“The most sanctified figure in American historiography is, by no accident, the Great Saint of centralizing “democracy” and the strong unitary nation-state: Abraham Lincoln. And so didn’t Lincoln use force and violence, and on a massive scale, on behalf of the mystique of the sacred “Union,” to prevent the South from seceding? Indeed he did, and on the foundation of mass murder and oppression, Lincoln crushed the South and outlawed the very notion of secession (based on the highly plausible ground that since the separate states voluntarily entered the Union they should be allowed to leave). But not only that: for Lincoln created the monstrous unitary nation-state from which individual and local liberties have never recovered.”
Murray N. Rothbard
“It is easy to be conspicuously ‘compassionate’ if others are being forced to pay the cost.”
Murray N. Rothbard
“To be moral, an act must be free.”
Murray N. Rothbard
“And, indeed, what is the State anyway but organized banditry? What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked, scale? What is war but mass murder on a scale impossible by private police forces? What is conscription but mass enslavement? Can anyone envision a private police force getting away with a tiny fraction of what States get away with, and do habitually, year after year, century after century?”
Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto
Read “Anatomy of the State” by him and your view of gov’t will never be the same.