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Government Equals Force
Occasionally throughout the 20th century, commentators have clearly recognized the coercive nature of government. British political scientist Harold Laski wrote in 1935:

"At any critical moment in the history of a State the fact that its authority depends upon the power to coerce the opponents of the government, to break their wills, to compel them to submission, emerges as the central fact of its nature. "

Political scientist Theodore Lowi, author of the 1969 book The End of Liberalism, observed:

"Government is obviously the most efficacious way of achieving good purposes in our age. But alas, it is efficacious because it is involuntary. Modern policymakers ... pretend ... that the unsentimental business of coercion need not be involved and that the unsentimental decisions about how to employ coercion need not really be made at all."

As a 1940 federal court decision noted, "The 'State,' as used in political science, means the coercive force of government."

What matters is not the rhetoric in the speeches of politicians but rather the power in the hands of prosecutors and law-enforcement agents. Governments rest upon the statute book. The essence of a law is the threat of government force to compel obedience to a legislative or regulatory edict. The Supreme Court observed in a 1909 decision, "'Law' is a statement of circumstances in which public force will be brought to bear on men through the courts." A 1996 Justice Department report observed, "The feature distinguishing police from all other groups in society is their authority to apply coercive force...."

The first question is not whether government is good or evil, but whether government is coercive - whether government relies on force to fill its coffers, enforce its commands, and impose its will. To get a clear understanding of the pervasive use and threat of force in daily government actions is the first step towards political realism. ...

...Taxation is not a mere technicality to be relegated to the footnotes of political science and public administration. Taxation goes to the heart of the relation of the citizen to the state: the higher the taxation, the greater the subjugation - and the more politicians are preempting individuals from building their own lives. Every increase in taxation is a proclamation that government knows best and thus that politicians are entitled to commandeer more of the individual's paycheck and to save him from himself.

The Treasury Department defines a tax as "a compulsory payment for which no specific benefit is received in return." No matter how much in taxes a person pays or what politicians promise, the taxpayer is not irrevocably entitled to a single benefit from government. The fact that some people benefit from how their tax dollars are spent does not make the process of taxation any less coercive.

Laws are structured so that government agents rarely need to soil their hands with citizens' blood. For instance, IRS rules and regulations allow IRS agents to confiscate a citizen's bank account without a court order and without any proof of the citizen's wrongdoing, merely on the basis of the IRS agent's unsubstantiated allegation that the citizen owes taxes. This power is exercised more than three million times a year (six times more often than in 1979); and the IRS wrongfully seizes tens of thousands of bank accounts and paychecks each year, according to the General Accounting Office. Such seizures are often accomplished by an IRS agent's sending an official notice to a bank and some timid bank clerk's kowtowing to the government's demand. The IRS routinely does not even officially notify citizens when it confiscates their savings and checking accounts; the only "notice" a person deserves, according to the IRS, is a notation on his monthly bank records informing him of his loss. ...