Murray Rothbard on Secession and State Boundaries

"The form in which all European states are governed today allows the services demanded of citizens to be squandered on foolish, frivolous and criminal undertakings. The whim of individuals, the self-interest of vanishingly small minorities, all too often determines the goal towards which the efforts of the whole are directed. Thus the individual citizen works and bleeds so that wars may be waged which destroy his life or his prosperity, so that fortresses, palaces, railroads, harbors or canals may be built from which neither he nor nine-tenths of the nation will ever derive the slightest benefit, so that new offices may be created, which will make the state machine still more cumbersome, the friction of its wheels still harder, in which he will lose still more of his time, still more of his freedom, so that officials may be highly paid who have no other purpose than to lead an ornamental existence at his expense and to make his existence more difficult; In a word, he works and bleeds in order to make his yoke heavier and his chains tighter and to create the possibility of obtaining even more work and even more blood from him...." Max Nordau

"The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men." Rose Wilder Lane