Lew, excellent point. This highlights the need to distinguish the political conception of the state from more positivist definitions such as the one I was employing.
This is actually a quite fascinating area. International law generally sets forth four criteria for statehood: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.” (Art. I, Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States) Given such criteria, there are various “micro” and borderline “states,” such as San Marino, Monaco, and Lichtenstein. And “states” are not the only “legal persons” under international law–there are also international organizations such as the UN (see Brownlie, ch. 3) and other sui generis entities such as the Holy See (Vatican City is not a state under international law; it has a murky relationship with the Holy See). But even by positive international law standards the Holy See’s status as a state is borderline (see Brownlie, p. 64), although it is recognized as a (non-member) state by the UN.
Is being a “state” in this sense necessarily unlibertarian? I think not, since none of these criteria, even “government,” necessarily implies aggression. Libertarians are against aggression, and thus also against institutionalized aggression; the “state” opposed by libertarians is the agency of organized or institutionalized aggression. In Power and Market, Rothbard quotes Oppenheimer from his The State:
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. … I propose … to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others “the economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.” … The state is an organization of the political means [emphasis added].
Or, as Oppenheimer defined it in his introduction to The State: “I mean by [the ‘State’] that summation of privileges and dominating positions which are brought into being by extra economic power. And in contrast to this, I mean by Society, the totality of concepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man …. ” (See also Rothbard’s classic The Anatomy of the State.)
Here, by the way, we see the genius of Hoppe’s essentialist definition of socialism not merely as centralized control of the means of production, but as “an institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims” (A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 2; also see pp. 12). To those who would object that this means all states are socialist, and all socialism is statist–yes. Exactly; and this is why libertarians are anti-state. It is because we are anti-aggression; and all states (in our sense) employ aggression; and this is what is also wrong with socialism: it is merely institutionalized aggression. Thus Hoppe explicitly writes:
There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.
(A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, pp. 148-49; emphasis added)
In short: Lew, I stand corrected. The Holy See does not tax; it does not compel; it does not commit aggression. It is not a state in our sense, no matter what the UN calls it. And maybe this is why it is hated by leftists and liberals.
10:17 pm on July 7, 2009