Summary
Defense and state
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Extract
The Will to Be Free.
The Role of Ideology in National Defense
The practical superiority of markets over governments has become readily apparent. Only the most dogmatic of state apologists continue to deny this obvious fact--at least with respect to the production of many goods and services. Free-market economists and libertarians go much further, of course. They affirm the market's superiority in nearly all realms. Yet only a handful of anarchocapitalists, most notably Murray Rothbard, have dared claim that a free market could also do a better job of providing protection from foreign states.(1) National defense is generally considered the most essential of fall government services. This widely conceded exception to the efficacy of markets scorns to have irrefutable empirical confirmation. If private defense is better than government defense, why has government kept winning over the centuries? Indeed, the state's military prowess has more than seemingly precluded the modern emergence of any anarchocapitalist society. At one time, as far as we know, all humankind lived in stateless bands of hunter-gatherers and had done so since the emergence of modern man some fifty thousand years ago. But beginning around 11,000 B.C., a gradual transition to plant cultivation and animal husbandry--in what is variously identified as the Neolithic, Food Production, or Agricultural Revolution--fostered a steady increase in population densities. These denser, settled populations became susceptible to what the distinguished historian William H. McNeill (1992) has aptly termed microparasites and macroparasites. Microparasites are the assorted diseases and other pests that have constantly plagued civilization until (and to a lesser extent since) the development of modern medicine. And macroparasites are governments, which arose either through conquest or in reaction to the threat of conquest, until they now dominate every corner of the globe.(2) Radical libertarians, such as Rothbard (1974, 1978), explicitly acknowledge the historical triumph of governments over primitive stateless societies when they embrace the conquest theory of the origins of the state.(3) Yet this acknowledgment boxes them into an apparent paradox. How can they attribute the origins of government to successful conquest and simultaneously maintain that a completely free society, without gover...See the full content of this document
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