Our Enemy - the State

ourenemy.pdf (application/pdf Object)

If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one
fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the
State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a
secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation,
political banking, "agricultural adjustment," and similar items of State policy that
fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these
can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance,
and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same
thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social
power.
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no
money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society
gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there
is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every
assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much
less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power
without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

India has had the misfortune of having a predatory State choking economic growth.