Government Versus the State

When I see others criticize the ruling class, it's often in the form of blaming the government or the State—they are both used interchangeably to mean the same thing.

However, is this correct?

If someone tells me that the government is the problem and the government is the source of the most criminality, I ordinarily assume what they are actually talking about is the State not necessarily "government". Although they are both said to serve the same purpose this has not always been the case.

Many of thinkers in antiquity confused the two, thinking the State originated from the family or some community organizing function. This could be further from the case, unless you wrongly assume using force is a legitimate means of getting people together. All you have to do is observe the history of how the State came to be that you can see it for what it really is.

For those who think peoples like the original native Americans, Minoans, Indus Valley Civilizations, or any other self-organizing society in history didn't have what we call "government" today are mistaken as they indeed had a system of governance like all societies, it just wasn't organized by the State.

Some of the early American revolutionaries notably Thomas Paine, were well aware that government is the social creation for the provision of justice, requiring the consent of the people for it to be legitimate; and once it went anything beyond that simple idea, it became a foreign body seeking control over others. Self-governance was suppose to be the main feature of the new American nation but as time went on given incidents like the creation of the Constitution and other take-overs of powers, the State came to represent themselves as the government.

The distinction between government and the State was penetrated very accurately as usual by Mr. Nock:

Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures
those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention,
making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does
not go. The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by
its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on
the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual
has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant
him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access,
and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality
whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

So in essence, government is concerned only with justice while the State with enacting laws. The more we understand this the easier it will be for all of us to transition into a society where the State is seen as the unnecessary evil it is, and governance can become realistic again.

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