We have become accustomed to watching President Bush move “other people’s” money from one segment of society to another, even as he mouths Conservative platitudes. You may have thought that all the money in the country was already transferred to New Orleans. But apparently not! In a News Conference today, Bush announced that he will take from people who managed their money prudently and give to those who recklessly purchased homes they could not afford.

This is a good time to re-read Franz Oppenheimer’s definition of The State in 1908.

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. Robbery! Forcible appropriation! These words convey to us ideas of crime and the penitentiary, since we are the contemporaries of a developed civilization, specifically based on the inviolability of property. And this tang is not lost when we are convinced that land and sea robbery is the primitive relation of life, just as the warrior’s trade – which also for a longtime is only organized mass robbery – constitutes the most respected of occupations. Both because of this, and also on account of the need of having, in the further development of this study, terse, clear, sharply opposing terms for these very important contrasts, I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor and equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.”

The State is an organization of the political means.

No State, therefore, can come into being until the economic means has created a definite number of objects for satisfaction of needs, which objects may be taken away or appropriated by warlike robbery.

According to Albert J. Nock the sole purpose of the state is the exploitation of one group of people by another. Whoever controls the political means just robs those who do not. In the USA the political means are controlled by Liberals and lobby groups allied with them. And yes, Bush is one of them.

No student should be allowed to graduate from high school without having memorized Nock’s The Enemy, The State.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.