[The John Bartel Lecture, presented at the 2012 Mises Institute Supporters Summit: "The Truth About War: A Revisionist Approach." You can watch a video of this lecture here.]

In his book, Anatomy of the State, Murray Rothbard wrote,

Just as the two basic and mutually exclusive interrelations between men are peaceful cooperation or coercive exploitation, production or predation, so the history of mankind, particularly its economic history, may be considered as a contest between these two principles.[1]

This contest has been one-sided. In the ancient world, empires dominated political life. Merciless systems of slavery, theft, and war ruled around the world. One exception in a territory surrounded by such empires was the tribes of Israel. Even though warned by God himself of the misery they would suffer if they willingly surrendered the freedom they enjoyed under the decentralized polity of the judges in order to have an earthly king rule over them, they clamored for their own enslavement. It is instructive that the prize the Israelites deemed worth paying so heavy a price to obtain was to have a king to lead them in battle. With Saul as king, Israel no longer enjoyed periods of peace as under the judges, but was constantly at war. As Samuel had warned, Saul took their sons for soldiers, their daughters and male and female servants as slaves, the best of their lands, produce, and flocks and thereby, reduced the Israelites to servitude.[2]

The Israelites would not be the last people to succumb to the siren song of war. About the importance of war as a device for aggrandizing the power of the state in its contest against liberty, Rothbard wrote,

In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogans of "defense" and "emergency," it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace. War thus provides many benefits to a State, and indeed every modern war has brought to the warring peoples a permanent legacy of increased State burdens upon society.[3]

War not only vastly extends the wealth transfers used by the state to bolster its rule but advances pro-state ideology. Because the state lives parasitically on the production of its hosts, those who benefit from the state's wealth transfers must always be a minority of the population. The majority must be the victims of the state and, therefore, their acquiescence in predation by the state must be engineered; otherwise that state is finished. The legitimacy of the state must be manufactured and maintained through ideology. From Oriental despotism to American hegemony, the state has never failed to attract, with its power and pelf, those who would fabricate apologia. But their litany of claims that our rulers are wise and their rule is beneficent, that our rulers protect us from horrible dangers, that our rulers uphold the glorious tradition of our ancestors, that our rulers embody the interests of society, that our rulers are appointed by God, that our rulers bring science and reason to society, and so on never explain how such claims turn hegemony into voluntary association, murder into defense, kidnapping into voluntary association, and taxation into free-will offering. If the state is the fount from which all social blessings flow, then why do its apologists resort to instilling guilt in the successful and envy in the unsuccessful to strengthen its power?

We see through the lies and sophisms of pro-state ideology because we have accepted the truth advanced by those who champion liberty. Extrapolating from our experience, we can see that anti-state ideology is a necessary condition to establish and maintain liberty. The advantages it has over pro-state ideology are, first, it appeals to the interests of the majority and, second, it is grounded on truth about the nature of human action. While liberty is consistent with human action, the state is founded on a contradiction, namely, that the only way to have an institution to protect our rights is to establish it on the violation of our rights.

The ancient Israelites held to an ideology with many of the features necessary to keep state power at bay, like a higher law to which all men are accountable and a decentralized polity. For a few generations, the kings of Israel were somewhat constrained by the higher law. But the wickedness of the kings who followed them grew, the law was eventually forgotten, and the liberties of the Israelites were extinguished.[4]

It would take several centuries for the world to witness another spark of liberty. It was ignited under Solon in Athens, and its embers glowed most brightly during the reign of Pericles. But liberty lasted only as long as Pericles and his generation lived. According to Lord Acton, the Athenian system failed to protect minorities and to put the state under the law. The democracy of Athens, in the end, led to class conflict, which tore the system apart. The Peloponnesian War extinguished both Pericles and the embers of Athenian liberty.[5]

Read more:

Liberty vs. War: A Brief History