There is always a crisis.  It must be real enough to frighten, but vague enough to remain unsolvable.  The goal is not resolution but perpetuation.  The state thrives on crisis.  A frightened public is a compliant public.  Compliance is the currency of power.

A free and self-sufficient people are a threat to this arrangement.  They don’t look to the state for solutions.  They do not need saviors.  Dependency can be manufactured.  Fear is the tool, and crisis is the justification.  The public must be convinced that their safety, their prosperity—even their morality—depends on the state’s intervention. The alternative is catastrophe.

The secondhand dealers in ideas emerge on cue.  Their job is not to think but to repeat.  They write, they lecture, they warn.  They do not question.  They are the mouthpieces of the machine, the junior officers in the army of fear.  Without them, the illusion collapses.  Without their ink and voices, the state would struggle to sustain the illusion.

Each crisis serves a purpose.  A war requires obedience.  An economic downturn requires intervention.  A social upheaval demands control.  The cycle repeats with each new hobgoblin.  The people are not asked to think, only to react—to demand action, to plead for solutions.  The solutions are always the same: more power, more money, more control.

The state does not work alone.  Business joins the game, dressed as an adversary but acting as an accomplice.  The state claims to rein in corporate power, to regulate industry for the public good.  The reality is different.  Regulations do not break monopolies, they create them.  The largest corporations welcome more rules, because they help write them. They can afford the compliance costs.  Smaller competitors can’t.  What is sold as a safeguard for the people is in reality a fortification of power.

Capitalism is the enemy—not in reality, but in rhetoric.  It must be discredited, not for its failures, but for its successes.  Capitalism is voluntary exchange, and voluntary exchange bypasses the state.  This can’t be allowed.  The state must be the gatekeeper of all things, the allocator, the planner, the supreme architect of society.  To achieve this, capitalism must be redefined, distorted, made into something it’s not.  It must be associated with greed, exploitation, crisis.  The public must demand its replacement.  And what will replace it?  More planning, more regulation, more control.

So, the crisis must never end.  The people must never feel secure.  They must never feel independent.  The next emergency will come, and the cycle will repeat.  A little more control, a little less freedom.  Always for the greater good.  Always backed by statistics.  Always inevitable.

The state will not retreat.  It does not relinquish power.  It feeds on fear, on dependence, on obedience.  As long as the crisis remains, so does its justification.  The eternal crisis is here to stay.

Reference

Murray Rothbard; War Collectivism