The State. Ludwig von. Mises delights in calling it “the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion.” It has a monopoly on violence. It is unique in that a free citizen must consider every negotiation with it as an adversary proceeding. It is the very opponent and negation of human freedom and individuality. Men strive to excel, the State seeks after averages. Men covet novelty, the State extrapolates from yesterday. Men love to chaffer person to person, the State is a rule book. Men yearn to be free, the State is the sum of liberties lost.
And so it is that the confrontation of individual and State is one of the most ancient, great, and continuous themes in human story. In times of abundant liberty the theme is taken up merely by theoreticians and philosophers; it retains an abstract vigor. In times when the people feel the monster State jostling and herding them, the problem of liberty once more pre-empts debate in the councils and occupies the gossip of the people. Robert Crunden, the biographer of Albert Jay Nock, is of opinion that there were only six books “worthy of mention as individualist literature” published between 1939 and 1945 in this country. In the last ten years, by contrast, our political presses have scarcely been concerned with anything else. That is a measure of the speed at which the State has made itself felt among the people. The growth of centralized government is, as this magazine pointed out exactly ten years ago in its inaugural issue, “the dominant social feature of this century.” Rickenbacker
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