The Robber and the Government: Differences and One Great Big Likeness

“For what are robber bands except little kingdoms.” —Saint Augustine

Government and robbery are not synonymous. Government actors and robbers differ in six ways:

1. Scale: A robber might, over a career, victimize dozens or even hundreds. Modern governmental coercion affects millions every day, simultaneously, permeating virtually every aspect of life. The tax collector’s apparatus extends throughout entire societies, and government restrictions pervasively threaten the initiation of coercion.
2. Exclusivity: Many robbers might operate in the same territory, but a government has a monopoly on institutionalized force within its boundaries. As described by Max Weber, “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”¹
3. Overtness: Robbers typically operate furtively, concealing their activities. Governments conduct coercion openly through published codes, uniformed enforcement agencies, public courthouses, and so on. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, citizens could go online and view exactly how many people they were permitted to meet with, whether masks were required, and how far apart they had to stand from others. Overtness represents part of rule-​of-​law aspiration.
4. Regularity: Governmental coercion operates according to documented procedures, established schedules, and publicly proclaimed rules. Robbers, of course, do not. Tax collectors demand specific percentages according to published tables; legal penalties follow codified guidelines. Predictability makes governmental extraction both more palatable and more efficient, as citizens themselves perform much of the compliance work.
5. A pretense and acceptance of beneficialness to the whole: Robbers rarely claim that their actions are beneficial, but a government presents each tax, regulation, and prohibition as beneficial to the whole of the polity. Moreover, for any given instance of governmentalization of social affairs, many citizens do accept it as beneficial for the whole. Victims of robbery, by contrast, recognize their victimization.

6. A pretense and acceptance of consent: Robbers rarely claim that their actions are consensual, but a government presents each tax, regulation, and prohibition as part and parcel of a contract—the so-​called social contract. Governments redefine concepts to obscure the coercive nature of their activities. Taxation is not taking individual property, but collecting what, as a matter of contract, citizens owe to the government. Through semantic manipulation, complying with such coercive takings becomes a duty of justice. In Orwellian extremes, words take on their opposite meanings:

   War is Peace

   Freedom is Slavery

   Ignorance is Strength²

   Thanks in part to such semantic stratagems, citizens fail to recognize themselves as victims of coercive threats and takings. The same cannot be said of victims of robbery.

The question is not whether the six differences represent government’s improvements over criminal predation. The question is whether they undo the reality of the initiation of coercion. The intellectual veins examined here answer no.

The government-​robber comparison appears across three veins of intellectual work. The first, avowed libertarianism, employs this comparison to argue that government is no more than institutionalized theft. A government is thus not merely similar to a robber but fundamentally the same. From Lysander Spooner, through Murray Rothbard, to contemporary anarcho-​capitalist scholars, this tradition uses the comparison as a moral critique, concluding that the state should not exist. This vein of thought is not the focus here.

The other two veins, twentieth-​century political economy and a long train of philosophical thought, illustrate that scholars across different methodological approaches have found the comparison valuable without embracing anarchist conclusions. Such scholars employed the comparison to better understand the nature of political authority.

Max Weber’s emphasis on coercion as the defining characteristic of state authority provided a conceptual framework for many twentieth-​century efforts in political economy. Weber did not explicitly compare government action to robbery. But his insight into how government operates a monopoly of force opened space for examining how states establish and preserve their coercive monopoly through means that parallel, while differing from, criminal enterprises.

Franz Oppenheimer distinguished between the “economic means” and “political means” of wealth acquisition. He categorized government as fundamentally reliant upon “the forcible appropriation of the labor of others.”³ Oppenheimer observed that “the State grew from the subjection of one group of men by another” through the same mechanisms that characterize robbery but at larger scale and with greater permanence. Oppenheimer’s analysis aimed simply to explain state formation rather than condemn it.

Douglass North,⁴ working in the same mode as Oppenheimer, extended this analysis. He argues that “the state is an organization with a comparative advantage in violence extending over a geographic area whose boundaries are determined by its power to tax constituents.” For North, understanding the government’s fundamental nature as institutionalized coercion helped explain its behavior better than other theories grounded in social contract or public interest.

Mancur Olson⁵ wrote of the “stationary bandit.” He used the government-​robber comparison to solve a puzzle in institutional economic theory: Why would a predatory ruler ever provide public goods? The comparison revealed that self-​interested extraction creates incentives for infrastructure investment. A roving bandit takes everything and leaves; a stationary one realizes that preserving and enhancing the tax base allows for long-​term, repeated extraction. Olson’s model offers an economic theory of the state. It explains why even dictators and modern-​day kleptocrats have incentives to provide some benefits to the targets of their predation.

James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s public choice framework rejected what Buchanan termed romantic notions of government, insisting instead on ‘politics without romance’⁶—analysis of political actors with the same assumptions economists apply to market participants. This unromantic perspective treats politicians and bureaucrats as self-​interested agents rather than selfless public servants. Gordon Tullock made explicit the connection between this analytical stance and the government-​robber comparison. His⁷ work “The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft” directly linked theft to the use of politics to seek transfers and other privileges. Like theft, such political rent-​seeking generates deadweight losses—net reductions in social welfare. Tullock demonstrated that political processes institutionalize predation by making extraction appear legitimate while concentrating benefits and dispersing costs. It should be acknowledged that Tullock and, especially, Buchanan also expounded a contractarian view of political authority and in that way are out of step with David Hume, Adam Smith, and many others of the classical liberal tradition who rejected contractarianism.

