25A037 What States Can't Do by Jim Davies, 9/16/2025

In practice, of course, they can do pretty well every loathsome thing they wish. But this is about what they can and cannot rightfully do.

In the August ZGBlog States' Rights, Revisited we saw that whereas real human beings have a natural right to exist (what Jefferson called the Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness), all States have none at all. They are un-natural, artificial constructs with no roots in nature whatever, which modern mankind managed very well without for 80% of our history. If you go back further into our ancestry that percentage rises to the high 90s.

Since they have no natural right even to exist, they can have no natural right to do anything whatever. Everything they do, they have no right to do. They have no right to govern, for to govern is to deny the natural right of real people to own and operate their own lives. They have no right to steal (to take property without the owner's uncoerced consent, ie to tax) for the owner obtained it by exchanging for it his own labor. They have no right to kill, as when waging war, their favorite activity - for everyone has a natural right to life; and that means they have no right to defend themselves. They don't even have the right to tell you the time of day - though, to the chagrin of my friend and fellow-blogger Kent McManigal, in practice they do anyway.

That absence of a self-defense right has awesome implications. It means that if a State (ie the government of a society, not the people in it) is facing extinction, it is not entitled to fight back. That's consistent with not even having a right to exist. Yet that is what States under threat of attack have always done - with resultant carnage among the people, in war! Accordingly, if the absence of this right were acknowledged, war as we have known it would not take place.

But, but... surely companies are "artificial constructs" as well. Do they too have no rights?

They are, but they do. Reason: companies operate by agreement, among real people who certainly have the right to make agreements. So if an electrician and a carpenter and a plumber agree to form "Three Pals Construction" and offer the services of remodeling and building, and customers make contracts with TPC that specify what's to be done and for what price, no rights are infringed. The firm's rights are those of the three pals, neither more nor less.

But nobody made any contract to establish any State, because to make a contract to have someone's choices over-ruled, or his property stolen, or his very life taken, would be to exercise, by proxy, rights that the contractor does not have; and nobody can validly give or delegate properties or rights he does not possess. Someone hires a hit man, he commits the murder just as if he wields the knife. There's a second reason why it's impossible for a State to be set up by contract: in any such deal the parties must agree who is to arbitrate in the event of later dispute. However States are entities that claim there is no authority in the land that is higher than the State itself; so it could not do that.

Accordingly a State does not derive rights either from nature or from intermediaries such as residents of some society. It simply doesn't have them; it can rightly do nothing at all. There is an infinitude of things that the State cannot rightly do.

I can't present in a short blog a list of infinite length, and you'd not be likely to read it if I could; so I'll just abbreviate it. Here is what States cannot rightfully do: