One Can Always Hope
efficiency can only be lowered by the injection of that power. It will be as large as customers and sellers want it to be. Without political interference it can be world-wide.
The best that political power can do in the premises is to prevent theft (including the violation of contract), and this it can do only by punishing the thief after the act has been committed, with the hope that such punishment will discourage repetition or emulation. Even in this function it is less effective than social sanctions; exile from the market place of a community unable or unwilling to keep its house in order, or of an individual who establishes a reputation for dishonesty, is retribution enough. If it is in the economic interest of any political unit to maintain police relations with other communities, liaison through representatives can be established, but the powers and functions of these representatives must be held within the purview of their employers, the local town-hall meeting. Political power can and will be put to antisocial practices only when those to whom it is entrusted act as principals, not as agents.
The means by which the political person—"divine right" king or elected official—achieves independent stature is the power to appropriate property. Without appropriation there cannot be a State, and the power of the State is in direct proportion to the amount of property it appropriates. Contrariwise, social power is measurable by the amount of property the individual producer is able to retain and dispose of as he sees fit. The State thrives on taxation, Society suffers from it. The difference between a free Society and a dominated one is in the percentage of property the State lays its hands on.
All taxes are compulsory exactions—"voluntary taxation" is a contradiction in terms—and the problem that Society 162
