{"id":43,"date":"2002-09-21T23:17:00","date_gmt":"2002-09-22T04:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=43"},"modified":"2002-09-21T23:17:00","modified_gmt":"2002-09-22T04:17:00","slug":"defeating-hussein-without-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=43","title":{"rendered":"Defeating Hussein Without Government"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The aftermath of 9\/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist.<\/p>\n<p>For many years before the WTC came down I believed that America<br \/>\ncould be better defended by have no government than by the system we<br \/>\nhave now,  I imagined a nation of heavily armed militias, without<br \/>\nthe power-projection capabilities of a conventional military but<br \/>\nwith the capability to inflict a world of grief on an invader &#8212; and<br \/>\nwith nobody having the authority to tell them to surrender.  We<br \/>\ncould have a home defense better than Switzerland&#8217;s, our larger<br \/>\npopulation and longer distances doing for us what mountainous terrain<br \/>\ndoes for the Swiss.<\/p>\n<p>There would still be a place in an anarchist America for<br \/>\nprofessional soldiers &#8212; not many, but a few heavy troop formations<br \/>\nwould be kept on retainer by consortia of insurance companies.  Yes, I<br \/>\nsaid insurance companies, that&#8217;s because how free markets socialize<br \/>\nshared risks.  Normal law enforcement would be funded by pools set up<br \/>\nby vendors of crime insurance looking to reduce their payouts;<br \/>\nnational defense and overseas power projection (to the extent the term<br \/>\nstill had meaning in a stateless society) would be funded by people<br \/>\nwho bought war insurance (say, businesses with overseas assets to<br \/>\nprotect).<\/p>\n<p>These measures, I was and am convinced, would stop conventional<br \/>\nwars of conquest dead in their tracks. Invade a nation of 350,000,000<br \/>\nlibertarians, most of them routinely armed?  Yeah.  Right.  Any<br \/>\nWar-College-trained military officer will tell you that urban warfare<br \/>\nagainst guerrillas on their home ground chews up armies faster than<br \/>\nanything else.  Witness Stalingrad.<\/p>\n<p>Without a government, many of the <em>reasons<\/em> people might go<br \/>\nto war against America would also vanish.  No entangling alliances, no<br \/>\nforeign policy to object to.  Conventional terrorism would become a<br \/>\nlot dicier proposition in a libertarian anarchy, too &#8212; as in<br \/>\nIsrael, where armed civilians have on numerous occasions thwarted<br \/>\nattempted massacres by shooting back.  And, of course, the WTC would<br \/>\nprobably still be standing if the <em>passengers<\/em> had been<br \/>\narmed&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I grew up in the shadow of the Soviet threat.  Theirs was an evil,<br \/>\nevil system, but they were at bottom geopolitically rational. They<br \/>\ncalculated their chances very cold-bloodedly, and never pushed the<br \/>\nbig red button.  An ungoverned America would have stood them off, I<br \/>\nbelieve, long enough for the inevitable Hayekian collapse to remove<br \/>\nthe problem.<\/p>\n<p>But now we face the prospect of weapons of mass destruction dropping<br \/>\ninto the hands of people who are behaviorally indistinguishable from<br \/>\nstone psychotics.  That prospect poses problems of a different nature<br \/>\nthan Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did.  Because what Al-Qaeda<br \/>\nwants is not driven or constrained by geopolitics, by pragmatism, by a<br \/>\nrational estimation of risk and reward.  They have no population to<br \/>\nanswer to even in the limited sense that Hitler and Stalin did.  They<br \/>\nwere madmen, but they were constrained by the necessities of leading<br \/>\na country.<\/p>\n<p>Under the present system, I see no alternative to state action as a<br \/>\nway to suppress this threat, up to and including conventional warfare<br \/>\nand the proconsular occupation of significant parts of the Arab world.<br \/>\nI am not happy with this evaluation; war is the health of the State,<br \/>\nand statism is the most lethal enemy humanity will ever know short of<br \/>\na giant meteor strike (those who think this statement hyperbolic are<br \/>\nrecommended to read Robert Conquest&#8217;s &#8220;The Great Terror&#8221;).  The<br \/>\nquestion that drives <em>this<\/em> essay is whether, supposing the<br \/>\nU.S. were to become a market anarchy, there would be other means to<br \/>\nthe same end.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a tough case.  Al-Qaeda would not hate us any less; it is not,<br \/>\nat bottom, U.S. policy that enrages them, it is the fact of our wealth<br \/>\nand freedom and refusal to submit to the One True Way of Allah.  An<br \/>\nungoverned America, more wealthy and more free by the exact measure<br \/>\nthat its productive capacity is spent efficiently on a network of<br \/>\nsecurity agencies and judicial associations rather than being wasted<br \/>\non the support of parasitic government, would hardly enrage them<br \/>\nless.<\/p>\n<p>Al-Qaeda in itself is not an exceptional threat; in a properly<br \/>\narmed society the 9\/11 hijackers would never even have <em>tried<\/em><br \/>\ntheir stunt, because they would known that the certain outcome was<br \/>\ndeath in a hail of civilian bullets.  It is the combination of<br \/>\nAl-Qaeda-like suicidal fanaticism with state sponsorship (specifically<br \/>\nthe ability to produce chemical\/biological\/nuclear weapons) that<br \/>\nstrains the anarcho-libertarian theory of national self-defense, It<br \/>\ndoes so by dramatically lowering the cost of aggression for both<br \/>\nsets of bad guys; the fanatics get the capability to strike a<br \/>\nhammer-blow at the Great Satan, and their state sponsors get<br \/>\ndeniable cat&#8217;s paws.<\/p>\n<p>It is worth pointing out, however, that it strains the statist<br \/>\ntheory of self-defense almost as badly.  A governed U.S. has the<br \/>\nneo-imperialist option (conquer Iraq, install Colin Powell as<br \/>\nmiltary governor, and try to transform the place as we transformed<br \/>\nJapan), and that may even appear to be the option with the lowest<br \/>\nodds of catastrophic failure, but we don&#8217;t actually have any clue<br \/>\nwhether this will actually <em>work<\/em> &#8212; Al-Qaeda might well<br \/>\nbe able to get their bombs from the failing states of former-Soviet<br \/>\nCentral Asia, or from North Korea.  The historical situation<br \/>\nis truly unprecedented.<\/p>\n<p>Harder than the theoretical problem, perhaps, is the practical one.<br \/>\nHow to oppose that expansion of state power without acting as an<br \/>\nunwilling enabler for the terrorists?  In some ways that&#8217;s easy;<br \/>\npushing to abolish all the police-state bullshit at airports is<br \/>\na no-brainer, since tiger-team tests of the system consistently show<br \/>\nthat none of it has made smuggling weapons on board more difficult<br \/>\n(now, as before 9\/11, approximately 30% of attempts succeed).<\/p>\n<p>In a wider sense, though, it&#8217;s a very difficult question.  One I<br \/>\nwill be thinking about &#8212; and possibly writing about &#8212; in the<br \/>\ncoming months.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=81941258\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The aftermath of 9\/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist. For many years before the WTC came down I believed that America could be better defended by have no government than by the system we have now, I imagined a nation of heavily armed militias, without the power-projection capabilities of a conventional military&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=43\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Defeating Hussein Without Government<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}