Are You the Property of the State?

Thomas Woods reports:

Market prices, in other words, are not artificial, wicked things that discourage social cooperation. They make social cooperation, properly understood, possible in the first place. They convey the rule that we may not simply walk around as self-absorbed savages, taking whatever we want from whomever we want, as if nothing and no one can trump our demands and desires. We must be willing to offer something in exchange for the things we acquire, such that the person providing them — instead of being exploited by us, with no thought to his well-being at all — can see his own condition improved as well.

With the state, on the other hand, the price is whatever the state says it is. It will provide services you do not want, will never use, and may even find morally repugnant, and then tell you what you must pay for them. In the case of eminent domain, where the state confiscates your property for its own purposes, you will be paid something, but the state itself will decide exactly what it will pay you. How is this preferable to a world in which each individual is allowed to declare the terms on which he will dispose of his person and property, and in which no exchange takes place unless both parties voluntarily agree to it?

Choice or monopoly.Property or theft.Those are the differences between market and state.