“Statism is nothing more than gang rule. A statist dictatorship is a gang devoted to looting the effort of the productive citizens of its own country.”
– Ayn Rand, War and Peace, The Objectivist Newsletter, Oct 1962
What is statism? Merriam-Webster defines it as the “concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of a highly centralized government often extending to government ownership of industry.”
In essence, statism is the belief that the state or government, regardless of its size or the amount of control it exerts over its subjects, is legitimate to at least some extent. In practice, a government becomes more statist as it exercises increasing control over the economy.
While libertarians often use the word “statism” to brand any state control they deem authoritarian and antithetical to the free market, a statist doesn’t necessarily endorse despotism, fascism, socialism, conservatism, or any other “ism.”
A statist may merely believe that some form of minimal government is necessary to provide society with a safety net, protections against theft and breach of contract, a court system, or other functions with which the free market doesn’t naturally concern itself. Even the most laissez-faire economist is unlikely to condemn the concept of a town fire department as a threat to civil society.
In contrast, anti-statism is the essence of pure anarchism. An anti-statist would assert that all state power and political power are illegitimate as well as an affront to liberty. They would argue that everything which people need to thrive and coexist peaceably could be provided by the private sector.
Who and What Is a Statist
Statists commonly believe that the government must play a central role in the means of production. They may reason that the private sector is unable to function within a vacuum of government influence; perhaps it will violate the rights of the citizenry, or pose a threat to the hegemony of the state itself.
Economic planning, a common facet of socialism in which the government actively decides how resources will be allocated among its citizenry, is a common feature of statism. Subsidies, which are sums of money granted by the state to help an industry or certain businesses, are also common in statism.
As explained above, a statist might technically only want a government which offers a police department and a guy with a shovel who is paid to fill in potholes. The title of “statist” is more frequently reserved for someone (typically a politician) who believes the government should have more legal power over its citizens and influence in business.
The individual is no longer their own master under statism – at least not entirely. Rather, they are subject to a system that purports to serve a higher goal. Whether that goal is the advancement of a race, religion, ideal, or even the expansion of the state’s borders is ultimately up to the whims of the ruling elites (typically politicians).
Examples of Statism
The rather loose definition of statism means it applies to several forms of government. Socialism, communism, national socialism, feudalism, fascism, tribalism, apartheid, theocracy, and even democracy are all examples of statism.
At face value, these systems share little in common, but they all seek to direct how their citizens’ collective efforts are spent. The goal of communism is common ownership of all things; thus the product of a citizen’s labor goes in part or in whole toward the good of all (or in practice the good of the political elite).
The goal of feudalism is ultimately to benefit the king; thus the serf tilling the field pays rent to their vassal who in turn provides military aid to the crown. The goal of theocracy is to benefit God; because God has little use for gold, which He can make as easily as snapping His fingers, the church benevolently accumulates it on His behalf.
Technically speaking, every American politician is a statist. Although he is very much in favor of limiting government interference in private life to the greatest extent possible, Ron Paul’s political view that the “proper role for government in America is to provide national defense, a court system for civil disputes, a criminal justice system for acts of force and fraud, and little else” includes several state-run services.
As American politics become more left-leaning, so too do they frequently become more statist. Hilary Clinton’s 2016 platform included imposing a tax on high-frequency trading and direct government intervention in the free market.
Bernie Sanders’ pledge to transform America’s energy system into 100 percent renewable energy, although environmentalist in tone, would needless to say have required massive bureaucratic intervention. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s promise to illegalize capitalism while forcing all white, cis males to wear bomb collars is arguably just a tiny bit statist as well.
Final Thoughts
In her essay War and Peace, Ayn Rand wrote “The differences among statist systems are only a matter of time and degree; the principle is the same. Under statism, the government is not a policeman, but a legalized criminal that holds the power to use physical force in any manner and for any purpose it pleases against legally disarmed, defenseless victims.”
Statism exists wherever government exists – it is the degree to which statism is exercised which makes it reprehensible or not. But if one accepts that a person is a free and rational creature, whose sole obligation is unto themself, then any agency which forces them to behave a certain way or spend the product of their labor toward the advancement of any goal which they have not voluntarily accepted as their own is necessarily unjust.
