 What the state is not. The state is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the state as the apotheosis of society. Others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organisation for achieving social ends. But almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the private sector, and often winning in this competition of resources. With the rise of democracy, the identification of the state with society has been redoubled until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense, such as, we are the government. The useful collective term we has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If we are the government, then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untiranical, but also voluntary on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that we owe it to ourselves. If the government conscripts a man or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is doing it to himself, and therefore nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered, instead they must have committed suicide, since they were the government, which was democratically chosen and therefore anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree. We must therefore emphasise that we are not the government. The government is not us. The government does not in any accurate sense represent the majority of the people, but even if it did, even if 70% of the people decided to murder the remaining 30%, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organisist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that we are all part of one another must be permitted to obscure this basic fact. If then the state is not us, if it is not the human family getting together to decide mutual problems, if it is not a lodge meeting or a country club, what is it? Basically the state is that organisation in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area. In particular it is the only organisation in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered, but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of those goods and services to others, the state obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion, that is by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet. Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the state generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects. One would think that simple observation of all states throughout history and over the globe would be proof enough of this assertion, but the miasma of myth has lain so long over state activity that elaboration is necessary.