 We got a feisty bunch in here today All right Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started here. I got two o'clock on my clock There's a lot of material Let me just clarify because I know a lot of people watch all the stuff on me and misses you that the lectures that are made publicly available So what I'm covering here normally it misses you for the last several years I've given this talk called the market for security and in that talk I first cover private law like how could in a free society How could there be courts and police and judicial services? What would prisons look like if anything in a genuinely free society of the type that we're talking about here It misses you and then like in the last 15 minutes or so I would try to cover the private production of military defense and I thought okay. I'm being too cocky I need to take at least 45 minutes to explain how could a free society possibly provide military services So that's what we're doing here So the little bit of this if you've seen the other talks I've given on the market for security is a bit redundant But you'll see here. I elaborate So this is the first time that I've given the standalone talk here. It misses you and of course just to clarify was again What we're doing here is I want to say in a society without a coercive state How how could you how could it defend itself? How could those people defend themselves? Wouldn't they be sitting ducks for some neighboring state for example, and that's one of the standard objections people might say Okay, yeah, sure you guys could build roads I could even possibly see you know police and so forth but come on some neighboring state comes in with its Modern military and you guys would be sitting ducks and so that's the kind of thing I want to address right now Let me let the cat out of the bag. I think that's a huge misconception even many committed anti-state You know libertarians they still you know will sometimes they give these throwaway lines like oh Yeah, the government can't get anything right except killing people and and I get where they're coming from But actually no the government's not even very good at killing people all right And so what I mean is compared to if private business had the right incentives to do that So normally that doesn't come up because private business isn't legally allowed and blah blah blah But you'll see what I'm saying when I go through here Just like you wouldn't say oh well I mean if the apparatus of the state really threw itself behind wheat production, you know Then the USSR would have really outproduced a capitalist society in terms of just you know tonnage or or bushels of wheat And no in general that's that's not true it just because the government really sets itself to some aim That doesn't mean it actually satisfies it better than a private sector alternative would if it made economic sense to do so Okay, so that's what I'm gonna say here I'm gonna try to get you to see that this presumption even on the part of many libertarians that oh Yeah, the state the one area where they're really good as organizing militaries and you know blown up other countries and think that the only reason you think that is because Right now it's states that dominate the production of military services. We don't really have something to compare it to Okay, let me alleviate any I don't know what you guys are laughing at this is a very serious post So a lot of you may know that I personally call myself a pacifist And in fact Tom Woods and I recently had a debate on the contra cruise where we were debating pacifist I'm not gonna be Sort of cheeky and tell you who won that debate I will say however that I didn't lose all right and so And let me just tie that so so what I'm doing in this talk. I wanted this to be one for a more general audience So it's true. I personally would not contribute funds if we're in a free society I would not patronize businesses that you know used missiles and thinking we're trying to actually end the lives of foreign soldiers Trying to invade that's just against my personal preferences But what I'm talking about here is I know most people don't share those preferences And so here I'm giving as an economist a libertarian economist My vision of how the market for military defense would operate in a society that it was Composed of people who were largely like we are in so-called Western countries today Except that everybody believes we can't initiate aggression. All right And so this thing take the cultural Norms the way they are and how people feel about okay if somebody invades us We certainly are morally justified in hitting back that sort of thing and just saying how would that play out? With those people in a society though where there's no institution that can take money from people against their will because that's what taxation is and Also the the agencies providing military defense. They can't for example Conscript labor all right because that would be slavery. You're not allowed to do that period Even if you're doing it for a noble cause like repelling a foreign invader. Okay, so that's what I'm doing here It's an analogy. I personally don't use heroin and yet as an economist if you say okay What would happen if we legalize drugs tomorrow? I can sit there and walk through the market for heroin even though I personally You know wouldn't engage in it and don't want my kid to likewise here I happen to be a pacifist personally, but that's not really relevant for this lecture So in this lecture, I'm gonna just talk about a hypothetical libertarian society and how they would I think handle issues Like what of some neighboring state is massing its troops on the border and getting ready to invade us What would we do that's the kind of thing I'm talking about Last bit of housekeeping let me just mention even though for a lot of people and some of you came up here just before this lecture to tell me and Saying that yeah, this is the most difficult question as far as the advocate of a free society to explain military defense in terms I mean I get why that seems like the most pressing because you get invaded by some foreign country and that you know that's that's kind of a bummer but You know as opposed to like the under provision of education or something like that You know like if the literacy rates a little bit lower than what it ought to be That's one thing but you get conquered by some