A Quote by Henry Hazlitt
The essential function of the State is to maintain peace, justice, law, and order, and to protect the individual citizen against aggression, violence, theft, and fraud.
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The State, of course, is absolutely indispensable to the preservation of law and order, and the promotion of peace and social cooperation. What is unnecessary and evil, what abridges the liberty and threatens the true welfare of the individual, is the State that has usurped excessive powers and grown beyond its legitimate function - the super-State, the socialist State, the redistributive State, in brief, the ironically misnamed 'Welfare State.'
The State practices "violence," the individual must not do so. The state's behavior is violence, and it calls its violence "law"; that of the individual, "crime".
The penal code deals with things like theft, false testimony, adultery, fornication, etc. and then there's the law of the state, the law of the individual and the law of the public.
The government's only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud ... to protect men from foreign invaders ... to settle disputes among men according to objective laws ... The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly.
But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
In order that punishment should not be an act of violence perpetrated by one or many upon a private citizen, it is essential that it should be public, speedy, necessary, the minimum possible in the given circumstances, proportionate to the crime, and determined by the law.
Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited, to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified, but any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right.
And finally remember that nothing harms him who is really a citizen, which does not harm the state; nor yet does anything harm the state which does not harm law [order]; and of these things which are called misfortunes not one harms law. What then does not harm law does not harm either state or citizen.
We all say no to war, we are all for justice and peace. But sometimes in order to maintain peace, armed action is necessary. But we hope it won't be the case.
Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say violence or the threat of violence against the innocent.
As attorney general of Missouri, I am my state's chief law enforcement officer. I swore an oath to uphold the rule of law, and that means fighting violence and oppression wherever it exists, especially violence against the poor and vulnerable.
As the state's chief law enforcement officer, it's my job to see that perpetrators of fraud are brought to justice.
For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him.
Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don't think there is any need for a law against fraud.
When the entire administration of the state connives with the perpetrators of violence to thwart justice at every step, clearly there is no rule of law in that state.
I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
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