Over at To The People, in a post titled Remind Me Never to Hire the Government, Leonardo notes the prima facie use of force that constitutes governments’ every action. All of them. He, as others are, is forced to buy what the government is selling because:

[T]hey hire themselves for anything they want to do and would imprison me if I didn’t pay them for their work. But, gosh, they are just terrible about getting projects done! They are like your worst nightmare of a contractor on crack who holds a gun to your head to pay him or else.

He’s also touched on the idea of why we wouldn’t want to hire them to do things. Namely, anything.

Some would argue that “choosing” to accept the force imposed by the government in some manner mitigates the violation; and that whenever such a choice does not result in armed rebellion, in fact justifies the State’s ever-increasing intrusions and outright violations no longer concealed by platitudes. Fie on them. That argument carried out, suggests that the thief who robs you in the night is justified in his actions if he takes your wallet at gunpoint, because your “choice” was to give him the wallet or to die, and you obviously “chose” the former.

But herein lies the problem: Death and theft are not mutually exclusive in the alley. First the thief kills you, and then he satiates his desire for your wallet, your Nikes, your jacket, and so on. Nor are they mutually exclusive in the realm of government actions. First, the government imprisons you, and then it forecloses on your assets. If you don’t go willingly to prison, then the government kills you, and proceeds against your estate. There is certainly a qualitative difference between the choice between theft and death, and the choice between, as the anarchists might suggest, which company will provide you with security and insurance. Positing that the “choice” between acquiescence to government, or certain death in vainglorious resistance, is anything like the latter is a mere equivocation, nothing more.

Why don’t we see people waging war against the state? Well, for one thing, it’s tremendously expensive to raise an army these days. So much so, in fact, that the only real power to do so is the vested power in the State, an antiquity – if you will – the self-perpetuating monopoly of force. Most anti-monopoly arguments falter on the grounds that they suppose the very firms being accused of “monopolistic behavior” have a vast war-chest of monopoly spoils, from which to sink their losses as they try to corner the market. This has not been the case, factually speaking. Government, on the other hand, does have a vast war-chest of monopoly spoils, with which it is able to perpetuate its own existence, and quash any potential rival upstarts.

Besides, those who advocate “standing up” to the government, whatever-the-fuck that might mean in todays age of hypermilitarized police, spy-satellites, warrantless wiretaps – are inadvertently committing the same fallacious reasoning as those supporters of statism rely on: Might Makes Right. The only situation in which you should feel compelled to defend yourself by force, is one in which you yourself are threatened by another. If the only way to free yourself from the coercive injustice of Statism is to take up arms – what, praytell, does that suggest about the merits of the State, to begin with?

Choice is only truly possible in the absence of violence.