State justice is not justice.

Miguel Hernández

State justice is not justice. It is a coercive monopoly over conflict resolution, operated by the very apparatus that has structural incentives to rule in its own favor.

Think about it for a second. The State is simultaneously legislator, judge, and interested party. It drafts the rules, interprets them, and benefits from their enforcement. When a taxpayer disputes a tax, who decides? A court funded by that very same tax.

When a citizen reports police abuse, who investigates? A structure that answers to the same chain of command.

There is no institutional arrangement in history that has produced more predictably biased results than a monopoly judging cases where it is itself a party.

The usual objection is that without a State, justice would be chaotic, biased, and bought by the highest bidder. What this describes is not the private alternative, but the current system.

Those who can afford expensive lawyers get different results than those who cannot. Legal proceedings drag on for years or decades. Criminal justice has recidivism rates that prove its failure by any imaginable metric.

And the victim, supposedly the center of the system, almost never receives restitution. The State punishes the aggressor at the taxpayer's expense, and the victim is left exactly where they started.

A private justice system operates under radically different incentives.

Arbitrators and mediation agencies compete on reputation.

An arbitrator who consistently rules with bias loses clients, loses contracts, and goes bankrupt.

A state judge who rules with bias collects the same salary until retiring with a privileged pension.

The market feedback mechanism, which is the only thing that disciplines the quality of any service, is completely absent in monopolistic justice.

The law does not need a monopolist to exist, just as shoe production doesn't need one. The history of medieval commercial law, the Lex Mercatoria, is an empirical demonstration of this.

Merchants from all over Europe developed a sophisticated legal body, with private arbitration courts, without state intervention, precisely because they needed efficient conflict resolution and the feudal apparatus did not provide it. It worked for centuries.

What sustains the judicial monopoly is not its superiority, but the very same mechanism that sustains every state monopoly: the legal prohibition of competition. The State does not offer better justice; it simply forbids others from offering it.