Interestingly, although the prescriptions and requirements of a natural order appear intuitively plausible and reasonably undemanding on its constituent parts, i.e., on us as individual actors, as a matter of fact, however, we inhabit a world that sharply deviates from such an order. To be sure, there are still traces of natural law and justice to be found in civil life and the handling of civil disputes, but natural law has become increasingly deformed, distorted, corrupted, swamped, and submerged by ever higher mountains of legislative laws, i.e., by rules and procedures at variance with natural law and justice.

It is not too difficult to identify the root cause for this increasingly noticeable deviation of social reality from a natural order and to explain this transformation as the necessary consequence of one elementary as well as fundamental original error. This error - the "original sin," if you will - is the monopolization of the function of judgeship and adjudication. That is, the "original sin" is to appoint one person or agency (but no one else!) to act as final judge in all conflicts, including also conflicts involving itself.

The institution of such a monopoly apparently fulfills the classic definition of a State as a monopolist of ultimate decision-making and of violence over some territory that it acquired neither through acts of original appropriation nor through a voluntary transfer from a previous owner. The State and no one else! - is appointed and permitted to sit in judgment of its own actions and to violently enforce its own judgment.

Hans Herman Hoppe