#2

consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction. Governments' provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering. To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket. Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and
since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same ways as racketeers. There is, of course, a difference: Racketeers, by the conventional definition, operate without the sanctity of governments.

Charles Tilly, 'War Making and State Making as Organized Crime' in Peter Evans, Dietrich
Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (eds) Bringing the State Back (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).

# 1

Democracy is the idea that the state responds to what the people want. But as the demos grows accustomed to receiving substantial benefits from the state, subjects begin to conceive of the state not as an instrument of their own will, but as an independent source of benefits. The abstraction of rights is a powerful and sometimes useful idea, but like all abstractions, it can turn reality upside down. And as a right expands beyond signifying a freedom and begins to signify an entitlement to some substantial benefit—sliding, that is to say, from live conceived of as a game to life conceived of as a collective endeavor to satisfy the needs of human beings—it begins to turn into the blueprint for a static state.

Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind. How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (Encounter Books, 2012), 72-73.