The Only Task a Government Was Ever Supposed to Assume--of Protecting Our Life and Property--Our Caretakers Do Not Perform

After more than a century of compulsory democracy, the predictable results are before our very eyes. The tax load imposed on property owners and producers makes the economic burden even of slaves and serfs seem moderate in comparison. Government debt has risen to breathtaking heights. Gold has been replaced by government manufactured paper as money, and its value has continually dwindled. Every detail of private life, property, trade, and contract is regulated by ever higher mountains of paper laws (legislation). In the name of social, public or national security, our caretakers "protect" us from global warming and cooling and the extinction of animals and plants, from husbands and wives, parents and employers, poverty, disease, disaster, ignorance, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia, and countless other public enemies and dangers. And with enormous stockpiles of weapons of aggression and mass destruction they "defend" us, even outside of the U.S., from ever new Hitlers and all suspected Hitlerite sympathizers.

However, the only task a government was ever supposed to assume--of protecting our life and property--our caretakers do not perform. To the contrary, the higher the expenditures on social, public, and national security have risen, the more our private property rights have been eroded, the more our property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, and depreciated, and the more we have been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: of personal independence, economic strength, and private wealth. The more paper laws have been produced, the more legal uncertainty and moral hazard has been created, and lawlessness has displaced law and order. And while we have become ever more helpless, impoverished, threatened, and insecure, our rulers have become increasingly more corrupt, dangerously armed, and arrogant.

--Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed; The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 89-90.