I. Introductory

Hitherto of politics that is the State is the institution best suited for the production, interpretation, and enforcement of law and order. The fact is the variance in a plethora of political discourse is confined to which laws the State ought to engender and how they should be interpreted and enforced. The query often left unasked, though scrounged by traditional political thought: “Is the State the institution best suited for these tasks? If not, what is the superior alternative?” will be examined. This chapter of this here manifesto will fixate on a systemic evaluation and critique of the State as a monopolistic engenderer of law and less on the content of present illegal systems. As such, this analysis will remain pertinent to any State-administered legal system contrary to its ever transmuting law code and/or illegal procedures.

II. On Social Order

 Norms are established to solve the problem of the demand for various resources exceeds their availability. As men are neither saints nor angels, disputes over resource ownership abound. Therefore a legal system with a foundation of property norms is the mechanism by which a plethora of disputes may be settled in a predictable and just manner. Interpersonal conflict exists only if scarcity exists and every act of violence throughout the epochs is caused by allocation and/or control over some scarce good (whether of one’s own body or external good). The solution to the problem of social order, then, necessitates the formulation of a rational set of property rights such that, if followed, would negate the emergence of any and all violent conflict! (Rachels, Chase. 2018)\

 As excellently explained by Professor Hans Herman Hoppe, a myriad of proposed reforms have been offered as solutions to the quandary of social order throughout the history of social and political philosophy, and this plethora of mutually incompatible reforms have contributed to a prevalent conception that the search for a solitary optimal solution is futile and illusory. However, a correct solution does exist, thus eliminating the necessity of moral relativism. Indeed, the solution to the problem of social order has been known for centuries. The solution is the idea of private property. (Hans-Hermann Hoppe, 2011) Property rights and the concept of private property are major axioms for thoose on the Right. Norms of private property facilitate the avoidance of interpersonal conflict. The model in which we evaluate the efficacy of any given norms will be by examining whether or not, and to what extent, they engender or evade conflict. (ibid)

In an ideal world without scarcity, the solution is provided by the simple rule stipulating that everyone may place or move his own body wherever he pleases, provided only that no one else is already standing there and occupying the same space. Yet in our world, a world of tremendous scarcity, the solution is provided by four logically interrelated rules; Every person is the private (exclusive) owner of his own physical body. Every person is the private owner of all nature-given goods that he has perceived as scarce and put to use utilizing his body, before any other person. Again, who else, if not the first user, should be their owner? The second user or the first and the second user jointly? Yet such rulings again would be contrary to the very purpose of norms: of helping to avoid conflict, rather than to create it. Every person who, with the help of his body and his originally appropriated goods, produces new products thereby becomes the proper owner of these products provided only that in the process of production he does not physically damage the goods owned by another person.

Once a good has been first appropriated or produced, ownership in it can be acquired only by means of a voluntary, contractual transfer of its property title from a previous to a later owner. Some have unfortunately confounded private property with a convention, as to leave little or no distinction between them. Like private property, convention serves a purpose, but unlike private property, conventions have alternatives. Austrian Economics professor and Helicopter enthusiast, H.H. Hoppe uses the example of the Latin alphabet as a means as communication but could be interchanged with the Cyrillic Alphabet. What, however, is the rationale of action norms? If no interpersonal conflict existed — that is: if due to a stabilized harmony of all interests, no situation ever arose in which two or more people want to utilize the same good in incompatible conduct — then no norms would be requisite. It is the raison d’être of norms to facilitate the avoidance of otherwise ineluctable conflict. It is a contradiction to the value priorities of norms if a norm engenders conflict in lieu of facilitating conflict avoidance. It is a dysfunctional norm or worst, a perversion.

As to the implication of conflict avoidance, nonetheless, the foundation of private property is certainly not only a tradition, in light of the fact that no option in contrast to it subsists. Just private/exclusive property influences it conceivable that all generally ineluctable conflicts can be eschewed. What’s more, just the principle of property acquisition through demonstrations of original appropriation, initiated at a certain time and location by a specific individual or individuals, constructs a feasible system to eschew conflict from the dawn of humanity henceforth to modernity, because that just the original appropriation of some prior unattested property can greatly avert any conflict since per definitionem no entity had any prior relations with that commodity.

III. Social Order and the State

 Social Order and the desideratum of conflict avoidance (peace) cannot alone be established by the institution of private property and acts of original appropriation. Albeit, these norms are to avoid conflict, several individuals, who are called deviants (Macionis, J.; Gerber, L. 2010), will behave or act contrary to violates these norms. This includes formally enacted rule (e.g., crime) and informal violations of social norms (e.g., rejecting tradition, sodomy/homosexual acts, etc.)

