 Our speaker tonight is Dr. Robert Higgs, who is a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute. He is the editor of their quarterly journal, which I highly recommend, The Independent Review. He is a widely influential on the topics of American economic history and public policy. He is the author of many books and many articles, including Crisis in Leviathan, Depression War and the Cold War, and Against Leviathan. Dr. Higgs received the Mises Institute's 2007 Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. The title of his lecture tonight is Warfare, Welfare, and the State. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Dr. Robert Higgs. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and let me add my welcome to Mark Thornton's. I think you're in for a very exciting and instructive week, and it's always a pleasure for me to come here. I've been coming for more than 20 years now, and I've never failed to have a good time here to meet interesting people and to learn things, and I'm expecting to do that while I'm here this week also. So this is our task, but we'll have a lot of fun while we do it. One of the nice things about this meeting is all the camaraderie that becomes quickly established among the students here, so if you haven't already launched into that, I'm sure you will very soon. Everyone who's ever talked to me in the past about being a student here has been very positive about it, and I'm sure you will also be. The main task of Mises University is to teach you more about Austrian economics, about praxeology, about catalactics, about how markets work, and unfortunately we live in a world in which markets are not the only important institutions for the allocation of economic resources. We also have a state, practically everywhere on earth, that undertakes to interfere in the market process and sometimes to displace it entirely, and that's my topic tonight, the state much more than markets. So this is not entirely out of bounds here, we're going to, as the week progresses, find that the state gets injected in one way or another into one topic after another. So this is an important part of what Austrian economists deal with. The great Austrian economists have all had important things to say about the nature of the state and its actions and its functions, and what I'm going to do tonight is take a few high points that I've drawn from my own studies that have touched upon the state over the years. Now before I get started, I want to call your attention to some background sources that I recommend for you if you haven't read them before. The state is a gigantic topic, an enormous amount has been written about it, and you could easily waste the rest of your life reading most of these sources. So not the ones I have up here, however. I recommend these, I don't endorse everything that is said in each of these books, even my own, but... But they're well worth your reading, and I guarantee you'll learn a great deal from each of them. Oppenheimer's book, The State, was originally published in German in 1914, and it is, in a way, the locus classicus of Rothbardian state theory, I think. Oppenheimer developed rather exhaustively the argument that all states, in the sense that he understood states, originate in conquest, and I think that is a very good hypothesis that is held up before the evidence extremely well. That's not the end of the story, of course, and it wasn't for him, either, but Oppenheimer's book is an excellent thing to start you out because he contrasts his ideas with those of others who offered alternative hypotheses. Albert J. Knox's book, Our Enemy of the State, is a polemic, but it's a wonderful polemic. Knox, like his friend H. L. Minkin, was one of those polemicists who knew what he was talking about. He wasn't just good at polemics, he was good at content, so Knox's book is a rousing read. It's a wonderful read. In fact, Knox was one of the best writers that ever contributed anything to the literature that we hold dear here at the Mises Institute, so you'll have a lot of fun reading his little book and you'll learn from it as well. I have two of Mises books, I could have listed more, but these are particularly germane in regard to the state, and what you'll find when you read them is that besides being an absolutely amazing economist and economic theorist, especially, Mises was a man of great intellectual breadth, including breadth in his knowledge of history, and these are wonderful books. The First One Nation, State and Economy is one of my favorites in helping us to understand how the European nations ultimately came to engaging in World War I, and the Second One aimed at helping us understand why they resumed that fight in 1939, and especially looking at what had happened in Germany after World War I, so these are excellent historical sources with great analysis embedded in them. I've got, let's go back, I've got a couple of essays by Murray Rothbard. In fact, the collection in which these essays appear egalitarianism as a revolt against nature and other essays, I recommend the whole thing actually, but the two I've pointed to are especially apt in regard to Rothbard's thinking about the state. I also have a couple of more recent books, one by Anthony DeGiasse, who's in my judgment one of the finest living political philosophers, and a man whose work has been unjustly ignored, I think because he doesn't fit very well with a lot of other schools of thought, especially in political philosophy, but I highly recommend his book, The State, and other books of his, by the way, and then Pogge's book is the work of a political sociologist of a more standard academic kind, but it's still a book that's worth reading and it's a little more up to date than some of the other sources. And finally, I wanna call your attention to some of my books in which I've had something to say in one way or another about the state. In some way, all of my books have touched on the state, but these do so more than most of the others. So there you can find what I've had to say and it's what you find in those books that provides the background for my own conclusions, which I'll sketch here tonight for you. So these are places that you can learn more and I hope you will, as I say, it's a giant subject and these will get you off to a running start. The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised. A fire that at best can be controlled for only a short time before it or leaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide. Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state's depredations and therefore augments the public's multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency. War and other crises comparable to war and the seriousness of the threats they pose. States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war. Not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects. The state's most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is extortion. The state gains its very sustenance from the proceeds of its extortion, which it pretties up ideologically by giving it a different name, taxation, and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary. State propaganda, status ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral duty, to pay taxes to the state that rules their society. They fall into such erroneous moral reasoning because they are told incessantly that the tribute they fork over is actually a kind of price paid for essential services rendered. And that in the case of certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty, and property, only the government can provide the service effectively. They are not permitted to test this claim by resorting to competing suppliers of law, order, and security, however, because the government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged services and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud that the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket. All governments are, as they must be, oligarchies. Only a relatively small number of people have substantial effective discretion to make critical decisions about how the state's power will be brought to bear. Beyond the oligarchy itself and the police and the military forces that compose its praetorian guard, somewhat larger groups constitute a supporting coalition. These groups provide important financial and other support to the oligarchs and look to them for compensating rewards. Legal privileges, subsidies, jobs, exclusive franchises and licenses, transfers of financial income and wealth, goods and services in kind, and other booty, channel to them at the expense of the mass of the people. Thus, the political class in general, that is, the oligarchs, the praetorian guards, and the supporting coalition, uses government power, which means ultimately the police and the armed forces to exploit everyone outside this class by wielding or threatening to wield violence against all who fail to pay the tribute the oligarchs demand or to obey the rules they dictate. Democratic political forms and rituals, such as elections and formal administrative proceedings, disguise this class exploitation and trick the masses into the false belief that the government's operation yields them net benefits. In the most extreme form of misapprehension, the people at large become convinced that owing to democracy, they themselves are the government. Individual passages back and forth across the boundary between the political class and the exploited class testify, however, to nothing more than the system's cunningly contrived flexibility and openness. Although the system is inherently exploitative and cannot exist in any other form, it allows some leeway at the margins in the determination of which specific individuals will be the exploiters and which they exploited. At the top, a modest degree of circulation of elites within the oligarchy also serves to mask the political system's essential character. It is a sound interpretive rule, however, that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one in all. The mass belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of Stockholm syndrome at large. Yet, no matter how widely this syndrome may extend, it cannot alter the basic fact that owing to the operation of government as we know it, that is, government without voluntary, express individual consent. A minority lives on balance at the expense of the rest and the rest therefore lose on balance in the process. While the oligarchs, elected or not, it scarcely matters, preside over the enormous web of criminal organizations we know as the state. Notwithstanding the ideological enchantment with which official high priests and status intellectuals have beguiled the plundered class, many members of this class retain a capacity to recognize at least some of their losses and hence they sometimes resist further incursions on their rights by publicly expressing their grievances, by supporting political challengers who promise to lighten their burdens, by fleeing the country and most important by evading or avoiding taxes and by violating legal prohibitions and regulatory restraints on their actions as in the so-called underground economy or black market. These various forms of resistance together compose a force that opposes the government's constant pressure to expand its domination. These two forces working one against the other establish a locus of equilibrium, a boundary between the set of rights the government has overridden or seized and the set of rights the plundered class has somehow managed to retain, whether by formal constitutional constraints or by everyday tax evasion, black market transactions and other defensive violations of the government's oppressive rules. Politics in the largest sense can be viewed as the struggle to push this boundary one way or the other. For members of the political class, the crucial question is always, how can we push out the frontier? How can we augment the government's dominion and plunder with net gains to ourselves, the exploiters who live not by honest production and voluntary exchange but by fleecing those who do so? National