A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms--an expropriating property protector--and will inevitably lead to more taxes and less protection. Even if, as some classical liberal statists have proposed, a government limited its activities exclusively to the protection of pre-existing private property rights, the further question of how much security to produce would arise. Motivated (like everyone) by self-interest and the disutility of labor but endowed with the unique power to tax, a government agent's response will invariably be the same: To maximize expenditures on protection-and almost all of a nation's wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection-and at the same time to minimize the production of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work to produce, the better off one will be.


- Hans Herman Hoppe