To see how nonsensical this claim is, let’s apply it to some concrete examples from history. If “government is the things we decide to do together,” then “we” must have decided to use US troops to break the Pullman Strike and to institute martial law in most western states and use the National Guard to wage all-out war on striking miners. “We” must have decided together on the mass incarceration of political prisoners during WWI, and the detention of Japanese-Americans during WWII. “We” must have decided to overthrow Diem and fabricate the Tonkin Gulf incident to lie ourselves into war in Vietnam, and used “Kuwaiti incubator babies” and “weapons of mass destruction” to lie ourselves into two wars in Iraq. “We” decided to keep ourselves from knowing the provisions of treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiated in secret by the US Trade Rep in collusion with global corporations.

I repeat, without apology: Anyone who uses this phrase is stupid.

Furthermore it’s odd, if government really is just “what we decide to do together,” that it puts such enormous effort and resources into making sure we — the allegedly sovereign public it serves — don’t decide anything it disapproves of. For decades the U.S. government has treated U.S. public opinion as something to be managed with the same propaganda and disinformation techniques it would use to manage the perceptions of an enemy population or government.

The idea that “we” can “decide together” at all presupposes that we’re free to communicate with one another, without any outside attempts at disruption or sabotage by the government we allegedly work through, in order to decide what to tell the government to do. Operation COINTELPRO was used to sabotage “left-wing radical” organizations in the 1960s because the US government viewed the portion of the political spectrum it occupied as illegitimate, and wanted to sanitize that portion of the political spectrum from the marketplace of ideas.

In recent years Congress has explicitly approved Pentagon operations to operate covertly in the media to manage American public perception in the same way it previously operated outside the US. Former Clinton “National Security” Advisor Sandy Berger warned in 2004, regarding declining public support for the Iraq war: “We have too much at stake … to lose the American people.” That didn’t sound much like a government waiting for the American people to “decide together” whether the war in Iraq was a good thing, did it?

And now the Pentagon is conducting research into the causes of the tipping points in public opinion that led to mass disaffection and the coalescence of opposition in Arab Spring uprisings like Tunisia and Egypt — so it can prevent such “social contagion” (their words) from happening here, of course. Considering the Occupy movement in the US was directly inspired by the organizational model of the Arab Spring, M15 and Syntagma, this is no mere academic matter. In fact the Pentagon specifically refers to “nonviolent social activists” and “radical causes” promoted by peaceful NGOs.

So if government isn’t just what “we decide to do together,” who does it serve? All the actions described above make a lot more sense if we view government, in Marx’s words, as “the executive committee of the capitalist ruling class.” That should be — and was — a good enough definition for free market libertarians. For example, Franz Oppenheimer called the state the “political means” to wealth, by which an economic ruling class of capitalists extracted rents from the rest of society via artificial scarcities, monopolies and artificial property rights enforced by government.

The state is not “us.” It is THEM.

If government was just people grouping together voluntarily to undertake some desired social end, who could object? What even would form the basis of an objection? Free association and decision by consensus hardly seem the sort of things actually underlying our incensed debates about politics, the emotional nature of which seems to hint that the stakes are high (or at least that we honestly believe them to be). I think rather that some people suspect the truth — that government is something more or something other than simply “the things we choose to do together.” I think these people suspect that government presents legitimate dangers, imposing the preferences of some special, limited group on all of society, regardless of what we choose. And the choosing, or lack thereof, is the essential principle that is the heart of the libertarian critique.

We remonstrate with government not because it is government; we are not interested in the word itself or with random opposition to institutions that are called a certain thing. It is the lack of choice — the fact of coercive imposition or aggression — which we call attention to, a certain way of behaving which we see as inhumane, as contrary to human nature, or morality, or some other rubric against which we as sentient human beings grade observed conduct. Libertarians demur to the idea of government on historical, theoretical and empirical grounds. Historically, we see that government was never really about what “we choose to do together,” but was instead first about conquest and domination of a ruled group by a ruling group. As Frank Chodorov teaches, “the premise of the state is the exploitation of producers by the use of power,” “this master-slave economy” being “the earliest manifestation of the state.” No idea as lofty or as virtuous as togetherness or social contract motivated or crossed the minds of the first states, which were nothing more than bastard progeny of vanquishment, of rape, plunder and spoliation.

Theoretically, we oppose government as one specific example of the improper use of force, a discrete, identifiable form of aggression. To the extent that a monopoly on the use of force within a given area is built into the very definition of government, we oppose government on philosophical grounds. Empirically, observing the practical effects of government authority in human society, its failures to even mitigate the problems it was supposedly inaugurated to solve, we surmise that there must be better ways to go about unraveling those problems. Experience teaches us that government has, in point of fact, aggravated, even created, most of what sane, ordinary people regard as problems. Having thus torn aside the the most popular veils of falsehood that cover the state, its historical origin and function and its consequences, the libertarian gets down to the important business of talking about what actually would constitute that which “we choose to do together.”

It should be clear enough that genuinely voluntary, cooperative forms of organization, big and small, for profit or not, are malleable and versatile enough to set about doing the many things we might want to do together. Without the state, always an illiberal force of domination, orthodoxy and conformity, our many experiments would compete perfectly nonviolently with one another. A world of coercive government “solutions” in grayscale would be transformed into a full color panoply of potential answers, none with the power to force compliance or acceptance. It is the lack of such a power that is the source of a free society’s robustness and resilience. We should desire deeply to do things together. Human beings are social and community-oriented by nature. Given freedom from the state and external coercion generally, we are unlikely to simply split off and wander solitarily for the rest of our time on earth. But true togetherness does not and cannot result from defeat and subjugation, which can only alienate us from one another and obstruct any worthwhile goal we might have as fellow humans. Libertarians raise a toast to “the things we choose to do together” — and that’s why we stand in opposition to the state.