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The state commands, and the state extracts, and the state kills. The state does not provide.

To the extent that we experience the state providing us with anything, we’re receiving from people who were compelled by the state’s power to provide for us. Maybe those people would provide for us of their own volition. Maybe we could freely induce them to provide, in the absence of the state.

Lots of people have the illusion that states can be “democratic,” in the sense of comprising an entire community as an electorate (liberals) or a class (Marxists). This is simply not the case. A state can never be synonymous with the community over which it rules.

“The state…is not an abstraction floating above society and its members; it is a social institution, and, as such, a group of human beings, a section of society, organised in a particular way…wherever there is a state, there is always a group of human beings who stand in a different relationship to it from most members of society: not as the dominated, or the excluded, but as the dominators and the excluders.”

- Adam Buick and John Crump, “State Capitalism”

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