neighboring state. That's pretty much a deal breaker for a lot of people So I get why that's the case, but in terms of conceptually actually as you'll see as I go through I think this is actually pretty Straightforward the real issue. I think that the conceptual hurdle for explaining how could a genuinely free society work is When it comes to well, how could there be the rule of law like that's tricky And that's why like some of the iron rand even thought no you can't have Anarcho-capitalism that doesn't make any sense She thought because if you're gonna have the rule of law you got to have one agency in charge of promulgating or at least codifying what The law is otherwise you'd have competing, you know So that's the kind of thing that I handle if you want to know more about that That's the the market for security. I talk about that question But once you have the legal framework in place so for this talk now going forward Let's just stipulate for the sake of argument in this free society Everybody knows what the property rights are and then now the issue was just okay What do we do about the possibility that some foreign army might come in or some you know air force might start bombing us? That's the kind of thing we're gonna talk about a Lot of what I'm covering in this lecture if you want to learn more about that and read more about it look up my article The journals called libertarian papers so it came out in 2017 the titles libertarian law and military defense So that's where I elaborate and a lot of stuff. I'm gonna touch on for this talk Okay, so before we get into the real fun stuff about anarcho-capitalism. Let me just bring you up to speed even in terms of conventional Government militaries going to war with each other even on those terms It's still the case that the less government intervention you have the better off your country will be and the better you will be In a military capacity So this is a quote from Mises this comes from human action and I had to abbreviate this though, you know the Block quotes that are the paragraphs that I grabbed this from the whole thing is great But I didn't want to get bogged down here in too long of a quotation Well, let me just read you this from Mises. He says capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations But this is not mean that a nation which is forced to repel foreign aggressors must substitute government control for private enterprise If it were to do this it would deprive itself of the most efficient means of defense Okay, so let me just give you some examples of the kind of thing Mises has in mind here. So number one for some reason even people who Nominally understand the benefits of free enterprise think that when it comes to war Oh, wait, that's the one situation where you definitely need the government to come in and Nationalize industry like you need the government in charge of the steel because you can't have too much steel going to frivolous Uses when we got to be cranking out battleships and bombers and things like that And you certainly you know, you don't want there to be nylon stockings being made when there's a war on right? So that's that's the mentality even among people who are typically, you know, not authoritarian They think that oh, yeah when it comes to a life-and-death issue such as World War two Then you needed the government and they think that the Roosevelt administration in the United States did the right thing by You know wartime planning. All right, and so that's what Mises is rebelling against here So Mises was a minarchist and our language he would have just called himself a liberal in the classical, you know 19th century sense of that term But so so Mises did think that you needed the state To tax and then spend money on military defense But he thought that that was it that if the government needs to spend a hundred billion dollars Building tanks and bombers and getting troops and equipping them and so forth Then go ahead and tax the public and do it that way or he can borrow the money and do it that way He didn't want them to run the printing press because he thought that was undemocratic Mises argued that if the public wouldn't tolerate the amount of taxes and or borrowing that was necessary to finance the war effort Then that just shows the war was too costly and that you know the government so if instead they finance the war by running the printing press Mises thought that was like a sneaky way of Funding something that the public really wasn't prepared to shoulder the burden of as far as the actual military effort though Mises's point was Nationalizing industries and having central planners dictate. Okay, this much steel is gonna go here. It's gonna go here that That's sabotaging the beauty of the market economy And so yes, it's true going into a major war like the US going into World War two what needed to happen clearly Fewer automobiles for personal use had to be produced because you got to start making tanks and Fewer luxury cruise liners needed to be made because you got to make battleships and aircraft carriers But Mises point was you don't need central planners to micromanage that just like if the public all of a sudden Decides they don't like cigarettes anymore You don't need central planners to tell the farmers stop planning tobacco You just let the market price system and profit and loss signals Guide all that and do it in the most efficient way possible to deal with the new situation So likewise if you're in peacetime everything's great The economy is correctly calibrated to you know using the resources given Technological know-how to what consumer preferences are and now all of a sudden there's a big change in the data Namely that the you know Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and the US wants to get ready for the war How do you get all the businesses to switch over and start operating in light of this new information? Well, Mises point was you rely on the market system profit and loss test the one Caveat there though is that the buyer of the military hardware is going to be the US government And they're going to get that purchasing power through taxes and or borrowing is the way Mises thought it you know Ideally would happen So there you know the government spends a lot more on tanks and bombers That pushes up the price of steel and the other inputs and those necessary for those things And so that makes private automobiles