Robert Higgs⁸ implicitly employed the robbery analogy to explain asymmetrical government expansion—rapid growth during crises without a return to pre-​crisis government size, scope, and power afterward. Just as opportunistic thieves exploit moments of vulnerability, political actors use emergencies to overcome normal resistance to expansions of the extractive apparatus of government.

The twentieth-​century analytical tradition has ancient roots. Philosophers from Ancient Greece through the Enlightenment employed the government-​robber comparison while examining questions of legitimacy and justice.

Thinkers have long recognized that, despite differences in scale, institutionalization, and public acceptance, government and robbery share a fundamental reliance on the initiation of coercion.

Ancient philosophers, operating in societies where state power was often exercised without modern pretense of democratic legitimacy, were among the first to articulate this comparison. Diogenes the Cynic is attributed with saying this after seeing magistrates imprisoning someone who had stolen a bottle: “The great thieves are leading away the little thief.”⁹ The remark emphasizes not just similarity but hierarchy—government officials are “great thieves.”

As Christianity became the dominant intellectual framework of Europe, theologians wrestled with the tension between Christ’s teachings about peace and justice and the brutal realities of government. Saint Augustine acknowledged the necessity of government in a fallen world, but in The City of God he posed a crucial question: How does organized coercion become morally distinguishable from simple predation? He asked:

Augustine argued that both governments and robber bands operate through similar mechanisms—territorial control, hierarchical organization, and wealth redistribution. Scale alone does not undo the fundamental likeness.

Saint Thomas Aquinas built on Augustine: “Hence Augustine says: ‘Justice apart, what are kingdoms but organized brigandage?’” Aquinas analyzed when coercive institutions transcend their predatory origins. By arguing that government without justice “is a robbery like the doings of highwaymen,”¹¹ he established that the method of operation—coercion—remains constant while the moral character depends on adherence to justice. Aquinas distinguished between just and unjust initiations of coercion.

The author of Discourse of Voluntary Servitude—often said to have been Étienne de la Boétie but perhaps in fact Michel de Montaigne¹²—described French citizens as systematically robbed by their rulers: “Your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away.”¹³ What distinguished the analysis was the author’s focus on willing submission: citizens, as it were, embracing both their exploitation and their exploiters.

Hugo Grotius, in The Rights of War and Peace, prefigured Mancur Olson’s stationary bandit theory, arguing that transitions may take place from robber bands to governments: “They who had been only robbers, embracing another mode of life, become a state.”¹⁴ This observation creates an interesting tension with Grotius’s own contractarian theory of government.

Montesquieu observed that “in a republic, there is not so coercive a force as in other governments”—not that republics avoid coercion, but that they employ less of it.¹⁵

Adam Smith explicitly compared “the violence and injustice of great conquerors” to “petty thieves, robbers, and murderers,” noting that the former “are a hundred times more mischievous and destructive” yet receive admiration rather than condemnation.¹⁶ For Smith, scale provided no moral justification; indeed, it arguably made governmental coercion worse than common robbery. Like Augustine and Aquinas, Smith saw a certain understanding of justice as the line government must not cross to remain morally superior to mere predation.

Frédéric Bastiat was particularly direct. In The Law,¹⁷ he distinguished between plunder outside the law and legal plunder: “Sometimes the law takes the side of plunder. Sometimes it carries it out with its own hands, in order to spare the blushes, the risk and scruples of its beneficiary … In a word, there is legal plunder.”¹⁸ Legal plunder eliminates both the risk and the moral condemnation while achieving the same wealth transfers.

What emerges from these thinkers is a consistent recognition that the dimensions distinguishing government from robbery do not eliminate the fundamental similarity. Whether writing under emperors, constitutional monarchs, or republics, political thinkers repeatedly identified coercion as a defining characteristic of political authority. Some sense of moral superiority was not a reliable means of differentiating government from robbers. In this line of thinking, governments that merit universal approbation could exist. But few behave in such a manner.

When thinkers of exceptional caliber repeatedly find a comparison useful across different centuries and methodological approaches, dismissing it as fringe becomes intellectually indefensible. The persistence of the government-​robber comparison across two millennia suggests it captures something essential about political authority.

Augustine and Aquinas recognized that justice of some kind transforms the moral character of coercion yet does not eliminate its coercive nature. Olson’s stationary bandit provides public goods not from benevolence but from a goal of long-​term extraction. The comparison remains useful because it reveals what even the best governments must do—systematically initiate coercion—while raising the persistent question of when such coercion serves justice. Crucial to answering such a question is the conceptual separation, illustrated by separating points five and six in our listing of differences, between an action being an initiation of coercion and it being beneficial for the whole.

We do social science no good by beginning with assumptions that misclassify what an object is. As Joseph Schumpeter remarked:

Properly understanding government’s nature—recognizing both the great likeness and the meaningful differences between it and robbery—is the first step toward distinguishing between good and bad government.