 Thus the State has invariably shown a striking talent for the expansion of its powers beyond any limits that might be imposed upon it. Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the State is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist. In a sense our position is the reverse of the Marxist dictum that the State is the executive committee of the ruling class in the present day, supposedly the capitalists. Instead the State, the organisation of the political means, constitutes and is the source of the ruling class, rather ruling caste, and is in permanent opposition to genuinely private capital. We may therefore say with the Juvenel, only those who know nothing of any time but their own, who are completely in the dark as to the manner of powers behaving through thousands of years, would regard these proceedings, nationalisation, the income tax etc., as the fruit of a particular set of doctrines. They are in fact the normal manifestations of power, and differ not at all in their nature from Henry VIII's confiscation of the monasteries. The same principle is at work, the hunger for authority, the thirst for resources, and in all of these operations the same characteristics are present, including the rapid elevation of the dividers of the spoils. Whether it is socialist or whether it is not, power must always be at war with the capitalist authorities, and despoil the capitalists of their accumulated wealth. In doing so it obeys the law of its nature. What the State Fears What the State Fears above all, of course, is any fundamental threat to its own power and its own existence. The death of a state can come about in two major ways, a. through conquest by another state, or b. through revolutionary overthrow by its own subjects, in short by war or revolution. War and revolution as the two basic threats invariably arouse in the state rulers their maximum efforts and maximum propaganda among the people. As stated above, any way must always be used to mobilise the people to come to the state's defence in the belief that they are defending themselves. The fallacy of the idea becomes evident when conscription is wielded against those who refuse to defend themselves, and are therefore forced into joining the state's military band. Needless to add, no defence is permitted them against this act of their own state. In war state power is pushed to its ultimate, and under the slogans of defence and emergency it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace. War thus provides many benefits to a state, and indeed every modern war has brought to the warring peoples a permanent legacy of increased state burdens upon society. War, moreover, provides to a state tempting opportunities for conquest of land areas over which it might exercise its monopoly of force. Randolph Bourne was certainly correct when he wrote that war is the health of the state. But to any particular state a war may spell either health or grave injury. We may test the hypothesis that the state is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking which category of crimes does the state pursue and punish most intensely, those against private citizens or those against itself. The greatest crimes in the state's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private personal property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the state as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to presuming the man who assaults a policeman with the attention that the state pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet curiously, the state's openly assigned priority to its own defence against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d'etre.