In fact, man is a rising beast solely motivated by self-interest and selfishness (Thomas Hobbes 2012), therefore will always exist murderers, robbers, thieves, thugs, and con artists, i.e., people not acting in accordance with the aforementioned principles. Therefore, to maintain even the slightest social order, mechanisms and institutions are obligated to establish a means of punishment for deviants. But how is this task accomplished and by whom?  Despite the orthodox retort being the state, this is not a regular, specialized, firm. Instead, it is defined as an agency characterized by two distinctive, rationally associated features. Firstly, the state is the ultimate arbiter in every dispute, even inter-disputes. Or in other words, the State has superlative jurisdiction over a territorial monopoly of absolute governance. It does not sanction any appeal beyond and above itself. The State is “who decides on the exception.” (Schmitt, Carl, 2005.) Thus, the government also is the sole agency with a territorial tax monopoly, facilitating in the unilateral jurisdiction of the price that all private citizens must pay for its provision of law and order.

IV. Liberalism, The God that Failed

  As prevalent as the necessity of the institution of a State as the provider of law and order, copious rather elementary economic and moral arguments show this view to be completely erroneous. Of course, it is axiomatic to associate nefariousness with monopolies. Monopoly is defined here in its traditional sense as an exclusive right granted to a single producer of a commodity or service, or the lack of “free admission” into a certain line of production. Since it is guarded against prospective new entrants into a specific sector of production, a monopoly is “destructive” for consumers because product quality are significantly diminished and the prices are inflated which greatly contrasts amid free competition.. Hence, law and order provided by the State will always lead to significant squandering and of particularly substandard value.

Albeit these miscalculations are minor in juxtaposition to the egregiousness of liberalism. Unlike other monopolies, the State produces both goods and also scourges. Indeed, it must produce scourges in order to produce anything that might be regarded as a product. As noted, the State is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself. Consequently, in lieu of merely preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will withal incite conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. Or in other words, the State will pervert justice if the State benefits, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding. Indeed, these are courts owned by the State and constitutions of the State, and whatever circumscriptions on State action they may find is invariably decided by agents of the very same institution under consideration. (Hans-Hermann Hoppe, 2011) the definition of property and protection will be altered continually and the range of jurisdiction expanded to the advantage of the State. The conception of perpetual and immutable law that must be discovered will vanish and be superseded by the conception of law as legislation — as flexible State-made law.

What is even more egregious is that the State has a monopoly on taxation, and while government employees see theft by the State as an ultimate good, while those who are forced to pay taxes regard the payment as something bad, as an act of expropriation. As a tax-funded life-and-property auspice outfit, then, the very institution of State is nothing less than a contradiction in terms. It is an expropriation of protection of property, burdening more taxation and creating less production. Even with restrictions upon the State, its actions exclusively to the protection of the property of its citizens, as classical liberals have postulated, the further question of how much security to produce would arise. To quote H.H Hoppe again;

  “Motivated, as everyone is, by self-interest and the disutility of labor but equipped with the unique power to tax, a government agent’s goal will invariably be to maximize expenditures on protection, and almost all of a nation’s wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection, and at the same time to minimize the production of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work to produce, the better off one will be.”(Hans-Hermann Hoppe. 2001)

In sum, the incentive structure intrinsic in the institution of the State is not the praxis to protect life and property, but instead the cause of maltreatment, oppression, and exploitation. This is what the history of states illustrates. It is first and foremost the history of countless millions of ruined human lives.

V. Democracy: The Suicide Machine

  According to the first political theory, that is liberalism, “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil”. (Paine, Thomas) While both leftists/radicals such as the Maoists and liberals/Whigs such as the American Founding Fathers believe in different forms of government, they reject a government ruled by a sovereign due to the fact that it is incompatible with their dogmas of universal human rights and equality before the law.

However, in practice, republicanism/democracy has greatly failed to create a single universal law, equally applicable to everyone, everywhere, and at all times. Instead of the personal privileges given to a monarch, you have functional privileges given to all those who interests are aligned with the State. This includes NGOs, mega-corporations, tech-monopolies, universities, and the press, and all of whose employees are effectively civil servants (permanent employees of the State), and side with the civil service in almost all conflicts. (Mencius, Moldbug. 2007.)  And, as long as these sycophants of the State act in an official capacity, are governed and protected by public law and occupy thereby a privileged position vis-à-vis persons acting under the mere authority of private law. (Hans Herman Hoppe. 2014.)

