The War of All Against All

Thomas Hobbes referred to man in the state of nature as living a ’short, nasty, poor and brutish’ life (paraphrased). In Leviathan (1651), it is argued that a state is required to have a monopoly on violence and to be the final authority. Without this state, supposedly society would degenerate into a “war of all against all”.

However, there is a sense in which it could be argued that the “war of all against all” is encouraged with the existence of the state. With the existence of this state, a gargantuan institution of violence, it is clear to see that there are many who petition the state to use its guns for their own purposes. This stems from the fact that the existence of a state forces people to associate with people who they wouldn’t otherwise associate with, stripping the individual of his/her right to freedom of association. This happens wherever individuals are forced to vote, and are also forced to fund state projects that they disagree with.

The fact that government spending happens with stolen money that is coerced under the banner of taxation – entices people to try and get some control over where that money is directed. Businesses and people will ask for government grants to help them get started, or worse, bailouts to help them sustain their unprofitable businesses/lifestyles. The people who want government funding (people who want something for nothing) are ‘at war’ with the taxpayers. The idea that anybody would actually want to be able to keep their own money and decide for themselves becomes laughable to the state and its apologists.

The government’s monopoly on violence is sought out to be used for the purposes of many interest groups, each with their own agendas. Religious groups may want the government to outlaw behaviour that it finds distasteful, even if that behaviour doesn’t infringe on the property rights of others. Take censorship for example, there is absolutely no need to impose a nationwide filter on the internet if personal filters are all that is required for an individual to filter out content they do not wish to view. Unions argue to violently set wages higher than what employers are otherwise willing to pay. Businesses lobby for regulation that restricts competition and entrenches their own position in the market such as anti-competition law, patents, copyrights, special land use rights in cases such as mining/logging etc. 

All of this struggle over state resources and state violence can make other people feel like they need to go and defend themselves via petitioning the state. State interference begets more state interference. The people who are aggressed against seek to defend themselves via the state, but if there was no state at all, this would never have happened. One example is patenting, where the state gives a specific company or person the monopoly on a good. Red hat linux applies for patents, purely to ensure that nobody would “hijack” their product and patent it from underneath them. Clearly they would not have otherwise patented their product, it’s just that the threat of state violence against their business forced them to act.

The fact that state employees don’t literally fight people in the streets doesn’t mean that the state is not violent, the point is that the threat is still there. This institutionalised violence needs to come to an end, and there is no reason why people shouldn’t be given more freedom of choice in the matter. It is their own lifestyle, job, property and money so each person should be allowed to decide for themselves. If you support the existence of coercive govt over people who would choose otherwise, I ask you to please think carefully about what gives you this right.