Això ho he trobat ací...
Justament avui hi pensava: quina diferència entre cap boldró de criminals i l'estat...? Sobretot un estat feixista _ com els dos (van enjovats per a trepitjar'ns millor) que pateixen (patim?) els catalònics...?
Ens prenen totes les llibertats i sobre encara els hem de pagar, i sobre ens criminalitzen, i sobre ens xeringuen amb llurs merdegades de la religió catòlica i llurs patriotisme feixista per tots els racons. Els hem d'aguantar totes les putades, i encara es veuen prou valents per a robar'ns. I encara gosen prohibir'ns d'usar del nostre cos i de la nostra vida al nostre lloure i al nostre albir. Qui collons són...? Mafiosos criminals, eh-li.
Això deia avui en William F. Vallicella:
Now it is surely nonsense to maintain that the government is us. I also cannot understand why many people liken the state to a club or cooperative venture which charges dues to its members for services rendered. If the state is a club, then taxes are dues. But this comparison obscures the crucial fact that dues are paid voluntarily while taxes are coerced.
Having indicated two things the state is not, what is it positively? Murray Rothbard's answer builds on the work of Franz Oppenheimer:
The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the "economic means." The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another's goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed "the political means" to wealth.
[. . .]
We are now in a position to answer more fully the question: what is the State? The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the "organization of the political means"; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.[4] For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively "peaceful" the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.
In sum, for Oppenheimer and Rothbard, the state is a vehicle of predation, a system of organized theft of private property for the benefit of a parasitic caste.
Now one thing ought to be clear: it is an essential characteristic of any state that it have the power (via institutional as opposed to personal means) to coerce and violate those under its control. Taxation, imprisonment, execution, are among the ways in which the state coerces its subjects and violates their liberty.
Once this is understood, one is in a position to appreciate the fundamental problem of normative political theory, namely, the problem of accounting for the difference between a criminal organization such as the Mafia and the state. If a mafioso extorts money from me, he does me an injustice. But if he forces me to feed my kids, he also does wrong in that he has no legitimate authority over me. So even if the state does nothing unjust (according to your favorite moral code), that does not suffice to show the moral difference between the state and a criminal outfit. For the problem remains as to what gives the state the right to demand and enforce just behavior on the part of its subjects. Whence the legitimacy of the state's power?