really expensive because now the inputs that you would go into a car are a lot more Expensive because of the government buying and that's how you know automatically people would ration the use of Think you know frivolous things are resources going into so-called frivolous purposes Civilian uses would be curtailed an expansion of the wartime industries would happen automatically as it were okay so that's where Mises is coming from and to do things like putting in place a Wartime profits tax for example. Yeah, that's something that's very typical that Western nations would have done You know going into the world wars that just cripples the ability of private enterprise to respond to the new situation right so Mises point is What is it that profits mean it means those Entrepreneurs correctly anticipated the change in the data and they adjusted their production decisions Better than their peers did and so in a situation where it's your country's survival is literally on the line You need to switch over industry as quickly as possible and later the new situation You want you want entrepreneurs who are making profits because that shows they anticipated the change better than other people did So you want them to be rewarded you don't want to cripple that mechanism Which is what a wartime profits tax would do all right same thing too with Like meatless Tuesdays and stuff like that if you if you're familiar with US history Where they would ration? Consumer goods and so in addition to having money they also had price controls and then out explicit rationing with coupons Again, that just cripples the economy's normal ability to ration things. We have a rationing system It's it's called money and prices and so if the government is buying up meat to put in you know Packages for the troops that pushes up the price of meat and people naturally economize on that It doesn't mean the whole country just stops eating meat though Maybe some people really want it in which case you can still get it right you just have to pay the market price for it So that's how the price system works in general and Mises point was that's what you want to have happen here now beyond just these sort of abstract Economistic remarks Mises also has a lot of history So he has a few remarks in human action some of his other works where he says things along the lines of No capitalist country has ever lost a war all right and he's saying even the despite the much touted war socialism of Germany Let us not forget that it lost both world wars and he even argues that Germany would have easily defeated the Russians Except that they were aided by Len Lies and you know other US Support, okay, so I've talked to military historians who think maybe Mises is stretching there But the point being Mises does go through and try to supplement these Theoretical remarks with with history and Mises was in the first world war also So I mean he saw some of this with his own eyes so in any event if you haven't read that stuff It's pretty interesting to see Mises as a military historian just commenting on some of these things but his point being that It's it's not correct to say. Oh, yeah The one area where explicit government intervention in central planning works is when it comes to Fending off a military invasion. No, he says that that's exactly where you want it people to be nimble You need to be able to adapt quickly in a situation Where events are changing daily or even hourly and so how do you do that? How do you maximize the adaptability of your society if you want to think in those terms? It's certainly not but not by Channeling it and turning it into a system where just a few people at the top make all the decisions and everybody else Just waits for orders to trickle down That's the last thing you want to do in a situation like that If you wouldn't rely on that kind of a system to make TVs or radios, why would you do it? You know, why would you rely on that kind of a system to defend your nation from being conquered? Okay, so that's the baseline for just even a regular, you know Two states going at it and just saying okay given that the state's gonna Fund the military defense and it's illegal for private companies to do it without the state's permission You know, Mises is showing you still would want to limit it just to that okay in terms of the classic Functions of government night watchman state you wouldn't have the government do a bunch of other stuff on the side to try to supplement the war Effort that would be counterproductive, but now let's move into Okay, the real thorny question. Well, suppose you have a totally free society. There is no state apparatus Now, how would they defend themselves from a military attack? So here and I outlined this again the paper that I pointed you to also my booklet chaos theory if you've seen that And this is an elaboration Rothbard talks about it and for new liberty I know Hapa has an essay on the private production of defense so The the consensus seems to be that at least in a modern Let's call it Western society of the types most of us are familiar with if those group of people all of a sudden turned Ancap how would they defend themselves? It would probably the the primary funding mechanism would probably come from the insurance sector So just imagine a city like New York City, okay, so there's all these skyscrapers There's hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars worth of property in a small area And so just like well gee, what if there's a fire? How would a free society protect itself in case there's a fire? Well, there's fire insurance Okay, and that's the way you spread the possibility of that loss among the whole population That sort of thing likewise I think there would be insurance contracts that would indemnify the owners of major pieces of property in the case of War damage or you know being conquered from some outside army. So you've got major life insurance or sorry major insurance companies Putting out these policies collecting premiums on them And now instead of just sitting back and saying well, let's hope we don't get invaded or just running the probabilities and charging a really high premium The insurance companies would realize we can lower the probability of a successful foreign invasion or this property being destroyed by bombers or tanks If we engage in defense Just like you know, this isn't sci-fi stuff right now fire insurance companies if