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From an exchange on LRC blog a few years ago:

First, Chris Manion had a post, Pope Benedict on Charity and Truth, about Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical letter, “Caritas in Veritate,” which is about the importance of (necessarily voluntary) eleemosynary activities. As Manion writes:

Re: Pope Benedict on Charity and Truth

Is the Vatican a State?

Lew, excellent point. This highlights the need to distinguish the political conception of the state from more positivist definitions such as the one I was employing.

This is actually a quite fascinating area. International law generally sets forth four criteria for statehood: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.” (Art. I, Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States) Given such criteria, there are various “micro” and borderline “states,” such as San Marino, Monaco, and Lichtenstein. And “states” are not the only “legal persons” under international law–there are also international organizations such as the UN (see Brownlie, ch. 3) and other sui generis entities such as the Holy See (Vatican City is not a state under international law; it has a murky relationship with the Holy See). But even by positive international law standards the Holy See’s status as a state is borderline (see Brownlie, p. 64), although it is recognized as a (non-member) state by the UN.

Is being a “state” in this sense necessarily unlibertarian? I think not, since none of these criteria, even “government,” necessarily implies aggression. Libertarians are against aggression, and thus also against institutionalized aggression; the “state” opposed by libertarians is the agency of organized or institutionalized aggression. In Power and Market, Rothbard quotes Oppenheimer from his The State:

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. … I propose … to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others “the economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.” … The state is an organization of the political means [emphasis added].

Or, as Oppenheimer defined it in his introduction to The State: “I mean by [the ‘State’] that summation of privileges and dominating positions which are brought into being by extra economic power. And in contrast to this, I mean by Society, the totality of concepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man …. ” (See also Rothbard’s classic The Anatomy of the State; update: see also my post The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It.)

Here, by the way, we see the genius of Hoppe’s essentialist definition of socialism not merely as centralized control of the means of production, but as “an institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims” (A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 2; also see pp. 12). To those who would object that this means all states are socialist, and all socialism is statist–yes. Exactly; and this is why libertarians are anti-state. It is because we are anti-aggression; and all states (in our sense) employ aggression; and this is what is also wrong with socialism: it is merely institutionalized aggression (update: see also my article What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist).  Thus Hoppe explicitly writes:

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.

(A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, pp. 148-49; emphasis added)

In short: Lew, I stand corrected. The Holy See does not tax; it does not compel; it does not commit aggression. It is not a state in our sense, no matter what the UN calls it. And maybe this is why it is hated by leftists and liberals.

Great quote:

“… the state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.”
–Joseph A Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

Chris–quite right about charity being voluntary. And not only that, as far as I know, the Holy See is the only state in the world that does not tax–it’s supported by voluntary donations of a billion Catholics around the globe. It’s the most libertarian state in the world.

As mentioned by Jeff Tucker, in the Pope’s new encyclical, Caritas in veritate, he writes:

On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care.

As Jeff writes, “I wish it had gone further to reject the whole idea of a IP but this is an excellent statement as far as it goes.”

[Against Monopoly cross-post]

Lew, great post. Anti-state, and anti-war. The Zinn piece has some other great lines that should be of interest to libertarians, especially constitutional sentimentalists and those who desperately cling to the notion that the American Revolution was some thoroughly libertarian event:

Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. … That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs ….

Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line-in the Proclamation of 1763-that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.

Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution? … Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it

… Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.

[LRC Cross-post]

ABSOLUTELY HEROIC post by Lew Rockwell! Yes, it’s time to take the gloves off, my fellow libertarians. No more excuses for the state! No more state worship! Down with constitutional sentimentalism!

‘Untold Truths About the American Revolution’

Posted by Lew Rockwell on July 7, 2009 08:49 AM

Volunteer Copyeditor Sought for Libertarian Papers

Lew, you are so right, and here is more evidence: Judge Says Blogs Not Legitimate News Source; No Shield Protections.

