Among the various signs that distinguish the state from the firm “Horns and Hooves”, the monopoly on coercion holds a place of honor. Various schools studying the state—except for some exotic ones believing that the sergeant’s widow did indeed flog herself—agree that the state possesses this ability that gladdens everyone. But, interestingly, it is with this very assertion that the greatest confusion and muddle in the minds of the broad masses are associated.
For if you tell the broad masses that the state monopoly on coercion should be abolished for the common good, they will certainly be indignant. How can that be, they will say, for if there is no state monopoly on coercion, then court decisions will not be executed, the streets will fill with mountains of corpses, and most terrible of all, everyone will do what they want, and it will be impossible to make them do what I want.
Let us figure out what is going on here. I think that the problem lies in understanding the origin of the monopoly we are talking about, and I will now try to explain this. Let us imagine a shoe manufacturer. He works day and night, improves, buys new equipment and technologies, trains personnel. Over time, he becomes a monopolist. This means that it is impossible to compete with him—his product is better than yours in every respect. Now imagine another situation. Let a big burly man with a big club appear on a certain territory, who declares: “From now on only I produce shoes here, and you will bring me money for them once a month, or I’ll beat you to death.” Any attempts by barefoot citizens to become underground cobblers, he suppresses with skillful blows to the head. This man is also a monopolist.
That is, the formal result in the two situations is the same—on a certain territory no one except one producer can produce shoes. But the content of this result is different—in the first case it means that we have plenty of shoes, they are so good and so cheap that there is no point in competing; in the second case there may be no shoes at all. Nothing obliges the man with the club to produce shoes.
Note that generally speaking, there is no difference whether the man with the club passes his business on to his heirs or someone from among the locals is regularly elected to this position. If the residents believe that only the man with the club can produce shoes, forcibly taking part of their income for this purpose, then there is no difference. And even if we assume that the man, so to speak, “for fun,” wants to make a pair of boots, he will never be able to make boots like the “monopolist” from the first example, since he simply has no data about the market due to the absence of competition. In the case of the monopolist from the first example, competitors breathe down his neck, and the moment he relaxes and misses something about consumer desires, his monopolistic status will be lost.
I think everyone understands that the man with the club is the state. Historically, the state is the result of military conquests—that is, a situation where some group forcibly holds some territory in order to collect tribute. Hence its monopoly.
Therefore, unexecuted court decisions and mountains of corpses on the streets are in no way connected to whether there is a state with its monopoly on coercion nearby or not. The state is a monopoly not because it always and under any conditions protects you from bandits and executes court decisions. It is a monopoly because you are forbidden to defend yourself from bandits and create a judicial system. And whether it will protect you is something it will decide itself, as is convenient for it.