emergency, war or a similarly menacing crisis answers the political class's crucial question more effectively than anything else because such a crisis has a uniquely effective capacity to dissipate the forces that otherwise would obstruct or oppose the government's expansion. This fact alerts us to the most important aspect of state power, namely, that it ultimately rests on and ceaselessly magnifies people's fears. As Butler Schaefer has written, quote, "'Fear can debilitate us, making us susceptible to the importunities of those who promise to alleviate our fears if only we will give the direction of our lives over to them." In this manner, our institution's born with the state demanding the greatest authority over us and promising release from our uncertainties, end quote. All animals experience fear, human beings perhaps most of all. Any animal incapable of fear would have been hard pressed to survive regardless of its size, speed and other attributes. Fear alerts us to dangers that threaten our well-being and sometimes our very lives. Sensing fear, we respond by running away, hiding or preparing to ward off the danger. To disregard fear is to place ourselves in possibly mortal jeopardy. Telling people not to be afraid is giving them advice they cannot take. Our evolved psychological and physiological makeup predisposes us to fear all sorts of actual and potential threats, however, even those that exist only in our imagination. The people who have the effrontery to rule us, who call themselves our government, understand this basic fact of human nature. They exploit it and they cultivate it. Whether they compose a warfare state or a welfare state, they depend on it to secure popular submission, compliance with official dictates and on some occasions, affirmative cooperation with the state's enterprises and adventures. Without popular fear, no government could endure more than 24 hours. David Hume argued that all government rests on public opinion and many others have endorsed his argument. But public opinion I maintain is not the bedrock of government. Public opinion itself rests on something deeper and more primordial, fear. Hume recognized that the opinions that support government received their force from what he called other principles, among which he included fear. But he considered these other principles to be, quote, the secondary, not the originary principles of government. Murray Rothbard considers fear briefly in his analysis of the anatomy of the state, classifying its instillment as, quote, another successful device by which the rulers secure from their subjects acceptance of or at least acquiescence in their domination. Quote, the present rulers it was maintained supply to the citizens an essential service for which they should be most grateful, protection against sporadic criminals and marauders, end quote. But Rothbard does not view fear as the fundamental basis on which the rulers rest their domination, as I do. Of course, as many scholars have recognized, ideology is critical to the long-term maintenance of state power. Yet every ideology that endows the state with legitimacy requires and is infused by some kind of fear. I contend that public fear is unnecessary, though perhaps not a sufficient condition or the viability of government as we know it. The fear did not be of the government itself and indeed may be of the danger from which the government purports to protect the people. Of course, some of the threats that induce subjects to submit to government in the hope of gaining its protection and thereby calming their fears may be real ones. I am not maintaining that people who look to government for their salvation act entirely under the sway of illusory threats. Although I do insist that nowadays, if not always, many public fears arise in large part, if not entirely, from stimulation by the government itself. If the people's fears may be one of the government itself, two of real threats from which the people look to the government for protection and three of spurious threats from which people look to the government for protection, we must admit that the relative importance of each type of fear varies with time and place. In every case, however, the government seeks to turn public fear to its own advantage. Thousands of years ago, when the first organized groups we would recognize as governments were fastening themselves on people, they relied primarily on warfare and conquest. As Henry Haslett observes, quote, there may have been somewhere as a few 18th century philosophers dreamed a group of peaceful men who got together one evening after work and drew up a social contract to form the state. But nobody has been able to find an actual record of it. Practically all the governments whose origins are historically established were the result of conquest, of one tribe by another, one city by another, one people by another. Of course, there have been constitutional conventions, but they merely changed the working rules of governments already in being. This view of the origin of the state has great antiquity. As long ago as the late 11th century, Pope Gregory VII, the leader of the momentous papal revolution that began during his papacy and ran its course over a span of nearly 50 years, wrote, quote, who does not know that kings and princes derive their origin from men ignorant of God who raised themselves above their fellows by pride, plunder, treachery, and murder. In short, by every kind of crime, at the instigation of the devil, the prince of this world, men blind with greed and intolerable in their audacity. End quote. Although certain analytical purposes may be served at times by likening government to a form of exchange between the ruler and the ruled, a la public choice theory, or by supposing that government might conceptually reflect a unanimously accepted social contract, a la constitutional economics, these characterizations fail to acknowledge governments essentially coercive character and bear little resemblance to the actual historical establishment of governments or to their functioning today. The