? Nice. Sounds like he knew all 20 anarcho-capitalists in the world!

Arteezy · Jan 19, 2010

I liked the article and that guy definitley describes me fairly well, too. I have been saying for years that the state is just a large-scale gang with a monopoly on force.

EbencoyE · Jan 20, 2010

kstigs said:

I liked the article and that guy definitley describes me fairly well, too. I have been saying for years that the state is just a large-scale gang with a monopoly on force.
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Now the question is: why do you think getting rid of the state, but not the people who control it, would change anything?

Arteezy · Jan 20, 2010

EbencoyE said:

Now the question is: why do you think getting rid of the state, but not the people who control it, would change anything?
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Getting rid of people isn't really a viable option for me. Getting rid of the state will get rid of the current mechanism of control and power. Of course there will always be people who strive to control and have power over others, but at least we've gotten rid of the monopoly on force.

EbencoyE · Jan 20, 2010

kstigs said:

Getting rid of people isn't really a viable option for me. Getting rid of the state will get rid of the current mechanism of control and power. Of course there will always be people who strive to control and have power over others, but at least we've gotten rid of the monopoly on force.
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Getting rid of the monopoly on force is great and all, but then you just have multiple competing forces. How does that achieve anything?

Also, good luck getting rid of the state without getting rid of people. There are many MANY people that will defend the state until death. How do you propose to deal with these people?

Arteezy · Jan 20, 2010

EbencoyE said:

Getting rid of the monopoly on force is great and all, but then you just have multiple competing forces. How does that achieve anything?
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As an anarcho-capitalist, I believe in the free market. Do you really need me to explain how competition and the profit motive works?

EbencoyE said:

Also, good luck getting rid of the state without getting rid of people. There are many MANY people that will defend the state until death. How do you propose to deal with these people?
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I'd rather not deal with them. I don't think humans were meant to live in groups of 300 million. People just want to live out their own lives and most of them don't really care about people who live 1000 miles away. I'd rather that they leave me alone and I leave them alone. If they won't leave me alone (aka initiating force), then I will be forced to use my own political power.

What I mean is I would like people to be able to determine their own fates. If all the lefties want to go live up in New England and make a hippie-commune to bring about world peace, that's fine. Just don't mess with my shit (property, labor, rights, family, etc.).

ArtemisRain · Jan 20, 2010

This issue is why I dream of one day disappearing into the wilderness to escape this joke of a society. With a few seeds of course.

Shade · Jan 20, 2010

EbencoyE said:

Getting rid of the monopoly on force is great and all, but then you just have multiple competing forces. How does that achieve anything?
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Competition isn't a bad thing by itself, quite the contrary. Competition facilitates innovation, efficiency and wealth, generally speaking.

EbencoyE · Jan 20, 2010

kstigs said:

As an anarcho-capitalist, I believe in the free market. Do you really need me to explain how competition and the profit motive works?
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Nah, that's ok. I've heard all the rhetoric many times.

I'd rather not deal with them. I don't think humans were meant to live in groups of 300 million. People just want to live out their own lives and most of them don't really care about people who live 1000 miles away. I'd rather that they leave me alone and I leave them alone. If they won't leave me alone (aka initiating force), then I will be forced to use my own political power.

What I mean is I would like people to be able to determine their own fates. If all the lefties want to go live up in New England and make a hippie-commune to bring about world peace, that's fine. Just don't mess with my shit (property, labor, rights, family, etc.).
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My point was, that if you were to attempt to establish your anarcho-capitalist society, you would have to destroy the state. So whether you want to deal with them or not, you're going to have a huge military to fight, corporations that support such military and state, etc, etc. It's not a voluntary fight. It's guaranteed to happen.

And I'm not talking about lefties, I'm talking about the state itself. Lefty hippies don't control the state, although I know right wingers tend to think otherwise for some reason.

EbencoyE · Jan 20, 2010

Shade said:

Competition isn't a bad thing by itself, quite the contrary. Competition facilitates innovation, efficiency and wealth, generally speaking.
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Right, for the people on the winning side anyway.

Personally I don't really see the difference between one oppressive force and many competing oppressive forces. They both contain hierarchical centralized power structures and are therefore not anarchist.

Arteezy · Jan 20, 2010

EbencoyE said:

My point was, that if you were to attempt to establish your anarcho-capitalist society, you would have to destroy the state. So whether you want to deal with them or not, you're going to have a huge military to fight, corporations that support such military and state, etc, etc. It's not a voluntary fight. It's guaranteed to happen.

And I'm not talking about lefties, I'm talking about the state itself. Lefty hippies don't control the state, although I know right wingers tend to think otherwise for some reason.
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I don't have all the answers. Knocking down the state is not an easy task as there are many powerful interests in it; however, this isn't going to change my political philosophy. I'd be happy to compromise with the state, but I'm not going to just abandon anarchism because there isn't an easy way to achieve it.

Also, I never said hippies control the state. I'm under no delusions of the sort of people that control the federal government today.

EbencoyE · Jan 20, 2010

kstigs said:

I don't have all the answers. Knocking down the state is not an easy task as there are many powerful interests in it; however, this isn't going to change my political philosophy. I'd be happy to compromise with the state, but I'm not going to just abandon anarchism because there isn't an easy way to achieve it.

