Cruel but Not Unusual

The State Can Never Be Wrong
Posted by Butler Shaffer on April 3, 2011 02:41 PM

The Supreme Court decision to which you refer is perfectly understandable . . . at least to a statist. Because the state is an entity that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence, it can never make a fundamental error needful of being corrected. Who is to do the correction? Whoever, or whatever, is to be the remedial force would become, by definition, the new monopolist. Would its decisions likewise be subject to review by an even higher violence monopolist, ad infinitum? Is it really a matter of "turtles all the way down?"

The Supreme Court is just updating the ancient doctrine "the king can do no wrong," a proposition that makes individual liberty and property ownership completely incompatible with any political system.