Spencer Heath Archive

Item 497

Penciling on two three-ring notebook pages

July 7, 1949

No war was ever waged except by led or driven men on behalf of rival governments, or would-be governments, each seeking to destroy the other and usurp or nullify its rule.

Nor was ever an alliance anything but victory without arms, and defeat without resistance, the bloodless subordina­tion of its weaker governments and a new subjugation of the people over whom they ruled.

Wars are never fought by governments on behalf of people, but always by people on behalf of governments or of would-be governments.

And every political election either confirms existing rulers or establishes new ones in their stead.

War, alliance and election, these are the three proce­dures in which political power is won, lost or confirmed. In all cases the object sought, and the only ends served, is to gain, maintain and extend political power — the power of men, as governments, to dominate other men. And this irrespective of the mode of acquiring political power, whether by conquest, alliance or by the popular will.

Now just what is this political and governmental or state power and rulership that we call sovereignty and imagine as giving services? We have seen that it is gained or enlarged by conquests, alliances and elections, and that it is the monopoly, within a definite territory, of the physical force called sovereignty by persons, many or few, called govern­ment. Government is unique in this, that it is essentially negative. It has no power, no property, but that it takes from other persons, without regard to their individual consent. It must expropriate in order to appropriate. It can create no rights, only grant permissions. It must infringe the rights and properties of the many or all in order to confer privileges on its favored few, or seize from the affluent few to purchase the loyalty of the organized or indigent many with subsidies and doles.

Subjectively, and by imagination, government can be any­thing, from slavery to salvation, tyranny to divinity, but objectively and in practice it depends absolutely on the power to seize property and coerce persons that we call taxa­tion and without which it ceases to exist.

Persons acting as governments always consume and destroy, never produce or create. Nor do they perform any public services, as they are often supposed to do. For its services, so called, to some are predicated on disservices to others and the public is thereby as much if not more injured than served, and the government itself must finally expire. Thus it has been always and ever must be with public authority founded on force.