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That institution which interferes with the Free Market through the direct exercise of coercion or the granting of privileges (backed by coercion).
[celine]
[The] state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
Max Weber, "Science and Politics"
[weber]
A compulsory territorial monopoly on final judgments.
[hoppe]
The state is "the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area."
Government is "the subjection of the noninvasive individual to an external will."
Joseph A. Labadie
(summarizing Tucker)
Anarchism: What It Is and What It Is Not
[labadie]
Anarchists have no quarrel with any institution that contents itself with enforcing the law of equal freedom, and ... they oppose the State only after first defining it as an institution that claims authority over the non-aggressive individual and enforces that authority by physical force or by means that are effective only because they can and will be backed by physical force if necessary.
Individual Liberty by Benjamin Tucker, "Liberty and Politics"
[tucker]
(involuntary government)
[sek3]
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone expects to live at the expense of everyone else.
Frederic Bastiat
[bastiat]
The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet. Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects.
Murray Rothbard, "The Anatomy of the State"
[rothbard]
There will always be those who claim to have special rights over the rest of society, and the state is the most organized attempt to get away with it.
Lew Rockwell, "Why the State Is Different"
[rockwell]
... while some Libertarians cling to the State as somehow capable of defending Liberty if only kept small enough, the modern Libertarian Movement ... considers the State ... a necessary or unnecessary Evil but definitely an Evil. In fact, the State is generally perceived as the institutional opposite of Liberty.
[sek3]
Nowhere has the coercive and parasitic nature of the State been more clearly limned than by the great late nineteenth-century German sociologist, Franz Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two and only two mutually exclusive means for man to obtain wealth. One, the method of production and voluntary exchange, the method of the free market, Oppenheimer termed the "economic means"; the other, the method of robbery by the use of violence, he called the "political means." The political means is clearly parasitic, for it requires previous production for the exploiters to confiscate, and it subtracts from instead of adding to the total production in society. Oppenheimer then proceeded to define the State as the "organization of the political means" -- the systematization of the predatory process over a given territorial area.
[Franz Oppenheimer, The State (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926), pp. 24-27 and passim.]
Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
[rothbard]
I would define government as a group of men who sell retributive justice to the inhabitants of a limited geographic area at monopolist prices.
Robert LeFevre, Commentaries
[lefevre]
Let me begin with the definition of government: A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "Government, Money, and International Politics" [PDF]
[hoppe]
The State is a group of people who have managed to acquire a virtual monopoly of the use of violence throughout a given territorial area. In particular, it has acquired a monopoly of aggressive violence, for States generally recognize the right of individuals to use violence (though not against States, of course) in self defense. The State then uses this monopoly to wield power over the inhabitants of the area and to enjoy the material fruits of that power. The State, then, is the only organization in society that regularly and openly obtains its monetary revenues by the use of aggressive violence; all other individuals and organizations (except if delegated that right by the State) can obtain wealth only by peaceful production and by voluntary exchange of their respective products. This use of violence to obtain its revenue (called 'taxation') is the keystone of State power.
Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
[rothbard]
And who is the state? It is any group who manages to seize control of the state's coercive machinery of theft and privilege. Of course these ruling groups have differed in composition through history, from kings and nobles to privileged merchants to Communist parties to the Trilateral Commission. But whoever they are, they can only be a small minority of the population, ruling and robbing the rest of us for their power and wealth. And since they are a small minority, the state rulers can only be kept in power by deluding us about the wisdom or necessity of their rule. Hence, it is our major task to oppose and desanctify their entrenched rule, in the same spirit that the first libertarian revolutionaries opposed and desanctified their rulers two hundred years ago.
Murray Rothbard, Keynote Address to the Libertarian Party Convention, 1977
[rothbard]
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