10. Strategy: Secession, Privatization, and the Prospects of Liberty

The institution of the State is not normal or natural. We will pay for making this error. There are not different and unequal laws applying to masters and individuals. Once you accept, incorrectly, unilateral taxation and ultimate jurisdiction in the hands of the state you are stuck.

Instead of protecting us, our government has made us more helpless and impoverished while they become richer and more powerful. Yet, the state owes its existence entirely to ideas and can be brought down quickly when the majority withdraws its consent from those ideas.

Intellectuals are overwhelmingly statist. Thus, arguments against statists need to be ethical and moral arguments. Taxation is either just or unjust. Friedman and Hayek’s ideas contributed to the growth of the state, so the fact that those two men supported an issue does not make it ethical. Politicians are not only thieves, but generally mass murderers. Hayek gave us an uninspired vision of the Swedish welfare state; Rothbard gave us inspired visions of a destatized society.

Instead, as intermediate goals, we can aspire to a world of tens of thousands of Singapores and San Marinos – small unities engaging in open free trade policies. Perhaps even a Mises Institute reservation! Democracy will not abolish itself; the masses will not give up their right to other people’s money. But most will agree that social issues should be solved on the smallest possible level.

Lecture 10 of 10 from Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Economy, Society, and History.