Each election time brings to mind a story told by Albert J. Nock.  The story goes as follows:

It was once quite seriously suggested to me by some neighbours that I should go to Congress.  I asked them why they wished me to do that, and they replied with some complimentary phrases about the satisfaction of having some one of a somewhat different type “amongst those damned rascals down there.”  “Yes, but,” I said, “don’t you see that it would be only a matter of a month or so – a very short time, anyway –before I should be a damned rascal, too?”  No, they did not see this; they were rather taken aback; would I explain?  “Suppose,” I said, “that you put in a Sunday-school superintendent or a Y.M.C.A. secretary to run an assignation-house on Broadway.  He might trim off some of the coarser fringes of the job, such as the badger game and the panel game, and put things in what Mayor Gaynor used to call a state of ‘outward order and decency,’ but he must run an assignation-house,, or he would promptly hear from the owners.”

Nock based his conclusion on a studied belief in a specific theory of the State.  Nock saw there are two ways for a person to satisfy his needs and desires.  One is by working, applying labor and skill to natural resources to produce an asset, then using or exchanging that asset in order to meet the need/desire.  This, appropriately enough, he called the economic means.  An alternative method is to appropriate the asset of others, without trading for it or compensating them.  This, again appropriately, he called the political means.

The State, he concluded, “may be described as the organization of the political means.”  The primary purpose of the State is to take resources (usually financial) from one group and give it to another group, while taking a hefty portion of the exchange for itself.  Parties organize around ‘who’ will be the beneficiaries of the plunder, as multiple groups of people vie for the largess.

Nock’s conclusion was that putting a different rascal in Congress would not, could not, by itself, change the game.  But yet, the game stinks!  What to do?

Nock’s solution borrowed from another great thinker in the conservative tradition, Edmund Burke.  “If a great change is to take place, the minds of men will be fitted to it.”  Change must come about by a change of thinking, by a rejection of the political means and an embracing of the economic means as a way of life.

If true – and it is – this makes preaching about, and living out, the eighth and tenth commandments truly revolutionary acts.  “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet,” when rigorously applied, provide the moral grounds for denouncing the actions of the State and point the way to a better society, based on voluntarism, not force.

[Story and quotes from Nock’s Anarchist’s Progress.  https://mises.org/library/anarchists-progress-0%5D

• Political-Economics