Whence The Authority Of The State?

Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute essentially asks: “Whence the authority of the state?”.

There is a relatively simple libertarian answer, that surely is not original to me, and surely has been propounded before more competently. I just don’t know where. My version of it is here: http://libertarianmajority.net/whence-the-authority-of-the-state.

Can anyone point to some prior art on this? The only prior art I can think of is a decades-old pamphlet I have against anarchism written by John Hospers, though it doesn’t talk about homesteading. I’m also of course interested in prior art from anarchists in the form of attempted rebuttals to such an argument.

Ad hoc efforts at a rebuttal, without reference to the anarcholibertarian literature, will be taken as an admission that the a/l literature has an embarrassing blind spot about this straightforward argument. :-)