Do you make a distinction between a State and a government?
Do we anarchists oppose the State and government, or just the State?
This is purely a semantic discussion. I’m unsure whether the terms are more useful when they are considered synonymous or when a distinction is made between them.
Thoughts?
I think on this site, and in other libertarian circles, government is generally used as a synonym for the state. really though, libertarians should not be against government per se, (like the right of board members of a firm to govern it), but against the violent monopoly of government that is the state.
That said, I use government interchangeably with the state, since 99% of the time, that’s what people mean.
Have you read Nock’s distinction between the terms in Our Enemy, The State? Basically, he defines government as a type of political organization concered only with the preservation of “freedom and security.” He writes (in agreement with Paine’s Common Sense):
“It would seem that in Paine’s view the code of government should be that of the legendary king Pausole, who prescribed but two laws for his subjects, the first being, Hurt no man, and the second, Then do as you please; and that the whole business of government should be the purely negative one of seeing that this code is carried out.”
The state, on the other hand, originates in “conquest and confiscation” and is concerned primarily with “the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.”
Nock cites Native American Indian tribes as an example of society without a State, but with a functioning government. Therefore, his conception of government seems compatible with the private, voluntary produciton of security.
One way Nock could be read is that when he describes a government that is not also a State, he has in mind something similar to the ideal Rand-type government: a territorial monopolist of law/security, which never violates the NAP. But this is of course contradictory because a monopoly can only be maintained by violating the NAP. So this definition would need to be altered to (1) a territorial monopolist of law/security, which only violates the NAP to prevent competition with itself in the law/security industry. Since modern anarchists oppose the monopoly itself, anarchists oppose both States and governments with this interpretation, and the distinction becomes fairly useless from the anarchist perspective.
On the other hand, perhaps Nock is thinking of government as simply a voluntarily chosen private property protector. In which case, government means just (2) a provider of law/security. PDA’s are governments. With this second interpretation, anarchists are specifically NOT opposed to governments; we are for “voluntarily chosen governments”, and “competition between governments”, and “self-government”. (All these terms are self-contradictory under the first interpretation).
Libertarians like Hoppe, Block, Long, etc, as far as I know, do not make a distinction between the terms State and government. Or perhaps they do (as in interpretation 1), but they don’t feel the need to highlight the distinction, because they oppose both anyway.
However, when Ron Paul declared his preference for anarchism over constitutionalism, he phrased it using the second interpretation. He said he was in favor of “self-government”. Perhaps there is communicative value in making the distinction. “Self government” sounds more attractive than “no government”. But unless we make the distinction between government and the State (under interpretation 2), “self-government” is really a contradiction in terms.