A Case of Corruption
how account for the unseemly strife for office that men with pretensions to character engage in? "Long live the king" is the upholstery of the throne.
So, the predatory political institution that emerges when Society acquires a competence is compounded of vanity and cupidity.
But there must be some means of restraining Cain from going after Abel's hide and property, lest human life go the way of the dinosaur. There cannot be a Society until there is a market place, and there cannot be a market place until security of possession is assured. Without that assurance the individual will not strive to improve his circumstances and production will drop to the level of mere subsistence; man will be little better than an animal, a status against which his primordial compulsions revolt. It is for that reason that he sets up a machinery for the protection of life and property, even against himself, a machinery to which he gives the name of Government.
"To secure these [inalienable] rights [to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness]," says the best phrasing of the subject, "governments are instituted among men." It follows that if there were some way of securing these rights without Government, men would not institute it. And it also follows that when Government employs its monopoly of coercion for purposes which violate these rights it ceases to be Government. It is some other kind of concern, even as a merchantman that turns to piracy cannot be classified as a merchantman. So that, when the committee in charge of the power of compulsion use it to confiscate property they cannot lay claim to the name of Government. It is a corruption, and its name is the State.
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