Taken from Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, and he relied upon Bartlett, “Fuller, Law, and Anarchism”. My poetic commentary on self-contradiction interspersed.
The state is self-contradictory. It cannot, and I mean cannot, survive and abide by its own rules. In that sense it rejects itself. It is hypocritical. It does not let its ‘yes’ be yes or its ‘no’ be no.
The state proclaims that no one may take by force from another who has done no wrong. The state proclaims that no one may use violence against another except in self-defense. Then, without justification, the state breaks its own rules in its rules and taxes some citizens.
Everything that happens later is in a sense afterthought. All the competition for loot and blessing of favored citizens with the loot is secondary. It is all rooted in the explicit breach of what it most loudly prohibits.
Self-contradictions do not exist. There are no square-circles, and there are no unfree-agents. There may be squares, and there may be circles. But, it must be one or the other. To be both is an impossibility.
In like, it is not both permissible and impermissible, in the deepest sense, to aggress against the freedom of an individual who does no wrong. Which side do you choose. You know what the state has chosen. Don’t be fooled by the proclamations. Take the actions as much more definitive of commitment than the words.
