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… is from page 3 of the 1973 reissue (with an Introduction by Walter Grinder) of Albert Jay Nock [2]’s 1935 masterpiece, Our Enemy, the State [3]; Nock distinguished “social power” – voluntary choices, actions, and arrangements such as occur in markets and in mutual-aid societies [4] – from “State power”:
Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.