War

Military leaders reject taking sexual assault cases away from military. No kidding. Nobody wants to give up any power.

Just what we need, drones guided by thought.

Soldier pleads guilty to Afghan massacre.

Syrian rebels accused of beheading government soldiers. These are the guys the US is allied with.

The paradox of imperialism.

"Conventionally, the state is defined as an agency with two unique characteristics. First, it is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction). That is, it is the ultimate arbiter in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself. Second, the state is a territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, it is an agency that unilaterally fixes the price citizens must pay for its provision of law and order.
Predictably, if one can only appeal to the state for justice, justice will be perverted in favor of the state. Instead of resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. Worse, while the quality of justice will fall under monopolistic auspices, its price will rise. Motivated like everyone else by self-interest but equipped with the power to tax, the state agents' goal is always the same: to maximize income and minimize productive effort."

And they do so effectively. There are some consequences.

"Further, as tax-funded monopolists of ultimate decision-making, states are inherently aggressive institutions. Whereas "natural" persons and institutions must bear the cost of aggressive behavior themselves (which may well induce them to abstain from such conduct), states can externalize this cost onto their taxpayers. Hence, state agents are prone to become provocateurs and aggressors and the process of centralization can be expected to proceed by means of violent clashes, i.e., interstate wars."

That's why violent people are attracted to government, and the worst of the worst rise to the top.

"That is, states which tax and regulate their economies comparatively little – liberal states – tend to defeat and expand their territories or their range of hegemonic control at the expense of less-liberal ones."

True. Here's the paradox.

"What appears to be standing in the way of peace and civilization, then, is above all the state and democracy, and specifically the world's model democracy: the United States. Ironically if not surprisingly, however, it is precisely the United States, which claims that it is the solution to the quest for peace."

Same with Britain before.

"Monarchies are the semi-organic outgrowth of hierarchically structured natural – stateless – social orders. Kings are the heads of extended families, of clans, tribes, and nations. They command a great deal of natural, voluntarily acknowledged authority, inherited and accumulated over many generations. It is within the framework of such orders (and of aristocratic republics) that liberalism first developed and flourished. In contrast, democracies are egalitarian and redistributionist in outlook; hence, the above-mentioned growth of state power in the 20th century. Characteristically, the transition from the monarchical age to the democratic one, beginning in the second half of the 19th century, has seen a continuous decline in the strength of liberal parties and a corresponding strengthening of socialists of all stripes."

Monarchs historically also carried out a good deal of aggression though their powers were more limited than modern states.

"Not only is this close correlation between democracy and dictatorship troublesome for democratic-peace theorists; worse, they must come to grips with the fact that the dictatorships emerging from crises of democracy are by no means always worse, from a classical liberal or libertarian view, than what would have resulted otherwise. Cases can be easily cited where dictatorships were preferable and an improvement. Think of Italy and Mussolini or Spain and Franco. In addition, how is one to square the starry-eyed advocacy of democracy with the fact that dictators, quite unlike kings who owe their rank to an accident of birth, are often favorites of the masses and in this sense highly democratic? Just think of Lenin or Stalin, who were certainly more democratic than Czar Nicholas II; or think of Hitler, who was definitely more democratic and a "man of the people" than Kaiser Wilhelm II or Kaiser Franz Joseph."

Hoppe is smashing false beliefs.