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One of the most popular and “eternal” topics is the question of why a “monopoly on coercion” arises. Usually paired with it is the question of violence. From disputes on this topic, one could compile a decent multi-volume work, but it seems to me that one problem in these disputes—if not the main one—is the semantic trap where the debaters find themselves. In this note, we will try to understand what this trap is and how to avoid it.
The interaction of people in society, in the most general sense, is possible because people at a given place and time agree on who uses what resources, when, why, and on what terms. The boundaries within which an individual acts freely—that is, manages certain resources to one degree or another—are defined by property rights. I think it’s clear that here we are talking about real property rights, not the corresponding “legislation”—about those rules that make our peaceful everyday interaction possible and that are located not so much in formal state “law” as in customary law, habits, morals, and etiquette (for example, who and why gives up a seat on public transport, who lets whom go through a door first, and so on).
The inviolability of boundaries and the existence of procedures for resolving disputes are the main conditions that allow people to freely achieve their goals and effectively interact with each other.
Accordingly, violation of boundaries and attempts to appropriate or use others’ resources are actions that destroy cooperation and order in society. Actually, the overwhelming majority of problems we face can be reduced to problems of property rights and boundaries.
Regarding boundaries, there can be two main types of actions—aggression, that is, intrusion into others’ boundaries, and defense against aggression. It is these two categories that describe all events that can occur in connection with boundaries. Buying armored doors, insuring property, hiring lawyers for the most precise work with property titles, installing a firewall on your computer, and doing similar things—you are defending your boundaries. The same thing you do when you kick an intruder off your territory, shoot back at bandits, or expose fraudsters.
Similarly, there are many methods of aggression—from mundane mugging to sophisticated fraud and hacking. Both types of activity can have varying degrees of complexity; you can engage in defense yourself, or hire specially trained people for certain tasks. Similarly, aggression extends from petty theft to organized criminal syndicates. All these details constitute the content of specific cases of aggression or defense. One characteristic that may or may not be present in such cases is violence or coercion. A thief can steal your things without any coercion or violence, simply by breaking into the house when you are away. Similarly, strong walls, doors, and windows can protect your property without violence or coercion. The same applies to a fistfight and beating, but still defense will remain defense, and aggression will remain aggression; essentially, these actions do not change depending on whether violence was used in their execution or not.
Why then, in discussions of these issues, is the conversation usually about violence or coercion (enforcement), rather than about violation of property rights and the boundaries they establish? Where does the belief in the necessity of a “monopoly on coercion” come from—the belief that “someone must exercise monopolistic coercion” and even that in the case of the hypothetical absence of a state, it “will arise by itself” precisely because of the inevitability of a “monopoly on coercion”?
The reason for this can be explained through property rights themselves. The state considers you its property. It’s clear that this did not happen because some secret masons or reptiloids passed a secret resolution to this effect; it is simply the logic of its behavior: whoever can use, own, and dispose is the owner.
The owner has the right to determine how others may use his property; he can establish rules and even punish for their non-compliance. The ability to dispose of it is one of the main characteristics of a property owner. And again, I want to emphasize that we are not talking about procedures established by some “law,” but about actually existing legal practices. The state does not necessarily need to write in the constitution that it owns the territory and citizens; this is the factual state of affairs, not the result of some political decision or legislative act.
The state is inevitably led to the position of owner by taxation, that is, the regular practice of forcible seizure of part of people’s property within some territory. There is no logical mechanism other than property rights that would explain why someone should regularly pay someone else under threat of punishment. Very revealing in this sense are the “theories of the state and law” and, in particular, the theory of the “social contract” or its institutionalist version, interpreting the state as a set of “services.” These theories, as is well known, account for taxation as a contract, not as property rights. Note that all of them appeared not in satrapies where the property relations of officials over people are not hidden, but in relatively free societies in which the public is not at all inclined to consider itself the property of the state. Therefore, this public is told about a “contract” that no one ever signed, nor even saw.
And here we directly approach the cause of the confusion between the concepts of aggression, violence, and defense. This confusion exists only because the public is not yet ready everywhere to unconditionally consider itself property, while the state, nevertheless, needs to behave like an owner.
The “monopoly on coercion” belonging to the state is a factual state of affairs, since without it taxation is impossible. Necessarily, this monopoly will extend not only to cases of coercion for taxation, but also to relations between citizens, and above all, to key questions of property rights and boundaries.
This happens because a monopoly on coercion cannot exist simultaneously with the concept of boundaries, and accordingly, with ideas of aggression and defense, since it is obvious that in this case the state is an aggressor, and it is necessary to repel it just like any other aggressor. Therefore, the emphasis is shifted from the essence of the matter to its characteristic—that is, instead of aggression and defense, a generalized “violence” (coercion) appears. As a result, aggression and defense become mixed (note that “defense” actually disappears from philosophical and legal vocabulary), and in the ideological space, “violence” (or “coercion”) holds sway as some essentially homogeneous category. By the way, a vivid example of the process of substitution of the essence of phenomena is found in the formulas of moral imperatives. It is well known that the imperative “you shall not murder” is gradually being replaced by “you shall not kill,” that is, the prohibition of aggression is replaced by the prohibition of killing as such, regardless of its causes. This is part of the same conceptual substitution we are discussing here.
In general, the situation is as follows. In everyday life, as well as in ordinary (and often formal) law, we use the concept of property rights and boundaries, which helps us coexist peacefully and mutually enrich each other. Within this framework, independent owners act and interact. The state needs, on the one hand, to exercise taxation, that is, to perform actions that only an owner can perform with his property; on the other hand, it needs to obtain consent for taxation, for which it must maintain the existing concept of boundaries in society. These tasks contradict each other. All the legal and juridical confusion on issues of “personal rights” and “property rights” is caused by this fundamental contradiction. In ideology and philosophy, we simply attempt to hide this contradiction through the substitution of “violence” for aggression and defense.
P.S. I will note that the dispute over which word is more correct to denote an act of encroachment on property rights—“aggression” or “violence”—is purely aesthetic in nature. I call this act aggression, due to the libertarian tradition and the fact that the word “violence” is used in statist concepts that justify aggression. In this case, what matters is not which specific word is used, but that there are two different phenomena—violation of boundaries and the characteristic of this violation—and that two different words are needed to denote them, not one, as is currently the case.