you have a large building They'll give you lower premiums if you do things like show them that you have You know sprinklers set up and you have fire extinguishers and strategic location You have smoke alarms stuff like that so that the fire insurance company knows the chance of this particular Property being destroyed by fire and then us the insurance company having to indemnify the owner That probability goes down if they have things in place like smoke alarms and sprinkler systems And if we have a deal with the local fire department so that you know if our sensors go off We can have a truck there in 30 seconds or whatever you get the idea So and they'll pass those premium savings along to the customer to induce them to be willing to to fund those sorts of things Okay, so something real obvious like putting in a sprinkler system for a huge skyscraper You're not going to need government fire codes or building codes to ensure that happens It's not that people in a free society don't know how fire works Okay, and something that's obvious like spending whatever it is a couple of thousand dollars to put in a sprinkler system For a multi-million dollar apartment complex You don't need government codes to force private owners to spend a few thousand dollars for something that might avoid them millions of dollars in fire damage Right, and so that so I'm saying in practice the way that kind of outcome would happen Absent government coercive fire codes is something like the fire insurance company Just you know having in their contracts built in things saying you do the x y and z and we send inspectors periodically Right because the private owner might just say oh, yeah I we have a sprinkler system go ahead and give us a lower premium But maybe they really don't or maybe they installed it, but they're not staying on top of keeping it up You know maintenance and so forth. So maybe the fire insurance company also has inspectors that just show up Unannounced and do routine checks and that's part of the contract. They have the right to do that and so forth So a lot of this stuff that happens under the guys of government Building regulations with fire codes and things like that You could have analogs of that in a free society. I think the insurance sector would provide a lot of that so likewise here If there is a chance that some other country is going to send bombers and cause a billion dollars worth of property damage The first people that are going to suffer that would be the insurance companies And so now they have the incentive to say okay instead of us just sitting here as sitting ducks What if we instead paid some money to firms to set up surface-to-air missiles? Okay, and they could knock down incoming bombers That greatly reduces the probability that these skyscrapers are going to be taken out by foreign bombers if we have samsites Set up at strategic locations. All right, so The first hurdle to understand how could a free society exist without a political state Engaging in large-scale taxation and then expenditures on military defense Is I think the insurance sector would step up and they would be the ones Who would have the incentive and the ability because they're taking premiums from all the property owners Or at least all the large property owners in the community To make payments to private firms that engage in what we would call military defense. Okay, so that's the um the first thing i'll say here and then You know, so you can imagine things like this. I don't think there would be large standing armies All right, just in terms of just picturing it because if for one thing just that's expensive to have a huge standing army Just sitting around in general. So I think that's expensive. And certainly they wouldn't have swastikas That would just that would be bad for pr, right? They wouldn't do that but in general, I don't I don't think it would make sense just um, you know in general to just like, uh cities in northern cities can be ready in case there's a bad snow storm And they don't have you know thousands of people just sitting around all year On the off chance that there might be a really bad snowstorm, right? They have people that are doing other stuff that yeah, they could call up perhaps Um, you know, maybe a lot of the equipment they have in reserve But they don't have people just sitting around for years on end on the off chance something happens So likewise to I just I don't think in practice large standing armies Wouldn't make sense just business wise and we'll see as we go through this Why I don't think they'd also be necessary for military purposes But to alleviate the concern because that's a standard thing to say, oh wouldn't these large You know these firms that are providing private defense why wouldn't they just turn into a state? Well, one reason I think is that they wouldn't have large standing armies It wouldn't be Millions of people in a given society that would be serving this function for one thing Okay, another thing I think we need to Recognize here and I and it's the and this is a strength So the private defense firms are not allowed to just Violate property rights and get away with it because hey, there's a war on And so I've talked to some people even those who are sympathetic to libertarianism And they think that this is a constraint, right? They think that oh, yeah a neighboring state that wants to go to war with our free society They have an advantage military wise Because they can just you know requisition property, you know if their armies want to Build a bridge or something, you know, they can just conscript local workers They can just grab the steel or the wood or whatever it is the nails they need They don't have to pay for it They can just do all sorts of things like that and that's supposed to be an advantage to them Whereas we're talking about private firms embedded in this voluntary framework of a free society Where there's no institutional violation of property rights. So it can't be that some firm systematically Commits crime or destroys things Violates property rights in general that that would be a criminal activity and they can't just say well We need to defend ourselves. So in particular The one where a lot of people Think this would be a constraint is when it comes to the draft Okay, so Foreign armies they would be allowed to draft You know, there are citizens into the army and they could have huge armies that