Daily Inspiration Quote by Benjamin Tucker

Defense is supposed to be the state’s origin story: the moment we trade a little freedom for a lot of safety. Tucker flips that myth into an accusation. If “defence was an afterthought,” then the state didn’t begin as a protective shield at all; it began as a power arrangement looking for a justification. Security, in this reading, isn’t the foundation of political order, it’s the retrofit - bolted on once coercive authority needs to explain itself to the people living under it.

The knife twist is his claim that making defense a “State function” initiates the state’s destruction. The subtext isn’t that armies blow up governments; it’s that monopoly defense destroys the state’s moral alibi. Once you centralize protection, you centralize the logic of emergency: threats become the one renewable resource every state can harvest. Defense demands taxes, surveillance, discipline, and obedience - a permanent exception that quietly rewrites citizenship into subordination. The state may grow stronger in capacity, yet weaker in legitimacy, because its most persuasive promise (“we keep you safe”) becomes indistinguishable from its most dangerous power (“we decide what safety requires”).

Context matters: Tucker, an American individualist anarchist writing in the age of industrial trusts, labor conflict, and modern police forces, is arguing with both conservatives and socialists. He’s not romanticizing chaos; he’s warning that the state’s “protective” turn is precisely how it crowds out mutual aid and voluntary association, then calls the resulting dependency stability.