subjugation theory in stark contrast rests upon a mountain of historical evidence. As Ludwig von Mises remarks, for thousands of years, the world had to submit to the yoke of military conquerors and feudal lords who simply took for granted that the products of the industry of other men existed for them to consume. Moreover, the supplanting of the militaristic ideal which esteems only the warrior and despises honest labor has not by any means even yet been completely achieved. End quote. Losers who were not slain in the conquest itself had to endure the subsequent rape and pillage and in the longer term to acquiesce in the continuing payment of tribute to the insistent rulers, the stationary bandits, as Mansur Olsen aptly called them. Subjugated people, for good reason, feared for their lives, offered the choice of losing their wealth or losing their lives they tended to choose the sacrifice of their wealth. Hence arose taxes, variously rendered in goods, services, or money. Subjugated people, however, naturally resent their imposed government and the taxation and other insults it hoists on them. Such resentful people easily become restive. Should a promising opportunity to throw off the oppressor's dominion present itself, they may seize it. Even if the people mount no rebellion or overt resistance, however, they quietly strive to avoid their ruler's exactions and to undermine their ruler's apparatus of government. As Machiavelli observed the conqueror, quote, who does not manage this matter well, will soon lose whatever he has gained. And while he retains it, he will find it in it, endless troubles and annoyances, end quote. For the stationary bandits, therefore, force alone proves a very costly means of keeping people in the mood to disperse a steady, substantial stream of tribute. If the rulers are to sustain their predation at tolerable cost, they must gain legitimacy. Sooner or later, therefore, every government augments the power of its sword with the power of its priesthood, forging an iron union of throne and altar. The priests were, in Jack Douglas's words, quote, the ones who fabricated the holy texts, purporting to tell how the world was created, how God decreed the ruler's power, and how the king was necessary for everyone's welfare and on and on, end quote. In ancient times, not uncommonly, the rulers were themselves declared to be gods. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt made that claim for centuries. Or the descendants of gods, or the earthly representative of the gods. Doctrines of divine right of kings have deep historical roots in many parts of the world. In Western civilization, they received powerful support in the early fifth century. From St. Augustine, St. City of God, reached their zenith in the 17th century in the writings of Basway, on behalf of Louis XIV in particular, and did not go down with a thud, as it were, until the French Revolution. As late as World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm found it expedient to exhort his troops, quote, remember that the German people are the chosen of God. On me, on me as German emperor, the spirit of God has descended. I am his weapon, his sword, and his visor, end quote. To the extent that the subjects can be brought to fear, not only the ruler's superior force, but also his supernatural powers or authority, the ruler gains an enormous edge in overawing the people. Moreover, if people believe in an afterlife where the pains and sorrows of this life may be sloughed off, the priests hold a privileged position in prescribing the sort of behavior in the here and now that best serves one's interests in securing a blessed condition in the life to come. For Roman Catholics, and I'm quoting now from Berman, the church, and more specifically, the pope is considered to have jurisdiction over purgatory, and the time to be spent in purgatory can be reduced by clerical decision, end quote. By the way, Harold Berman's book, Law and Revolution, is one of the great books anyone can ever read. I highly recommend it. This clerical power may be and often has been used to induce people to fall into line with projects that serve definite secular as well as spiritual interests. For example, again quoting Berman, with the emergence of papal monarchy at the end of the 11th century, the Council of Claremont under Pope Urban II granted the first plenary indulgence, absolving all who would go on the first crusade from liability for punishment in purgatory for sins committed prior to their joining the Holy Army of crusaders, end quote. In our own time and place, a similar example pertains to the support that Protestant evangelicals have given to militarism in general and to the recent US wars against Iraq in particular, support that George W. Bush's administration actively cultivated and exploited counting on the religious right as a key part of the Republican Party's electoral and lobbying base. Naturally, the warriors and the priests, if not one and the same, almost invariably come to be cooperating parties in the apparatus of rule. In medieval Western Europe from the sixth century through the 11th, secular rulers dominated the church and appointed the highest ecclesiastical officials. Even after the papal revolution in which the church established its corporate independence and gained the power to choose the pope and appoint the bishops. However, churchmen and secular rulers continued to be intertwined in countless ways, not least by the often close kinship of their leading authorities. Although the clergy sometimes clashed with secular authorities, their relationship normally entailed cooperation and mutual support. This close relationship between throne and altar did not end with the Protestant Reformation. Indeed, in many ways, it persists even in today's more secular societies. Thus, the martial element of government puts people in fear for their lives and the priestly element puts them in fear for their eternal souls. These two fears compose a powerful compound sufficient to prop up governments everywhere on earth for several millennia. Over the ages, governments refined their appeals to popular fears, fostering an ideology that emphasizes the people's vulnerability to a variety of internal and external dangers from which their governors, of all people, are represented to be their protectors. Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats. Sometimes the government, as if seeking to nourish this mythology with grains of truth, does protect people in this fashion. Even the shepherd protects his sheep, but he does so to serve his own interests, not theirs. And when the time comes, he will shear or slaughter them as his interest dictates. Olson describes in simple terms why the stationary bandit may find it in his interest to invest in public goods. The best example of which are domestic law and order and defense of the realm that enhance his subjects productivity. In brief, the ruler does so when the present value of the expected additional tax revenue he will be able to collect from a more productive population exceeds the current cost of the investment that renders the people more productive. Sometimes, in addition, the ruler charges directly for the use of his public good. For example, quote, the introduction of a system of royal law into England by the Anglo-Norman ruler Henry II was in part a means of enriching royal coffers as well as royal power at the expense not only of barons and ecclesiastics, but also of the general population, end quote. Robert Bates argues that in Western Europe, the kings struck deals with the merchants and burgers, trading mercantilist privileges and liberties for a steady stream of tax revenue in order to dominate the chronically warring rural dynasties and thereby to pacify the countryside. Unfortunately, the kings who undertook these measures had foremost in their minds the same thought that the Meiji reformers had in 19th century Japan when they gave their country the slogan, rich nation, strong army. As Bates recognizes, the kings sought their enlarged revenue for the purpose of conducting ever more costly wars against other kings as well as against domestic opponents. Thus, their alleged pacification schemes actually entailed amplified fighting on some front, leaving the net effect on overall societal well-being very much in question, especially when we consider that no single king undertook these measures in isolation. A better funded king might have pacified his own realm internally, but other kings, also better funded, now presented greater external threats to this realm. Each king's foreign war entailed some other society's domestic devastation. As Joseph Schumpeter remarks of the rising nation states of Europe, quote, none of them had all it wanted. Each of them had what others wanted and they were soon surrounded by new worlds inviting competitive conquest. Aggression became the pivot of policy. Maximum public revenue for the court and the army to consume was the purpose of economic policy, conquest the purpose of foreign policy, end quote. Obviously, no one can demonstrate that the displacement of the feudal order by the rising kings and nation states of Europe gave rise to a continent consistently at peace. Indeed, as traditionally told, the history of the early modern age runs in terms of a succession of wars, often several at the same time among the great European powers. Lesser powers compelled to line up on one side or another of these armed struggles suffered a full measure of the destruction. When the government fails to protect the people as promised, it always has a good excuse, often blaming some element of the population, scapegoats such as traders, money lenders, unpopular ethnic or religious minorities or economic royalists, a la Franklin D. Roosevelt. No prince, Machiavelli assures us, was ever at a loss for plausible reasons to cloak a breach of faith, end quote. Just consider how many big heads have rolled in order to hold government officials accountable for the security lapses that permitted the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. By my count, the total comes to exactly zero, not to mention that the commander in chief on whose watch these devastating attacks took place subsequently engineered his reelection to office carrying his entire entourage onward to seize further opportunities for greatness. In the crunch, governments always attend first to their own protection, even if the people's protection must be sacrificed in the process. Vice President Dick Cheney became notorious for periodically scurrying into an impenetrable bunker when frightened by specters of terrorism. But we ordinary citizens are strictly on our own for protection when the dreaded weapons of mass destruction come our way. Government penal codes routinely make offenses against government officials, agents, or property graver offenses than identical offenses against other persons or property. The official reaction to the murder or attempted murder of a government official or even a low ranking police officer bears no comparison with the official reaction to the murder of an ordinary citizen. The former offense calls forth legions of SWAT teams, ardent to dispatch any suspect on site, whereas the latter offense may, all in good time, set in motion a lethargic investigation. The religious grounds for submission to the ruler gods gradually transmogrified into secular notions of nationalism and popular duty to the state, culminating eventually in the curious ideology that in a democratic system, the people themselves are the government. And hence, whatever it requires them to do, they are really doing for themselves. Woodrow Wilson had the impudence to declare when he proclaimed a military conscription backed by severe criminal sanctions in 1917 that quote, it is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling. It is rather selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass. In quote, not long after the democratic dogma had gained a firm foothold, organized coalitions emerged from the mass electorate and joined the elites in looting the public treasury. And as a consequence, in the late 19th