Also, I never said hippies control the state. I'm under no delusions of the sort of people that control the federal government today.
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Well, us lefty anarchists have been confused by anarcho-capitalist philosophy for quite some time so I was simply trying to better understand it.

I guess the major difference between our brands of anarchists (besides the obvious economic issues) is that we know we have to violently fight the state, as we have before many times. (Spain, Mexico, Korea, France, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, etc, etc) I'm not trying to get you to give up on anarchy, I'm just trying to make you aware of what will be required of you in the future.

The fact that there has never been an attempted anarcho-capitalist revolution leads me to believe that they don't really understand the necessary procedures to establish their dream society.

Shade · Jan 21, 2010

EbencoyE said:

Right, for the people on the winning side anyway.
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No, not really. If you're poor, for instance, and generally not doing very well, you're still better off being poor in a market economy rich with competitive business because the surplus and quality of goods is going to be higher while the cost of these goods is going to be lower. Additionally, there will be more employment opportunities, greater charitable giving, and other benefits like this. So no... not if you're just on the 'winning' side, whatever that is.

Shade · Jan 21, 2010

EbencoyE said:

Well, us lefty anarchists have been confused by anarcho-capitalist philosophy for quite some time so I was simply trying to better understand it.

The fact that there has never been an attempted anarcho-capitalist revolution leads me to believe that they don't really understand the necessary procedures to establish their dream society.
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Anarcho-capitalism, or modern libertarianism, is still relatively new in comparison to other political philosophies--or contrarily widely unknown/misunderstood, but it is rapidly growing from what I see, especially considering they're the only recognized third party (however minor in comparison to republicrats)... though admittedly some libertarians lean more towards a minarchist mindset, as opposed to anarchism. Left anarchism, on the other hand seems to have either stagnated, or dwindled, at least in America--I can't even remember the last left anarchist I've known.

If you want to learn about it anarcho-capitalism/libertarianism, go to mises.org for starters.

Buddy Dink · Jan 21, 2010

EbencoyE said:

My point was, that if you were to attempt to establish your anarcho-capitalist society, you would have to destroy the state. So whether you want to deal with them or not, you're going to have a huge military to fight, corporations that support such military and state, etc, etc. It's not a voluntary fight. It's guaranteed to happen.

And I'm not talking about lefties, I'm talking about the state itself. Lefty hippies don't control the state, although I know right wingers tend to think otherwise for some reason.
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Maybe because lefties do run the state? Neo-con is just another name for the most extreme left you can get, but this is besides the point.

Anarchy requires nothing more than people who understand that they are their own sovereign person and that the state has no real control over them. It does not require the state to be overthrown. In fact, you can not install anarchy. Removing the current system would usher in a new system, which is not what anarchy is about. Anarchists want no system, and the only way to have no system is to ignore everyone else.

Fuck the police, fuck the government, fuck everyone who tells me how to live my life, because my life is mine. The decisions I make are mine. The consequences of the decisions I make are mine to hold, as well. There is no third party in my decision making process, and I don't like to pretend otherwise.

So, you all can continue to fuck yourselves over, but I'll ignore your ludicrous laws and enjoy myself. Come smoke a bowl with me when you change your mind... I mean let us not forget what this government has done to people for something as simple as smoking a plant. And this is supposed to be the best country in the world?

edward · Feb 7, 2010

Shade said:

No, not really. If you're poor, for instance, and generally not doing very well, you're still better off being poor in a market economy rich with competitive business because the surplus and quality of goods is going to be higher while the cost of these goods is going to be lower. Additionally, there will be more employment opportunities, greater charitable giving, and other benefits like this. So no... not if you're just on the 'winning' side, whatever that is.
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Yep...

Economic stratification that results from an unhindered free market is merely representative of the differences in ability that are bound to arise in such a diverse species as human beings. The only way this can be "corrected" is through coercion that forcibly extracts wealth from those who have earned it.

Don't get confused by the system we have now where it APPEARS the wealthiest, fittest individuals have found themselves in a position to exploit the less-abled masses... this huge difference between the rich and the poor is because of regulation that gives preference to the wealthy, not in spite of it.

Sir Elliot · Feb 7, 2010

I would assert that the author is slightly off base when it comes to summarizing Ss. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

Just slightly, but the difference is important for someone considering being a form of anarchist.

We must recognize that Augustine and Aquinas saw the state as having a very specific aim, purpose, and goal. Namely ensuring the common good and ensuring justice.

Our modern states end up being incredibly divorced from the classical understanding of the state, since the modern state ends up primarily revolving around things like monopoly of force and sovereign rights to power.

Without a conception of God as the supreme authority from which the state rightfully derives its authority, with the notion that the state is itself inferior to the Kingdom of God, the state will inevitably degrade into a mere monopoly of power.

To be a true anarchist against the corrupted and fallen governments of this world, one would need to be a Christian. Unless the state and the citizens are servants of the Eternal Kingdom, they will end up being alligned against the Eternal Kingdom. That is why modern states have become so unjust.

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