Hey everyone, welcome back to the What Is Money Show, sitting down again today with Mr. Max Hillebrand.

And we're going to continue further into Rothbard's book, The Ethics of Liberty.

And today, we're going to start with the moral status of relations to the state.

And I'm going to read an excerpt here to get us going.

Rothbard says, quote, it means, for example, that no one is morally required to obey the state,

except insofar as the state simply affirms the right of just private property against aggression.

For as a criminal organization, with all of its income and assets derived

from the crime of taxation, the state cannot possess any just property. This means that it cannot be

unjust or immoral to fail to pay taxes to the state to appropriate the property of the state,

which is in the hands of aggressors, to refuse to obey state orders, or to break contracts with the

state, since it cannot be unjust to break contracts with criminals.

Morally, from the point of view of proper political philosophy, quote-unquote, stealing from the state, for example, is removing property from criminal hands, is, in a sense, homesteading property.

Except that instead of homesteading unused land, the person is removing property from the criminal sector of society, a positive good, unquote.

So that is quite the indictment against the largest business in the world, stateism.

Yeah, it's really solid, right?

Rossbart does not pull any punches here.

And again, he builds here on all the foundation that we built before, right?

And he just stayed outright that, well, the state is just a monopolization or institutionalization of crime and aggression, which we've worked on. It is. That is the defining characteristic of it. And therefore, it's a special case of human action. We're literally dealing with terrorists and criminals here who steal from people every day

as their only way of acquiring capital, with literally zero voluntary interaction involved.

And that means that any resource that the state commands are not just liais.

It cannot be. Just properties to find that that what's voluntarily exchanged or homesteaded,

which the state does neither of them, arguably, at least in general.

...