century, the so-called welfare state began to take shape. From that time onward people were told that the government can and should protect them from all sorts of workaday threats to their lives, livelihoods, and overall well-being. Threats of destitution, hunger, disability, unemployment, illness, lack of income in old age, germs in the water, toxins in the food, and insults to their race, sex, ancestry, creed, and so forth. Nearly everything that the people feared and much that they found merely annoying, the government then stood poised to ward off. Thus did the welfare state anchor its rationale in the solid rock of fear. Governments having exploited popular fears of violence so successfully from time immemorial, promising national security, had no difficulty in cementing these new stones, promising social security into their foundations of rule. In this quest, governments have enjoyed the support of a growing secular priesthood of intellectuals and far more numerous pseudo-intellectuals. I call them secondhand dealers in ideas, who for various reasons have tended overwhelmingly to espouse collectivist doctrines. These idea peddlers, many of whom live nowadays at taxpayer expense, have advanced a succession of interpretations of the world's troubles and of its potential salvation. That portray various private actions, especially those bundled in the concept of capitalism, as the source of a plethora of threats to life, limb, and happiness. And they have depicted the government as the savior that will descend from its heaven, located in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Washington, or some other such place, to remedy all the people's woes and drive the evildoers, especially the private money changers, out of the temple. Karl Marx famously declared that religion is the opium of the people. Not so famously, but equally correctly, Raymond Aaron called collectivism, especially in its Marxist variant, the opium of the intellectuals. From the intellectuals, this ideology seeped out to the masses. Once it had gained sufficient acceptance among them, by the beginning of the 20th century in Europe and slightly later in North America, it allowed government officials to exploit each great socioeconomic and political emergency to add new weapons to their arsenal of social control. The upshot of each such crisis included not only a ratcheting up of the government's size, scope, and power, but also a further weakening of the ideological resistance that had for millennia reflected the people's instinctive appreciation that the government is, at best, an unavoidable nuisance and at worst, an unbearable oppressor. Under the sway of the new dominant ideology, many people affirmatively support governmental enterprises and adventures under the illusion that we are all in this together, as if millions or even hundreds of millions of extremely heterogeneous individuals were nothing more than one big happy family. Although this bizarre phenomenon may well justify calling for the men in white coats to bring out the straitjackets, one cannot deny that it seems to motivate the political speech and actions of many opinion leaders, as well as a substantial number of ordinary citizens. Thus has fear led people from a well-founded aversion to the government itself to a form of mass lunacy in which, like Winston Smith in George Orwell's book, 1984, they finally love Big Brother. Margaret Atwood's poem, Siren Song, begins, this is the one song everyone would like to learn, the song that is irresistible, the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons, even though they see the beached skulls. And the poem ends alas, it is a boring song, but it works every time. In the present regard, it works every time because the people falsely believe that those who sing it are their protectors rather than their exploiters. Until people learn to disregard the state's siren song of beneficence and protection, they will continue to suffer and die as victims of the state's wars, foreign and domestic. People yearn for security and they look to the state to provide it, but they are calling on a wolf to guard the sheep. The state cannot refrain from crime because it is an inherently criminal enterprise living by the proceeds of extortion and retaining its turf by murder, which it relables law enforcement or if need be by mass murder, which it relables war. Constantly singing the siren song, it seduces the people by giving back to them a portion of what it has previously extorted from them and by ceaselessly claiming to protect them from all manner of threats to their lives, liberties and property and even their self-esteem. If it protects them at all, however, it does so only as the shepherd protects his captive flock, not because he recognizes and respects the natural rights of the sheep, but only to keep them unmolested in his sole possession and control until he finds it expedient to shear or slaughter them. A peaceful state is an impossibility. Even a state that refrains from fighting foreigners goes on fighting its own subjects continuously to keep them under its control and to suppress competitors who might try to break into the domain of its protection racket. The people cry out for security, yet they will not take responsibility for their own protection. And like the mariners of Greek mythology, they leap overboard immediately in response to the state's siren song. As the prophet Samuel had warned, the biblical Israelites were no better off for having a king in place of the judges who had settled their disputes for centuries. King Saul only led them from one slaughter to another. Likewise, our rulers have led us from one unnecessary slaughter to the next. And to make matters worse, they have exploited each such occasion to fasten their chains around us more tightly. Like the ancient Israelites, we Americans shall never have real lasting peace so long as we give our allegiance to a wicked and destructive king. That is, in our case, to the whole conglomeration of institutionalized exploiters and murderers we know as the state. Thank you very much.