[LRC cross-post]

This report quotes Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole on what policies TSA ought to adopt:

among large and midsize airports, only Omaha and Colorado Springs, Colo., still use swabbing machines as the only means of screening checked baggage for explosives.

“I didn’t realize that any of the airports in that size category were still doing trace detection,” said Robert Poole, a transportation expert with the Reason Foundation, a nonprofit free-market policy group based in Los Angeles. “It’s long overdue for an airport the size of Omaha” to have scanning machines.

… Poole said Omaha should temporarily place the luggage scanning equipment in the lobby, sacrificing customer space in order to use superior security technology sooner.Scanning equipment, he said, can reveal timing devices or other suspicious details, while swabbing is meant only to detect explosive materials.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help!

[LRC crosspost]

An interesting, fiery comment by Bob Kaercher to my post Happy We-Should-Restore-The-Monarchy-And-Rejoin-Britain Day!:

Bob Kaercher

I would never propose rejoining the Brits nor would I ever favor a monarchy, but I think I can appreciate what’s illustrated by the comparison being made here, which is that the vote-for-your-favorite-dictator democracy celebrated every 4th of July was hardly an improvement. As much as that may rankle the feathers of some American libertarians who have still not quite totally detoxed from the years of brainwashing by the media, popular culture, hearing family and neighbors spouting widely held assumptions with no or little basis in fact, and/or government schooling, the founding of the United States is hardly an historical event to be cheered by libertarians. Something good may be said for the secession from the British Empire, sure, but we should ask ourselves: To what did we secede?

“The revolution was betrayed!” This seems to be the view of the American War for Independence held by a lot of American libertarians. But on closer examination I think it’s more accurate to conclude that the rotten fruits we’re choking on today—endless war on bureaucratically defined vices at home and whatever country Uncle Sam feels like targeting abroad, increasing debt and taxation, the trampling of individual freedom, etc., etc., etc.—are what any libertarian should fully expect to have evolved out of the political arrangement established by the sacrosanct and hallowed founders.

The whole thing was corrupt from the get-go. As Stephan mentioned, really think about what’s written in the Declaration of Independence. Okay, there’s some great language about equality, which I take to mean equality of individual rights, not material or physical “equality,” i.e., no person may treat any other as their own personal property. Ah, but this did not apply to the slaves–no, no, no, no! A horrible compromise was made with southern slaveholding interests to strike Jefferson’s original language that was critical of slavery for the sake of unity. Remember, these new States with a capital S must be United with a capital U. Unity trumps principle! And we know what happened to a lot of Indians who weren’t exactly thrilled with going along with Uncle Sam’s Program.

So, okay, then as you proceed through the document there’s some great stuff about King George’s abuses of power. But then you get to the founders’ answer to this tyranny: A different brand of tyranny, one that’s homegrown! Those passages smack of collectivism through and through! There’s all this “We” being the “Representatives” of “the People” of the Colonies, and acting on the “Authority” of “the People” these purported “Representatives” declare that these Colonies are now independent of the King, sure, but as STATES that are UNITED. Lysander Spooner was right about the BS of such language. It’s the language of power.

Why not declare secession from the King as free and sovereign individuals with each person being free to secede (or maybe even not to secede for those colonists who didn’t mind staying under the King’s rule) by their own lights, entering into various associations by purely voluntary choice? Why did they have to secede as “United States”? Because that was the only way that the political elites who spearheaded that “American Revolution” could maintain any power.

So considering that this political unit called the “United States of America” was founded on the ideas of unity trumping principle and freedom, on the ideas of collectivism, we probably should conclude that it wasn’t that the founders’ principles were admirable but imperfectly implemented, or just a little flawed here and there, or were simply misinterpreted or misunderstood by succeeding generations, but that their principles were far less than libertarian to begin with and we are now tragically stuck with the bitter consequences of such principles.

Update: Hurrah for King George!, by John Attarian.

[LRC crosspost]