way in the free society There would be no analog you could not private firms could not get people to work for them and defend You know the free society against their will because that would that would be slavery or kidnapping you can't do that And so what i'm trying to tell you here is that's a good thing You don't want them to be able to do that that historically It hurts those societies where they tolerate their government drafting people Okay, and so just think of it. I'll do like a sort of economic argument first and then i'll try to make it More practical and appeal to history So as far as the economics of it labor is a resource just like anything else and Especially as we get into more modern warfare It's not obvious that the best thing for every single human being to do Is to just go to the front lines and get shot at or shoot at somebody else Right, there's all sorts of roles that people play in the modern division of labor to supplement the war effort And so when you start thinking of it that way just all the standard problems of central planning Just like if you're saying hey, we want to maximize food production We've got millions of people at our disposal. How do we do it? You wouldn't want central planners just telling all the people where to go and say, okay, you guys over there You go work on farms you people work at a distribution center You people build 18 wheelers because we need to be able to transport the food around You guys work on refrigeration units You see i'm saying there's a lot that goes on as you get into a modern economy Even for something like just food production And the same holds for something like defend the the society from military tech It's not obvious for example How many people should be snipers? How many people should be working in demolition? How many people should be doing r&d making new weapons? How many people should be working in the factory that makes bullets? How many people should be working on making new types of body armor, right? There's all sorts of things going on and it's not at all obvious who should go into what occupation And so when you have a draft that just Sort of swamps all that information that the market process and signals were giving to to entrepreneurs And you got a few central planners who work for the military Just deciding this is how it's going to be So in any other area we would see that would be crazy and that would that would stifle and cripple the effort And there's nothing special or intrinsic to military Attack or defense that all of a sudden you know flips that on its head and all of a sudden central planning Is a really smart thing to do Okay, so so there's that element another way. Let me motivate with some historical examples So, uh, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel has a book called emancipating slaves and slaving free men And it's he's talking about the the u.s. War between the states or civil war and he has um, he quotes some historians who are saying that On the eve of the civil war in the united states A lot of military Historians and you know other experts thought that the south was going to be fine the confederate states would be fine because after all The us itself had defeated the greatest empire in the world You know when they they fought fought off the british during the war for american independence And so they thought okay if the if the south engages in the same type of warfare Right where they have you know guerrilla tactics. They're just hiding out in the woods And the if the north there aren't union armies come in and they just take potshots and run away and they know the terrain better because it's you know That's their it's their home They thought the the north's not going to be able to win All right, and yet the south did lose And let me just mention in the in the war for independence You know when the when the us colonies fought the british Part of what was happening there and you see the problem with conscription Is the the british troops they were famously wearing red coats So they'd be marching through the woods And sticking out like a sore thumb this guy's in these bright red coats marching through whereas The colonials they were you know dressed either You know green things or stuff that blended in they were being civilian clothes And they could take potshots and then run away into the town You wouldn't know who was who you wouldn't know who was a partisan or not And so you might wonder well, why didn't the british adopt similar tactics? Why didn't they have their troops dressed you know in civilian clothes? And one of the reasons was because then they might defect Okay, so because again those british troops were not there voluntarily at least a lot of them weren't they were conscripts They didn't want to be there getting shot at they might not have cared about keeping the colonies for the king And so if they're there part of the function of having those bright red uniforms was so that if they ran away The you know their commanders could find them and also the people in the town would know wait You're not one of us get out of here. You're you know, you're an enemy and it's soldier invader Okay, so that that was partly You know for the the discipline and just maintaining the ranks of the invasion invading force and so you can see in a situation like that. Whereas the Partisan colonials who were taking shots of them in the woods like snipers and running away They were defending their homeland. Nobody was forcing them to fight like that. They were just trying to repel invaders okay, so That it just gives you an example of how that works And so If some historians think if the south if the confederate states had adopted similar tactics They would have been able to withstand The invasion from the union forces, but that's not what the south did the south had a draft They got their troops in line. They gave them uniforms and what did they have them do just think about it They hit them line up in march right into union cannons and and you know rifle fire Okay, so it's it's perverse. It's like if the if the confederate government just sat around thinking How can we maximize how quickly our able-bodied men are slaughtered? I know let's line them up and have them march right in front of union firepower And if we catch anybody not trying to do that trying to do something that would allow them to live We ourselves will shoot them. We'll use our police