The Progressive Conversion of Social Power into State
Power
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
by Albert Jay
Nock
[From
Our
Enemy, the State]
If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one
fundamental fact: namely, a great redistribution of power between society
and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of
civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like
price fixing, wage fixing, inflation, political banking,
"agricultural adjustment," and similar items of State policy
that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and
politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an
immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize
public attention, but they all come to the same thing, which is an
increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social
power.
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.
Moreover, it follows that with any exercise of State power, not only the
exercise of social power in the same direction, but the disposition to
exercise it in that direction, tends to dwindle.
Mayor
Gaynor astonished the whole of New York when he pointed out to a
correspondent who had been complaining about the inefficiency of the
police, that any citizen has the right to arrest a malefactor and bring
him before a magistrate. "The law of England and of this
country," he wrote, "has been very careful to confer no more
right in that respect upon policemen and constables than it confers on
every citizen." State exercise of that right through a police force
had gone on so steadily that not only were citizens indisposed to
exercise it, but probably not one in ten thousand knew he had
it.
Heretofore in this country sudden crises of misfortune have been met by a
mobilization of social power. In fact (except for certain institutional
enterprises like the home for the aged, the lunatic asylum, city hospital
and county poorhouse) destitution, unemployment, "depression,"
and similar ills have been no concern of the State, but have been
relieved by the application of social power. Under Mr. Roosevelt,
however, the State assumed this function, publicly announcing the
doctrine, brand new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a
living.
Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an astute proposal
for a prodigious enhancement of State power merely what, as long ago as
1794, James Madison called "the old trick of turning every
contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the
government" -- and the passage of time has proved that they were
right. The effect of this upon the balance between State power and social
power is clear, and also its effect of a general indoctrination with the
idea that an exercise of social power upon such matters is no longer
called for.
It is largely in this way that the progressive
conversion of social power into State power becomes acceptable and gets
itself accepted.[1] When the
Johnstown
flood occurred, social power was immediately mobilized and applied
with intelligence and vigor. Its abundance, measured by money alone, was
so great that when everything was finally put in order, something like a
million dollars remained. If such a catastrophe happened now, not only is
social power perhaps too depleted for the like exercise, but the general
instinct would be to let the State see to it. Not only has social power
atrophied to that extent, but the disposition to exercise it in that
particular direction has atrophied with it. If the State has made such
matters its business, and has confiscated the social power necessary to
deal with them, why, let it deal with them.
We can get some kind of rough measure of this general atrophy by our own
disposition when approached by a beggar. Two years ago we might have been
moved to give him something; today we are moved to refer him to the
State's relief agency. The State has said to society, "You are
either not exercising enough power to meet the emergency or are
exercising it in what I think is an incompetent way, so I shall
confiscate your power and exercise it to suit myself." Hence, when a
beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has
already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the
State about it.
Every positive intervention that the State makes upon industry and
commerce has a similar effect. When the State intervenes to fix wages or
prices, or to prescribe the conditions of competition, it virtually tells
the enterpriser that he is not exercising social power in the right way,
and therefore it proposes to confiscate his power and exercise it
according to the State's own judgment of what is best. Hence the
enterpriser's instinct is to let the State look after the consequences.
As a simple illustration of this, a manufacturer of a highly specialized
type of textiles was saying to me the other day that he had kept his mill
going at a loss for five years because he did not want to turn his
workpeople on the street in such hard times, but now that the State had
stepped in to tell him how he must run his business, the State might
jolly well take the responsibility.
The process of converting social power into State
power may perhaps be seen at its simplest in cases where the State's
intervention is directly competitive. The accumulation of State power in
various countries has been so accelerated and diversified within the last
20 years that we now see the State functioning as telegraphist,
telephonist, match peddler, radio operator, cannon founder, railway
builder and owner, railway operator, wholesale and retail tobacconist,
ship builder and owner, chief chemist, harbor maker and dock builder,
house builder, chief educator, newspaper proprietor, food purveyor,
dealer in insurance, and so on through a long list.[2]
It is obvious that private forms of these enterprises must tend to
dwindle in proportion as the energy of the State's encroachments on them
increases, for the competition of social power with State power is always
disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to
suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power
whatever in the premises in other words, giving itself a monopoly.
Instances of this expedient are common; the one we are probably best
acquainted with is the State's monopoly of letter carrying. Social power
is estopped by sheer fiat from application to this form of enterprise,
notwithstanding it could carry it on far cheaper, and, in this country at
least, far better. The advantages of this monopoly in promoting the
State's interests are peculiar. No other, probably, could secure so large
and well-distributed a volume of patronage, under the guise of a public
service in constant use by so large a number of people; it plants a
lieutenant of the State at every country crossroad. It is by no means a
pure coincidence that an administration's chief almoner and whip-at-large
is so regularly appointed postmaster general.
Thus the State "turns every contingency into a resource" for
accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and
with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New
generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted or as I believe our
American glossary now has it, "conditioned" to new increments
of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous
accumulation as quite in order.
All the State's institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency;
they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into
State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome
and necessary for the public good.
Albert Jay Nock (October 13, 1870 – August 19, 1945) was an influential
American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of
the early and middle 20th century. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced
by him, and so was the whole generation of free-market thinkers of the
1950s. See Albert Jay Nock's
article
archives.
This article is excerpted from
Our
Enemy, the State.
Notes
[1] The result of a
questionnaire published in July 1935 showed 76.8 percent of the replies
favorable to the idea that it is the State's duty to see that every
person who wants a job shall have one; 20.1 percent were against it, and
3.1 percent were undecided.
[2] In this country, the State is at present
manufacturing furniture, grinding flour, producing fertilizer, building
houses; selling farm products, dairy-products, textiles, canned goods,
and electrical apparatus; operating employment agencies and home-loan
offices; financing exports and imports; financing agriculture. It also
controls the issuance of securities, communications by wire and radio,
discount rates, oil production, power production, commercial competition,
the production and sale of alcohol, and the use of inland waterways and
railways.
http://mises.org/daily/4748
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