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Lifting the Wool: Governments Are Mafias, War Is Their Racket
by Alan Bock

...What it comes down to, then, is that the essence of government is force. Without the capacity to coerce citizens into paying taxes and obeying edicts, government is impossible. It is hardly a stretch, however, to note that such an institution is morally virtually indistinguishable from a criminal gang. Indeed, a criminal gang generally finds it more efficient to limit the use of force to those who resist too actively or to teach a lesson. The profits are greater when the merchants simply give in at once to the guys in bulky suits who come around saying, "Nice store you have here. Be a shame if anything happened to it. We can provide protection." But the racket works best, of course, if the merchants know the thugs will follow through on the implied threat, so once in a while an example has to be made.

A decent argument can be made, then, that a government is a mafia that's a little more sophisticated and successful than most outright criminal gangs are – or, as my Sicilian wife once put it, "government is just another gang." But the essence of what defines both is the willingness to use force when persuasion fails. The mafia, if the lore is accurate, even copies government by calling its enforcers "soldiers."

So the brutal truth is that while consent is preferred as the more cost-efficient option, government authority rests on the willingness to use force when it deems force to be necessary. Governments like to sell themselves as the only protection against the uncontrolled and unbridled use of force that would characterize society without such a wielder of "legitimate" force. But their essence is force. The ultimate expression of the essential character of the state, of course, is war, which not only involves killing foreigners who may or may not be a real threat directly, but provides multiple justifications for stepping up the use of force against inconvenient or obstreperous members of the society it rules directly....