and say hey get over there get over there and get shot. What are you doing? Okay, and so just I mean so it's kind of perverse, but that's if you think through that's what happens with conscription Or especially if you read about the battles of world war one You know when it really got going and you'd have the different, uh, you know the trenches set up And some of those horrible killing fields where tens of thousands of casualties were happening Per day depending on which bail you're talking about Again that the only reason such mass slaughter was possible Was that both sides were conscripting their men and sending them into these killing fields? Okay, that if you had a free society they wouldn't have done that And so they wouldn't have lost one of their most valuable resources, you know so easily So that's partly What i'm getting at here is that when there's conscription what happens is among other ways of thinking about it besides the moral Horror of just millions of people, you know being taken against their will and Forced to be either kill or be killed Besides the moral problem just economically just think of it Dispassionately, you know as a as a robot or something Those are very valuable resources, right when you're getting invaded one of your most valuable resources is the people at your disposal And the last thing you want to do is have people in charge of them and their allocation Thinking they have virtually a zero price And yet that's what the infantry are to military commanders They're almost free and yeah, they're not just going to sacrifice tens of thousands of troops for no reason But they're not fully internalizing the cost of that and they're certainly not recognizing. Oh, wait a minute We just killed somebody who was a great chemical engineer He might have been able if he had been out working in a lab somewhere He might have come up with a better bomb But instead we you know gave him a rifle and told him go take a hill and he got mowed down with machine gun fire And now we you know, not only is that guy dead But now we don't have the new bombs that he would have invented had he been placed somewhere else where he should have been Okay, so that's the kind of thing that in general market prices do is they ensure resources go to where they're most urgently needed And so in the kind of framework i'm talking about here again, it's those life insurance companies That would be paying bounties So just to talk a little bit more about that The insurance company might say you're you're faced with an incoming Invader they might say okay for every enemy helicopter you knock down will pay your firm ten thousand dollars For every infantry that you you know take out a commission whether you kill them or just you know Shoot their kneecap or something so that they're they're out for the fight will give you whatever eight hundred dollars They would set prices and they wouldn't be arbitrary They would run calculations just like actuaries can figure out if you're a smoker How much more does that cost us as a life insurance company and the premiums are adjusted Likewise you've got an incoming army they could figure out at least come up with some estimate is to say how valuable is it How much would we be willing to pay to take out one of those incoming bombers and they would give bounties accordingly? And so then the private firms hiring workers voluntarily Would figure out, you know, what's this person's marginal revenue product in terms of this particular occupation and this line, right? So that's the way you would have so-called rationality and economic calculation In something as esoteric as military defense So again a draft means the people running that operation Think that the workers are basically free when no they're very valuable and you want them to know what the opportunity cost is Likewise when it comes to something like blowing up Infrastructure inside your own society So this is a common technique that if you're retreating and the invaders are coming in you do stuff like blow up bridges Like just to hamper the enemy's ability to quickly cover terrain So they might do that the private firms, you know, especially if if it doesn't go well the first couple days in the outside states coming in and penetrating They might do stuff like blow up roads or In a free society who would blow up the roads the companies would the private companies that's who We've got that question handled too. All right, and so You know blow up bridges stuff like that that's fine, but they would have to pay the owners They couldn't just blow up stuff and say well, you know, we're defending from this foreign invasion They would have to pay for it Just like, you know regular right now if a plane's flying and crashes and takes out a house somewhere The the airline company or their insurers or somebody has to compensate the owner for that You can't just say well, we got to have air travel Occasionally some people's houses get blown up and that's not our fault, right? You know you pay for stuff It doesn't you don't ban air travel But the point is if your business operation entails The loss of other people's property you got to indemnify them in a free society So that would happen here and again, that's a good thing We don't want agencies that have the power to just go around blowing up property For all we know that bridge is more important So that the munitions being made in the factories can get brought to the front lines somewhere else, right? So maybe by blowing up that bridge that one firm thinking it was helping actually is Crippling the defense effort, right? And so how do you know market prices? That's how you know, right? So the other firm that's really relying on that bridge Maybe they're paying so much to the owner and the other firm comes along and says, you know I actually think you know, we'd be willing to pay you $800,000 to take this bridge out because we got these plans This operation we're doing to stop these invading tanks and your bridge is really a pain a thorn on our side Let's take it. We'll pay $800,000 But the other factory might say no we'll pay you $900,000 to keep that thing in operation, right? So that's the way the different firms that have different ideas for how can we defend That's how they compete and that's how it gets settled through the market price system Okay, and here's one that's even more esoteric even when it comes to blowing up the enemy