Statists fail to evaluate The State correctly. They consistently neglect to count all the costs of initiated force, including…

  • The moral costs of using force to oppress individual conscience. This oppression creates victims. Statists pretend those victims don’t exist.

  • The opportunity costs, which are the alternative uses to which the same resources could have been put. Statists never consider the alternative benefits that could have been achieved if people had been allowed to keep and spend their own money.

  • The superior performance inherent to efforts controlled by consumers vs efforts controlled by politics. Humans tend to be less efficient when they’re spending other people’s money. Even worse, performance declines when there’s no risk of losing funding. Taxation shields The State from the need to do a good job. Worst of all, politicians often use failure as an excuse to spend more money. In other words, the statist approach rewards failure.

  • The risk cost of giving any human institution a monopoly power to initiate violence. Statists always ignore the fact that any power that can be used to do good, can also be used to do bad.

Statists never account for any of these problems. But voluntaryist libertarians do.
For these reasons and more, voluntaryists believe governments must obey the Zero Aggression Principle. Governments must not initiate force. They must only use force defensively. 

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By Perry Willis & Jim Babka

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