In particular, public officials are permitted to finance or subsidize their own activities through taxes. (Constant, Benjamin. Political Writings. 1814–1815.) In other words, they do not, as all private-law subjects must, earn their income by producing and selling goods and services on a voluntary basis to consumers or consumers who do not buy them. Instead, Political agents invested with temporary authority by multi-party democratic systems have an overwhelming and irresistible incentive to plunder society as quickly and comprehensively as possible. (Land, Nick. 2012) It should be noted that privilege and legal discrimination will not disappear. To the contrary, rather than being restricted to princes and nobles, privilege, protectionism, and legal discrimination will be available to all and can be exercised by everyone. (Hans-Hermann Hoppe. 2006.)

It is inevitable that in a democracy, the propensity of every monopoly of ultimate decision making to gouge the price of justice and to deteriorate its quality by substituting justice for injustice. Democracy does not diminished injustice but greatly exacerbated. Under, hereditary and/or aristocratic monopolist i.e., feudalism, a sovereign or an aristocrat regards the territory and people under his jurisdiction as his personal property and engages in the monopolistic exploitation of his “property.”  It should be noted that democracy does not abolish monopolies and monopolistic exploitation. Instead, Democracy made it worst by replacing sovereigns and aristocrats with surrogates who may not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to plunder society as quickly and comprehensively as possible with little remorse. Anything they neglect to steal – or ‘leave on the table’ – is likely to be inherited by political successors who are not only unconnected, but actually opposed, and who can therefore be expected to utilize all available resources to utilize politics itself as the chief weapon in a Hobbesian war against not just their rivals (Land, Nick. 2012) but humanity as a whole. (Gray John. 1993) And the worst of all exploitation becomes nothing more than a shortsighted and capital consumption. (Hans Herman Hoppe. 2014.)

VI. For a New State

  When in the Course of human events, it becomes imperative for the cessation of political institutions which have failed to prevent the violation of reciprocity or directly cause the violation of reciprocity, and to assume among the powers of the State, the separate station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that there should be a declaration of causation which impel a ‘formation of a new State.  

So what would this new State look like? Ideally, it would be a State that is structured so that every individual and institution is subject to one and the same set of laws. No public law granting privileges to specific persons of functions and no public property exists in this society. In this new State —or “Neo-State”, property rights will be sacred and equally applicable to each and every one. The acquisition of Property by any means other than original appropriation production, or voluntary exchange is explicitly prohibited and no one possesses the privilege to tax and expropriate. Furthermore, in the Neo-State, it is explicitly prohibited to embargo anyone else from utilizing property in order to enter any line of production he wishes and competes against whomever he gratifies(usufruct).

This is accomplished simply by replacing traditional states with a confederation of competing protection agencies. Similar to Moldbug’s idea of patchwork (Moldbug, M. 2008), Hoppe’s Covent communities, David Friedman’s private enterprises described in his classic book Machinery of Freedom (Friedman, David D. 1989.), or Proudhon’s anarcho-federalism (Proudhon. 1863). These protection agencies would obviously be led by men who would plot a long term strategy and the tactics for managing the resources of the state. Naturally, the protection agencies called Vanguards would govern akin to an insurance company with decisions being made by negotiable shares and business savvy.  

In the Neo-State, the Vanguards solely responsible for any enforcement in its territory but some judicial procedures are mostly carried out by private courts while some are in the jurisdictions of the vanguard court. In fact, private courts would take cases that vanguard courts reject for a nominal fee.  Private Courts in the Neo-States would operate insurance agencies and sell insurance policies that include specific adjudication in case of certain crimes or other covered risks.

In a free market fashion, the vanguards will compete against insurers and arbitrators for paying clients. This would be bring a tendency towards a steep fall in the price of protection (per insured value), thus rendering protection increasingly more affordable, whereas under monopolistic conditions the price of protection will steadily rise and become increasingly unaffordable.

VII. Property in the Neo-State

  How can the commons be built upon: territorial, physical, cultural, and normative while at the same time, eliminating the monopolization of those commons that is the means by which the Academy, State, and Media complex sustains and expands itself? The answer can be once again found in the idea of property rights. Property in all its forms is more just abstract claim of ownership; it is a universally recognized foundation of all rights and freedoms. Rights and freedoms do not exist outside of the confines of property (Rothbard, Murray Newton. 1977) and thus it’s marked by the blood of those who died defending it. Hence, the existence of Property in Toto, an expansive definition of property that amalgamates all of the various forms of property. (Harman, E., 2018)