What is statism? In essence, it is whenever any authority exerts control over your life. But doing away with statism entirely would quite possibly require the elimination of the entire world population minus one.
Statist: The Definition of How Government Rules Through Economy originally appeared at Libertas Bella.
Governments don’t rule economies – privately owned Central Banks rule economies. Because governments are beholden to these privately owned Central Banks for the price of debt issued and money conjured up out of thin air on their behalf, these same privately owned Central Banks also rule governments. These privately owned Central Banks rule economies by setting the price capital and by determining which economic sectors do and do not get access to capital. Governments merely regulate economies into the directions that benefit the investments of these privately owned Central Banks. Thus governments will squash entire sectors of the economy – e.g., agriculture in the 1930s, oil in the 1980s, coal in the 2010s – to ensure not only growth and high returns within those sectors these privately owned Central Banks have invested, but also to ensure all competing sectors to these Central Bank investments are quashed and bankrupted out of existence.
There is no such thing as Free Enterprise in an economy ruled by a privately owned Central Bank.
Based.
What is it that motivates writers such as Libertas Bella to use such ungrammatical phrases as, “The individual is no longer their own…” and “…a person is a free and rational creature, whose sole obligation is unto themself…”? Is it the fear of using the pronoun “he”?
It’s just the universal corruption of language rearing its head again. Kind of like Liam Neeson in the trailer to the movie Taken, who said:
“…I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills…”
Clearly, the competent wielding of grammar not being among that particular skillset!!!
Yes.
Fear of anti-English feminists and LGBTQNCPZers.
http://truedemocracy.net/hj31/20.html
If we just have a free market everything will be great again and we’ll all be freee……..reeeeee
This is the big lie. Capitalism is the religion of the subjugated fool. The richest people in the world serve somebody and you will too, regardless the amount of money you mange to accumulate in your life. The richest are also the most evil. Ask yourself why.
The true value in life is family, tradition, culture , Christ and Nation. This is the only source of true happiness.
Capitalism has failed to preserve the fruit of liberty the same way Protestantism has failed to preserve Christendom. They are both connected in that usury is their birth mother.
Philip II: (1527-1598)
William Thomas Walsh
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=1889B28539B7506D637C3D5605BFD2A0
“This kingdom of Mammon had been held in subjection to a great extent by the
Catholic Church during the magnificent thousand years of her free expansion and
dominance, from the time of Constantine in the fourth century to the
Black Death in the fourteenth. And if, even during that period, the
Church did not succeed in abolishing usury, which she proclaimed
everywhere to be one of the vilest of sins, it was because monarchs,
less faithful to principle than to expediency, protected the moneylenders,
who depended on them for their very lives.
It did not occur to the kings that if the money-lenders ever got
power enough, if they ever got from under the public-spirited
repression of the Church, they would destroy their own masters.
Kings were not generally as far-sighted as money-changers, and
much less so than priests. This is not to deny that clerics sometimes
condoned usury and profited by it, or that some kings repressed it.
Human affairs are never so simple as that. But there was a line of
cleavage: the Church on one side hostile to usury, the kings
compelled to make use of it on the other. “
Protip –
Rule #1 – There is no such thing as a good governance for or by Psychopaths.
This notion that a system of devised rules will be able to contain greed, cheats, fraudsters, or those who seek power over others for their own ends, is not only historically false, but in reality, many of those who advocate such a system largely realize this.
A state is an obstacle to those who want to consolidate power for themselves, and – theoretically – the easiest route to consolidating power is to get others to topple the state on your behalf. This is consistent across ideology.
People who are trying to lead you somewhere that you would not otherwise go dont tell you the rest of the plan.
The truth is, good governance, liberty and freedom are aspects inherent to the capacity of a respective population, not a magic result of a rules-based system designed to contain them or isolate them from responsibility to one another.
If you have a society that tolerates criminality, cheats and fraudsters, and you will find them all societies and populations – ‘Libertarian’ included – the premise of self-interested behavior is already quite familiar to such a society, and Rothbard himself would not be able to contain the damage that even a small coalition would do to those who encounter such a malleable, opportunistic and self-serving belief system.