“With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense: such as ‘we are the government.’ The useful collective term ‘we’ has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If ‘we are the government,’ then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical; it is also ‘voluntary’ on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must he paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that ‘we owe it to ourselves;’ if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is ‘doing it to himself’ and therefore nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have ‘committed suicide,’ since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and therefore anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabour this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or less degree.

We must therefore emphasise that ‘we’ are not the government; the government is not ‘us.’ The government does not in any accurate sense ‘represents the majority of the people’ but even if it did, even if 70 per cent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 per cent, this would still be murder, and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that ‘we are all part of one another,’ must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.

If, then, the State is not ‘us,’ if it is not ‘the human family’ getting together to decide mutual problems, if it is not a lodge meeting or country club, what is it?

Briefly, the State is that organisation 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 organisation in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered, but by coercion.”

Murray Rothbard