This includes the plethora manifestations of simple property, from the rock a man picks up, to the spear he made with his own two hands. These were, in most cultures, nearly beyond dispute. Now, the ownership of land can be demonstrated by putting an investment into it. Such as if the proprietor farmed it, cleared it, or otherwise used it, it was his, and it would be theft if another took it or the fruits of his labor upon it from him. (Freeman, A., 2018) Communal property was easier to define and protect, as it carried with it the threat of force from contractual covenant communities instead of an individual.  These covenant communities would have a constitution to establish Vanguards and to write certain stipulations that may include prohibitions on certain types of public behavior such as lewdness, drug use, drinking, and the promotion of aberrant sexual behavior, malignance political ideology like communism/anarchism or doomsday cults like Islam or Jehovah’s Witnesses,…etc. (Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. 2001) The joint-ownership of plots and houses by the Vanguards would form the Neo-State, which would have a somewhat similar framework to a condominium. There will be no title deeds provided, except for agricultural land. As aforementioned, Neo-State is formulated by amalgamated sectors of the vanguard’s real estate property, and the proprietors/shareholders of the Vanguards, who shall be hereinafter referred to as, “seigneurs”, acquires the right to use property/estate linked to their Neo-State. It is imperative that every Vanguard has no outside investors other than its seigneurs themselves. There ought to be an extensive screening of prospective seigneurs allows for tight control. Every seigneur will undergo extreme vetting central to a code of moral principles which everyone is required or instructed to observe.

Children are generally considered the property of the parents until they were old enough to take care of themselves and live on their own. This credence is fortified by the fact that people in the local culture considered it felicitous to treat children, as the interests of future generations affected everyone in the culture of survival. Likewise, the property contract between husband and wife was fortified by the right of either side to leave and divorce, something to which most parties throughout history have had access. So while a wife may have been property in the field of protection and freedom, she was withal responsible for providing for her and her progeny well or she might decide that a departure was a superior option for them. (Freeman, A., 2018)  And the most important form of property right is self-ownership, i.e., a man owned himself, and was both free to make his own choices on what to do with himself, and free to reap the consequences of those choices, good or bad, a man was his own sovereign, he owned himself, and was free. (Schoolland, Ken. 2016)

VIII The Governance of the Neo-State  

  A general meeting of the seigneurs is held every seven years to vote for the Vanguards’ board of directors which will form an Assembly. The Assembly of the Neo-State will function as a consortium among various Vanguards for mutual protection. The Assembly is the guard of tradition and consists not just of shareholders/landowners but also 24 bishops and archbishops of the various Christian churches of the nation. Their powers should consist of the abilities to amend and review laws and to elect a chairman, who serves as the Consul and will be responsible for the daily administration and will embody the Neo-State in its unity and legitimacy. At no time could the Sovereign simply issue decrees and govern autonomously over the Neo-state. His power was severely restricted by the various seigneurs. But Consul shall retain certain constitutional powers as well as denying them to others as an aegis against abuses. This is because the Consul is, being apart, superior to differences of opinion, having no other interest than the maintenance of order and liberty. He can never return to the common condition and is consequently inaccessible to all the passions that such a condition generates, and to all those that the perspective of finding oneself once again within it, necessarily creates in those agents who are invested with temporary power. (Constant 1814, pp. 186–87).

The continuity of the Consul parallels the rule of law and will be the representation of a state of affairs in which fundamental political reform, while possible in the long run, cannot arise without enough time to contemplate. (Yeager, Leland B.) In contrast to a liberal republic where legislators and bureaucrats, who are inclined to think, by the very nature of their jobs, that diligent performance means multiplying laws and regulations, and where “the very head of the state, having no title to his office save that which lies in the popular will, is forced to haggle and bargain like the lowliest office-seeker” (Mencken 1926, p. 181). Continuity in the constitutional and legal regime provides a stable framework favorable to personal and business planning and investment and to innovation in science, technology, enterprise, and culture. (Yeager, Leland B.)

Other members of the board are given responsibility for community matters such as safety, planning, and community services.  Parts of the community are critical of the share block arrangement, as it offers no effective representation to people who rent their house, and thus are not shareholders in the company.  Even shareholding residents will have some limitations in the management of the Neo-State.

The continuity of the Consul parallels the rule of law and will be the representation of a state of affairs in which fundamental political reform, while possible in the long run, cannot arise without enough time to contemplate. (Yeager, Leland B.) In contrast to a liberal republic where legislators and bureaucrats, who are inclined to think, by the very nature of their jobs, that diligent performance means multiplying laws and regulations, and where “the very head of the state, having no title to his office save that which lies in the popular will, is forced to haggle and bargain like the lowliest office-seeker” (Mencken 1926, p. 181). Continuity in the constitutional and legal regime provides a stable framework favorable to personal and business planning and investment and to innovation in science, technology, enterprise, and culture. (Yeager, Leland B.)

Other members of the board are given responsibility for community matters such as safety, planning, and community services.  Parts of the community are critical of the share block arrangement, as it offers no effective representation to people who rent their house, and thus are not shareholders in the company.  Even shareholding residents will have some limitations in the management of the Neo-State.