New York's Finest, for example, who are also unionized, by the way — they feel such solidarity with their "brothers and sisters," you see, but, more decisively, expect support should they ever strike — were uncharacteristically inept when it came to nabbing the perps who torched newsstands during the truckers strike. (Some stands somehow managed to get their newspaper deliveries, but that turned out to be as prudential as movin' in on the Gambinos' turf in the '60s.)

Unions are little mafias that want to be big mafias, and are not above breaking a few legs to "set an example" that's only "good for business." And they can count on the applause of all "responsible" segments of our "free society."

The TWU's political theater, captured in all its ugliness on the local news, is performed daily outside the Hyatt hotel where the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) "negotiates" with those who would commandeer and, if it suits them, sabotage its property. You can just smell the thuggery. All that Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki seem capable of doing, however, is to commend "both parties" (i.e., aggressor and victim) for "staying at the bargaining table" or some such bullshit. Perhaps Bloomberg doesn't care to hear TWU's President Toussaint repeat his invitation of three years ago to shut his trap.

Strikes are politically protected thefts, and those men are politicians who covet Union support would rather die than be thought of as "anti-Union," even though that label should be no more malodorous than "anti-Mafia" or "anti-terrorist."

Tens of thousands of Americans are ready and willing to work for the MTA on current or even inferior terms, which would still be superior to what many of them enjoy now. Those TWU members who want "more, more, more" need only make themselves more productive as the free market defines and rewards productivity and then let prospective employers bid for their fine services.

But why work so hard, they must think, when crime pays so much better? Such musings reveal striking unionists to be, not "friends of labor," but enemies of real, flesh-and-blood working people who would gladly take their place.

After the TWU held the city hostage for eleven days in 1980 (April 1-11), members of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) thought they could reinforce their monopoly privilege by the same means. So several months later, on August 3, they walked off their jobs.

In response, however, President Reagan did not stand alongside I-95 asking drivers, as then-Mayor Ed Koch did during the transit strike, "How am I doin'?" Reagan simply did what he had promised to do: he fired and replaced them all.

By the way, the feared mid-air collisions never materialized. "I thought Reagan was bluffing," one striker belched.

NYC's and New York State's "leadership" could free NYC once and for all from this triennial hostage scenario, with its devastating economic and psychologic toll, by inducing the MTA to place ads for those rocket-scientist jobs — driving trains and buses! The netherworld to which Reagan dispatched the dispatchers would then soon have a vibrant immigrant population who, I'm sure, would bestow upon that realm all the blessings of diversity.

Government, in sum, must be limited to the smallest possible minimum; "inaction" was the proper function of government, since only inaction can permit the individual to flourish and achieve happiness. Any intervention by government, Lao-tzu declared, would be counterproductive, and would lead to confusion and turmoil. After referring to the common experience of mankind with government, Lao-tzu came to this incisive conclusion: "The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished…. The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be."

The wisest course, then, is to keep the government simple and for it to take no action, for then the world "stabilizes itself." As Lao-tzu put it, "Therefore the Sage says: I take no action yet the people transform themselves, I favor quiescence and the people right themselves, I take no action and the people enrich themselves…."

Lao-tzu arrived at his challenging and radical new insights in a world dominated by the power of Oriental despotism. What strategy to pursue for social change? It surely was unthinkable for Lao-tzu, with no available historical or contemporary example of libertarian social change, to set forth any optimistic strategy, let alone contemplate forming a mass movement to overthrow the State. And so Lao-tzu took the only strategic way out that seemed open to him, counseling the familiar Taoist path of withdrawal from society and the world, of retreat and inner contemplation.

I submit that while contemporary Taoists advocate retreat from the world as a matter of religious or ideological principle, it is very possible that Lao-tzu called for retreat not as a principle, but as the only strategy that in his despair seemed open to him. If it was hopeless to try to disentangle society from the oppressive coils of the State, then he perhaps assumed that the proper course was to counsel withdrawal from society and the world as the only way to escape State tyranny.

That retreat from the State was a dominant Taoist objective may be seen in the views of the great Taoist Chuang-tzu (369 BC - 286 BC) who, two centuries after Lao-tzu, pushed the master's ideas of laissez faire to their logical conclusion: individualist anarchism.

The influential Chuang-tzu, a notable stylist who wrote in allegorical parables, was a highly learned man in the state of Meng, and also descended from the old aristocracy. A minor official in his native state, Chuang-tzu's fame as a writer spread far and wide throughout China, so much so that King Wei of the Ch'u kingdom sent an emissary to Chuang bearing great gifts and urging him to become Wei's chief minister of state. Chuang-tzu's scornful rejection of the king's offer is one of the great declarations in history on the evils underlying the glittering trappings of State power; it was a fitting declaration from the man who was perhaps the world's first anarchist:

A thousand ounces of gold is indeed a great reward, and the office of chief minister is truly an elevated position. But have you, sir, not seen the sacrificial ox awaiting the sacrifices at the royal shrine of state? It is well cared for and fed for a few years, caparisoned with rich brocades, so that it will be ready to be led into the Great Temple. At that moment, even though it would gladly change places with any solitary pig, can it do so? So, quick and be off with you! Don't sully me, I would rather roam and idle about in a muddy ditch, at my own amusement, than to be put under the restraints that the ruler would impose. I will never take any official service, and thereby I will satisfy my own purposes.

Chuang-tzu reiterated and embellished Lao-tzu's devotion to laissez faire and opposition to state rule: "There has been such a thing as letting mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind [with success]." In fact, the world simply "does not need governing; in fact it should not be governed." Chuang-tzu was also the first to work out the idea of "spontaneous order," developed particularly by Proudhon in the nineteenth and by F. A. Hayek of the Austrian School in the twentieth Century: "Good order results spontaneously when things are let alone."

Chuang-tzu, moreover, was perhaps the first theorist to see the State as a brigand writ large: "A petty thief is put in jail. A great brigand becomes a ruler of a State." Thus the only difference between State rulers and out-and-out robber chieftains is the size of their depredations. This theme of ruler-as-robber was to be repeated, independently of course, by Cicero and then by St. Augustine and other Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was dean of the Austrian School. Posted on Mises.org December 5, 2005, the above was excerpted from Rothbard’s "Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change Toward Laissez Faire," The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol IX No. 2 (Fall 1990), 43-67. He delivered an ancestor of this paper in Poland in March 1986 (when, it doesn’t hurt to remind readers, that land was still Communist-ruled).