I am currently reading The Great Fiction, by Hans-Herman Hoppe. At the end of the first chapter I came across this gem of a thought experiment. In my mind it is one of the most devastating and bullet proof arguments against the necessity or even the utility of the state. Hoppe suggests that whenever one is debating a statist one present it. I intend to do just that.
I suggest that you always and persistently confront [statists] with the following riddle. Assume a group of people, aware of the possibility of conflicts between them. Someone then proposes, as a solution to this human problem, that he (or someone) be made the ultimate arbiter in any such case of conflict, including those conflicts in which he is involved. Is this is a deal that you would accept? I am confident that he will be considered either a joker or mentally unstable. Yet this is precisely what all statists propose.
This is intellectual Kung Fu at it's finest.
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