What's wrong with the State?

It's a very simple proposition. It's not true that anyone living today, with the exception of newly naturalized citizens, willingly entered into a "social contract" of any type, whereby they disposed of some measure of their right to be free from violence to enter into a compact with the government.

Therefore the only apparatus of state power is violence. Near or far, somewhere down the line, state power in enforced, not by social power or voluntary association, but by the threat of violence. Therefore, the state exists and is perpetuated by violence or the threat thereof. It is either explicitly violent (as in the case of police/paramilitaries) or implicitly (IRS).

In fact, the State holds a monopoly on "legitimate" violence.

Violence is evil.

Therefore the State is an attempt to monopolize and legitimized what is evil.

Whether it is better to have a small state or no state for the preservation of individual rights is a matter of some debate, but that is a utilitarian, rather than a moral, question

 Thanks to Albert Jay Nock and Murray Rothbard, from whom this syllogism was more or less stolen.