Daily Inspiration Quote by Benjamin Tucker

Tucker’s line is a scalpel disguised as a slogan: it cuts straight through the Victorian civility that likes to dress the state up as a neutral referee. By calling aggression “another name for government,” he’s not making a moody anti-politics shrug; he’s making a definitional claim. Strip away flags, courts, and parliamentary procedure and you’re left with the state’s core asset: the authorized use of coercion. The point isn’t that every bureaucrat is a bully. It’s that government’s power ultimately cashes out in the ability to compel compliance - through taxes enforced by penalties, laws backed by police, and property regimes maintained by the threat of force.

The subtext is a challenge to polite liberalism: if you condemn violence in personal life but celebrate it when it wears a badge, you’re practicing moral laundering. Tucker, an individualist anarchist writing in the long shadow of industrial capitalism, was surrounded by governments that policed labor, broke strikes, and protected monopolies through charters and patents. So “aggression” isn’t abstract; it names a real asymmetry between ordinary people and institutions permitted to escalate.

There’s also a rhetorical dare here. Tucker forces the reader to either reject the premise that coercion is aggression, or admit that government depends on what it claims to prevent. It’s a compact indictment of legitimacy itself: authority is not a halo over force, it’s the story we tell to make force feel lawful.