Hardware or you know killing enemy troops It's not clear to me what the legal status would be there. So we've got a free society You know judges make rulings and it's clear cut in the boundaries Of the free society what the legal system is and who owns what but it's not as obvious to me What is the legal status in the Rothbardian courts? Of outside like us government assets, right? Like does the us government is it's its own corporation and it owns all of its tanks You know, it's not clear to me how that would be or is that like The taxpayers in the us own that and you know, you see what I'm saying? So it's not obvious to me exactly how that would play out But for sure what would happen if it is the case Like let's say that the invade the the defending forces Want to do a preemptive strike and so like the the let's say it's the british or the us For whatever reason are about to invade and they're saying, you know If we knocked out some of their spy satellites and some of their reconnaissance aircraft like the drones and whatever That would really help us when they when they pull the trigger and they really invade us If we have first neutralize some of that stuff, you know knock out their recon or whatever So maybe they have to You know take out some of that stuff before the war officially starts They would be able to do that, but they'd had to pay for it, right? Because you're you're blowing up property and I think the way they could do it fairly cheaply is If they go to us taxpayers and say hey in our legal system You have been you know the us government stole a hundred thousand dollars from you over the last three years They owe you that money plus interest plus, you know pain and suffering We all know you're not getting that anytime soon So why don't you give us your claim against the us government for a hundred and six thousand dollars? And we'll you know We'll give you two percent of the face value for that because you know you're not ever seeing that money And so maybe they would do it that way so that the private defense firms could load up with a lot of Claims against the invading forces just vis-a-vis their own taxpayers and that's how legally they could show Yeah, we caused six hundred million dollars of damage to them And here we go and this is how we compensate for because they've cost six hundred million dollars of damage to their own people that we've acquired For you know five million dollars payment and here you go So again that might seem like quibbling and oh my gosh, you're worried bob about violating the property rights of these invaders Yes, I am right and that's a good thing That's that's our strength is that we respect property rights And so even in a situation like this where the courts rule No, technically they didn't send a cruise missile over our border yet So you can't really knock out their surveillance satellite or else that's aggression. Well, we could compensate them for that All right, so that's the kind of thing I'm talking about Where that actually is our strength. That's why we would have such a potent military defense Is because we would be guided by profit and loss signals Okay, let me uh in the time I have left here just try to Deal with some objections people might have or ways to help clarify Thinking through this process because I know it's tricky when you first encounter it Okay, so one thing is just make sure you're always doing an apples to apples comparison So yes, if everybody in this room just reads Rothbard and then I took you back in time and it's you guys versus nazi germany I'm pretty sure nazi germany is going to beat us in this room. Okay but um Likewise nazi germany defeated france, right and they had a state military at their disposal Okay, so you can't just say I can dream up a scenario Where a private society of you know free individuals would lose to a state Therefore private defense doesn't work because likewise I can think of countless examples where state militaries failed to defend their country from an outside Invasion so therefore I guess state provision of defense doesn't work either Okay, so it's always an apples to apples the claim is Not that private defense makes you invulnerable But that other things equal it's the best way to defend yourself just like if you're saying Hey, we want to have the best automobiles or the best computers or the best food How do you do it? You don't say oh, let's put the state in charge of that because that's really important for our society So we want to have government running it. No, you'd say leave it to private enterprise That's the way given whatever our skill set is in our natural resources and so on That's the best way to maximize quality in that particular sector. So it's likewise here Um another way of just again seeing the advantage that the free society has There's no monopoly on the ideas right if some so the insurance companies for one thing are all there's multiple ones So maybe some of them have different ideas about the relative value Of foreign targets, so they might set different prices accordingly It's not just going to be a case of groupthink But also there's competition and so you wouldn't have all your eggs in one basket like in france famously in world war two, you know, they had to imagine a line and Hitler just went right around that okay, and so Here there since there's not just one group of people in charge of defending the society But there's competition so some people might try conventional methods So you know a lot of people might be ex-military from other countries But there might be some people that are totally new and they just come up with a brand new idea that We'll totally shock the you know the state militaries Also, by the way Let me see if I put it in here. Yeah, the ANCAP society is going to be fantastically wealthy. So for a lot of this stuff Don't think of it as this relatively tiny little country against the big bad United States Think of it as like the Jetsons versus the United States, okay And as you know as much of a you know bumbling fool as George Jetson is with all that technology, you know, they could probably Fight circles around them. So just as an example I mean just probably if you had a firm and it had 10 years to do it and had 10 billion dollars to spend they could probably come up with a system where they could have a bunch of drones So some enemy comes in a bunch of drones get deployed They go and attach