[T]he 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 . . . The nature and intention of government … are social. Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.
---Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State.
We don't and have not had a properly construed government for a very long time.
We don't have a properly construed government whose sole legitimate business---beyond protecting and defending us from actual and provably iminent enemies abroad and predators (real predators, please, not mere vicemongers) at home---is staying the hell out of your business, my business, everyone's business, until or unless one would obstruct or abrogate another's equivalent rights. We have the State, as enunciated by Mr. Nock and others, the State which makes its business every last instance of everyone's business, whether it is competent or constitutionally sanctioned to do so.
The State presumes to give and to take away; when you think that at long last the State gives you something (say, a tax cut), the State takes it away or at least makes it meaningless enough (say, with concurrent metastatic spending, trade wars, and the like) to have made you lament that it was nice while it lasted. The State proclaims rights for all it favours except the individual person, and its sycophants call it proper and good. The State proclaims its favour upon some at the expense of thousands of times more others, and its sycophants call it wisdom. The State proclaims itself the first call upon your fealty, and its sycophants call it patriotism. The State behaves as the nation's largest organised crime family, and its sycophants denounce you as a criminal for pointing out that a genuine organised crime family will have, at least, the decency enough not to question your right to want your money or your property back, even while measuring your piano wire necklace. The State tells you that two plus two equals twenty-two, and the mathematician who points out the error is at minimum denounced by its sycophants as an enemy of the State.
