The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.
BENJAMIN TUCKERAnd this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.
More Benjamin Tucker Quotes
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Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.
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Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?
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Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.
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The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.
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If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
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Anarchism is for liberty, and neither for nor against anything else. Anarchy is the mother of co-operation, yes, just as liberty is the mother of order; but, as a matter of definition, liberty is not order nor is Anarchism co-operation.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.
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An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.
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But which is the State’s essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
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Therefore coercion of the non-invasive, when justifiable at all, is to be justified on the ground that it secures, not a minimum of ‘ invasion, but a minimum of pain.
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One thing, however, is sure, – that in all cases the effort should be to impose all the cost of repairing the wrong upon the doer of the wrong. This alone is real justice, and of course such justice is necessarily free.
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For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.
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The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least,’ and that which governs least is no government at all.
BENJAMIN TUCKER -
Aggression is simply another name for government.
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But the apparent inconsistency vanishes when you read his book and find that by property he means simply legally privileged wealth or the power of usury, and not at all the possession by the labourer of his products.
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There are some troubles from which mankind can never escape …. have never claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow from authority ….
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In times past…it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off.
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The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism.
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In the matter of the maintenance and rearing of children the Anarchists would neither institute the communistic nursery which the State Socialists favor nor keep the communistic school system which now prevails.
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Anarchism may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished….. Nor does the Anarchistic scheme furnish any code of morals to be imposed upon the individual. “
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He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man,
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If I can go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbor, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich.
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Whoso knows what these two schools want and how they propose to get it understands the Socialistic movement.
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The right of the majority is absolute.
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Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.
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Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labor will be in demand, and gradually the wages of labor will rise to a level with its product.
BENJAMIN TUCKER