a right of individual nullification would imply the right of any individual to “secede” from the State under which he lives.[1]
Thus, the State has invariably shown a striking talent for the expansion of its powers beyond any limits that might be imposed upon it. Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the State is profoundly and inherently anticapitalist. In a sense, our position is the reverse of the Marxist dictum that the State is the “executive committee” of the ruling class in the present day, supposedly the capitalists. Instead, the State—the organization of the political means—constitutes, and is the source of, the “ruling class” (rather, ruling caste), and is in permanent opposition to genuinely private capital. We may, therefore, say with de Jouvenel:
Only those who know nothing of any time but their own, who are completely in the dark as to the manner of Power’s behaving through thousands of years, would regard these proceedings [nationalization, the income tax, etc.] as the fruit of a particular set of doctrines. They are in fact the
normal manifestations of Power, and differ not at
- ↑ Cf. Herbert Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State,” in Social Statics (New York: D. Appleton, 1890), pp. 229–39.
