Albert J. Nock Quotes
Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.
Nock, Albert J. Our Enemy, the State. William Morrow & Company, 1935, p. 23.
Referring to many African countries:
Speaking in the Senate about the Omnibus Crime Bill under consideration:
To Mises, “interventionism” is any government action that affects business and businessmen and women. In a large complex society, virtually every government action will benefit some more than others while harming some more than others. There are almost always winners and losers as a result of every government action. Most political philosophers see justice and fairness in benefitting the majority of people most of the time. However Mises and others observe that in a large complex society, in an absolute sense, politics and government can never be fair and just to all.
In America there are different State laws on this subject. In some, if a person finished his sentence and paid his debt to society, he is no longer prohibited from public and political life; in others, he can no longer even vote. This was a particularly offensive thing to English women who were not allowed to vote or hold office while a male felon could serve a decade in jail and then do either.
Such a comcept has been shared by most autocratic governments like Nazi Germany, but before and after Germans did not see this subservience to and power of the state as desirable or even necessary. The Vatican has had periods like this. But this Sistema has been a part of Russian culture during the millinium of Czarist rule. It was used andn explicitly made a part of Lennin and the Russian Revolutionaries, and then so heavily used by Joseph Stalin before, during and after WWII. It continued under the Post Stalinist Communist leader and when the Soviet Union fell and Russia became less authoratoran, it was not utilized but it was deeply embedded in the Russian psyche and culture as demonstrated by the fact that Vladimir Putin began t use it as an instrument of his governance.
Albert Jay Nock was an American libertarian author, editor first of The Freeman and then The Nation, educational theorist, Georgist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century. He was an outspoken opponent of the New Deal, and served as a fundamental inspiration for the modern libertarian and conservative movements, cited as an influence by William F. Buckley Jr. He was one of the first Americans to self-identify as "libertarian". His best-known books are Memoirs of a Superfluous Man and Our Enemy, the State.
