Lew Rockwell on anarchy

Is it possible that we have likewise assumed that the state is inevitable only because we are used to it, and can hardly imagine a world without it?  Just as the menial tasks once performed by slaves are now distributed differently among free men, perhaps, as anarchists argue, the functions of the state could be distributed among voluntary agencies.

The Renaissance philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought that anarchy — the “state of nature” — would be “a war of all against all,” making human life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  His solution was the state, which would quell quarrels among men.  He didn’t foresee that the state itself might aggravate conflict and make social order far more miserable than anarchy could ever be.

Hobbes’s near-contemporary John Locke offered a more attractive alternative: the limited state, which would have the power to secure men’s natural rights but would lack the power to violate them.  But such a state has never existed for long.  Once a monopoly of power exists at all, it tends to degenerate into tyranny; anarchists argue that this decline is inevitable, because tyranny is inherent in the very nature of the state.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Heroic Joe Sobran," LewRockwell.com, March 4, 2024