themselves like to the treads of tanks and just have minor explosions Not to blow the whole tank up but just to incapacitate it And little things that go and go on the necks of the invading infantry And so they can track them right little little things that they can so they know where they are And if they get near sensitive targets, you press a thing and it releases something their bloodstream just knocks them out Okay, so i'm not saying that's the whole thing, but that took me 15 minutes to think of right and so If you have a society, you know of a million people or more And it's not like and especially if it's like the us or something I mean they would have to First have a propaganda campaign before they could just start dropping bombs on some other, you know Society so people would know it was coming they would have time to prepare and again the funding would be there And they would be if if you don't think they would be fantastically wealthy compared to the other status controlled societies That I don't think you've understood the case for freedom right that you don't understand how much Even like in the united states, which is relatively free compared to a lot of places How poor we are because of what the state does Easily we'd be three times as wealthy in a few years. I think if you got rid of all the state apparatus, okay So with that much margin for error, I think there's it's clear it would be like The us versus vietnam with the technological roles reversed Okay, so it's distinctly a part of how it was hard for the u.s Forces to beat them was because the guerrilla warfare imagine that the vietcong In addition to having those tactics that made them tricky to to snuff out Also had technology that was way more advanced than what the us troops had that's the kind of way to think about it You can see that that the us probably would not have persisted in trying to to conquer them Okay, another thing too is I think A lot of people don't realize just how inefficient state militaries are and this kind of goes back to that earlier thing I see when sometimes libertarians and you get how they're trying to be funny when they'll say stuff like Oh, yeah, the government's awful and everything except blowing things up and killing people ha ha No, this is what i'm saying is no actually if it really came down to it The private sector could kill people way more efficiently, okay Now I actually don't think in practice they would like other things equal If you want to cripple an invading force you actually don't want to kill their infantry You just want to make it so they can't fight and just have a bunch of people there You know that they still have to take care of and feed and house and the other troops see them Like you know if you somehow could make it so they couldn't walk or whatever like that's actually More militarily effective than killing them and so that's i'm just showing you that the way Militaries think is is not correct in terms of this the overall strategy But just to give you an idea here Anyone know dan carlin the the hardcore history podcast? So if you I was listening to his thing on world war one and it was amazing That he was he was saying that up so that you know it starts in the summer of 1914 and up through late 1915 Most of the armies they were still issuing felt caps to their soldiers Okay, so something as little as that something is you know, the the governments they could have Instead of in drafting Let's say 10,000 of those troops and setting the front lines where many of them were slaughtered within weeks Instead having an extra 10,000 people just being back home Cranking out steel helmets that would have made much more sense just that little tweak in how they were running their operations So i'm saying just imagine that times a thousand over the especially if it's a long drawn out campaign Also, the more you Like something like world war one that was largely a logistical supply issue like which nations could outproduce the other ones That was it didn't come down to tactics. It came down to how much material could they produce? So again, just showing you in modern warfare This idea that a free society is a sitting duck with a bullseye to compare to a state is Is crazy. Okay, last point here. I'll make you know wrap up Uh the classic question people say wouldn't warlords take over All right, and so it's ironic that people say all right. I'm really worried about One of these these defense agencies getting so large that maybe they start taking money from their customers against their will And they start, uh, you know killing people that they shouldn't and so that's why we have a state Right that that's it's like saying You know the the worst thing that could happen is that one of these companies would turn into a state And therefore we should have a state. Let's just get the you know, I don't want to have anxiety about it Let's just get it over with rip the band-aid off. All right So there's that element beyond that though to be a little bit fairer what they have in mind the person who makes this argument is to say Well, no If we have like a constitutional system and we agree ahead of time on the framework For these periodic elections and the role of the government that the kind of government we get under that Setting or in that setting is going to be more humane and controllable than one that emerges, you know From your ANCAP system sort of accidentally and there I would just say and I have an article with this title if you want to go look at it, but there I just make the point that The type of people who could contain a government so for which A constitutional limited government system would work the kind of people necessary to make that happen And thus far in history no such people have existed right because there there has been no government that's been contained But the kind of people that could make that work Also, if you had multiple competing defense agencies if one of them started getting aggressive They would just switch their business elsewhere Right, so if you're the kind of person that once you saw dictatorship emerging you would go vote for somebody else next election Well, then you can just switch your business too. So it's like if if limited government would work for a given set of people It would Preventing tyranny would work so much better if they were totally free in the Rothbardian sense. Okay. That's my time. Thanks everybody