The Keys That Unlocked the Door to Anarchism

In my last post, I showed how my cousin introduced me to anarchism.  By the end, he had guided me towards some of the leaders in the philosophy.  Now, I want to share a few relevant quotes from these brilliant minds that have stuck with me over time:

What is the State?

“Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.” - Murray Rothbard

“The State is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else…Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.” - Frederic Bastiat

“For something to be ‘government,’ it must, by definition, do something that average people do not have the right to do. A ‘government’ with the same rights as everyone else is not a ‘government’ any more than the average man on the street is ‘government.’” - Larken Rose

“The law is an opinion with a gun.” - Stefan Molyneux

Taxation

“The State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as ‘taxation,’ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as ‘tribute.’ Taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.” - Murray Rothbard

“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.” - Frederic Bastiat

“If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.” - Lysander Spooner

“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Voting

“A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and irresponsible.” - Lysander Spooner

“I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, ‘If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain,’ but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for what these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.” - George Carlin

“Your vote doesn't count...statistically, any person's vote makes no more difference than a single grain of sand on a beach. Thinking their vote counts seems to give people who need it an inflated sense of self-worth.” - Doug Casey

War

“What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?” - Thomas Sowell

“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.” - Robert Higgs

“We cannot build peace on blood. We are still so addicted to this lie. We have this fantasy that we honor the dead by adding to their number. What we need to do is remember that these bodies bury us. This ocean of blood that we create through the fantasy that violence brings virtue drowns us, drowns our children, drowns our future, drowns the world. We have to understand that when we pour these endless young bodies into this pit of death, we follow…” -  Stefan Molyneux

Justice

“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?” - Frederic Bastiat

“Economic theory requires only that scarce resources be allocated among competing uses. Clearly, the enterprise of law - the use of police services, court time, and all other inputs in the process of making law and establishing order - requires scarce resources that must be allocated. Beyond that, economic theory explains human behaviour by considering how individuals react to incentives and constraints.” - Bruce L. Benson

“What makes anyone think that government officials are even trying to protect us? A government is not analogous to a hired security guard. Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime. Yes, rulers have sometimes come to recognize the prudence of protecting the herd they are milking and even of improving its ‘infrastructure’ until the day they decide to slaughter the young bulls, but the idea that government officials seek to promote my interests or yours is little more than propaganda—unless, of course, you happen to belong to the class of privileged tax eaters who give significant support to the government and therefore receive in return a share of the loot.” - Robert Higgs

Roads

“But who would build the roads if there were no government? You mean to tell me that 300 million people in this country and 7 billion people on the planet would just sit around in their houses and think 'Gee, I’d like to go visit Fred, but I can't because there isn’t a flat thing outside for me to drive on, and I don’t know how to build it and the other 300 million or 7 billion people can’t possibly do it because there aren’t any politicians and tax collectors. If they were here then we could do it. If they were here to boss us around and steal our money and really inefficiently build the flat places, then we would be set. Then I would be comfortable and confident that I could get places. But I can’t go to Fred’s house or the market because we can’t possibly build a flat space from A to B. We can make these really small devices that enable us to contact people from all over the word that fits in our pockets; we can make machines that we drive around in, but no, we can’t possibly build a flat space.'” - Larken Rose

Gun Control

“If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people. So it’s not that you are anti-gun. You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you’re very Pro-Gun, you just believe that only the Government (which is, of course, so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous…) should be allowed to have guns. There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small, political elite and their minions.” -  Stefan Molyneux

Corporations

“Corporations are legal fictions created by the State to shield executives from liability… It’s like if I had a little hand-puppet, and I went to rob a bank, and the hand-puppet held the little gun and told people to hand over all the money, and then the hand-puppet grabbed the money and ran out, and then I got caught and I handed the hand-puppet over the police and then the police tried the hand-puppet, put the hand-puppet in jail, and I get to keep all the money.” -Stefan Molyneux

Morality

“If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, the president. Theft does not become acceptable when they call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy. We understand that it is never acceptable to wield violence nor the threat of violence against the innocent, whether by the mugger or the politician.” - Lew Rockwell

“If you personally advocate that I be caged if I don't pay for whatever ‘government’ things YOU want, please don't pretend to be tolerant, or non-violent, or enlightened, or compassionate. Don't pretend you believe in ‘live and let live,’ and don't pretend you want peace, freedom or harmony. It's a simple truism that the only people in the world who are willing to ‘live and let live’ are voluntaryists. So you can either PRETEND to care about and respect your fellow man while continuing to advocate widespread authoritarian violence, or you can embrace the concepts of self-ownership and peaceful coexistence, and become an anarchist.”  - Larken Rose

In Conclusion

“In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.” - Robert Higgs

All of these had a profound effect on my acceptance of anarchism.  My cousin had done a fantastic job outlining it all, but it took a long time for my conscious brain to fully and comfortably wrap my head around the concept.  These quotes were some key highlights that helped me in my journey.  Hopefully, they can help someone else, as well.

-@derekareith

Murray Rothbard, Frederic Bastiat, Lysander Spooner

Stefan Molyneux

Lew Rockwell

Bruce Benson's Enterprise of Law

Robert Higgs

Larken Rose

Doug Casey