James A. Donald wrote:
The state was created to attack private property rights - to steal stuff. Some rich people are beneficiaries, but from the beginning, always at the expense of other rich people.
More commonly states defend the rich against the poor. They are what underpins property rights, in the sense of "great property" - until the industrial revolution that was mostly rights to land other people farm or live on. Every society we know about has had laws and customs defending personal property (more or less successfully) but it takes political/military power to defend the right to exact rent from a large estate, and state power to defend that right for thousands or millions of landowners.
Again, compare the burning of Shenendoah with the Saint Valentine's day massacre. There is just no comparison. Governmental crimes are stupendously larger, and much more difficult to defend against.
True.
The apposite current comparison is 9/11 the most notorious piece of private-enterprise violence in recent years, and the far more destructive US revenge on Afghanistan and Iraq. Which was hundreds of times more destructive but hundreds of thousands of times more expensive, so far less cost-effective - but in a a war of attrition that might not matter so much. Of course the private-enterprise AQ & their friends the Taliban booted themselves into a state, of sorts in Afghanistan, with a little help from their friends in Pakistan and arguable amounts of US weaponry. Not that Afghanistan was the sort of place from which significant amounts of tax could be collected to fund further military adventures.
States can get usually get control of far larger military resources than private organisations, and have fewer qualms about wasting them. Not that it makes much difference to the victims - poor peasants kicked off land wanted for oilfields in West Africa probably neither know nor care whether the troops who burned their houses were paid by the oil companies or the local government.
