 How should a free nation defend itself from foreign aggression? This question presupposes a prior question. Would a free nation need to defend itself from foreign aggression? Some would answer no. The rewards of cooperation outweigh the rewards of aggression, and so a nation will probably not be attacked unless it first acts aggressively itself. On the other hand, if this were true, conflicts would never occur since no one would make the first aggressive move. It's true that the rewards for cooperation are evident enough that most people do cooperate most of the time. That's what makes human society possible. If people weren't basically cooperative, no government could make them so, since the people in government would have as much difficulty working together as all the rest of us. Still, a small but troublesome minority obviously do believe they're better off not cooperating. We call them criminals. Maybe they do tend to lose out in the long run, but on the way to that long run they cause a heck of a lot of damage to the rest of us. More importantly, governments face different incentives from those faced by private individuals. Under a government, the people who make the decision to go to war are not the same people as those who bear the greatest burden of the costs of the war, and so governments are much more likely than private individuals to engage in aggression. Thus, it's a mistake to model a nation state as if it were a single individual weighing costs against benefits. It's more like a split personality, where the dominant personality reach the benefits, but somehow manages to make the repressed personality bear the costs. Hence the superiority of private protection agencies. A protection agency that chooses to resolve its disputes with other agencies through war, rather than arbitration, will have to charge constantly rising premiums, and so will lose customers to nicer agencies. That doesn't mean governments are completely isolated from the bad effects of war. Certainly the people in power will suffer if they lose the war, especially if their country is conquered by the enemy, and they can also share in the prosperity that peace and free trade bring. But the disincentives for war are much weaker for governments than for individuals, which means that it's a dangerous world out there, so a free nation needs a defence. Why Not a Government Military Most societies, at least in this century, handle the problem of national defence by having a large, well-armed, permanent military force, run by a centralised government, funded by taxation, and often, though not always, manned by conscription. Is this a solution that a free nation can or should follow? I don't think so. First of all, I don't think there should be a centralised government. My reasons for this position have been set out elsewhere, so I'll just summarise the main points briefly. First, government is unjust. Government, by definition, requires its citizens to delegate to the ruler all or part of their right to self-defence. An institution that does not require this is no government but something else. But to delegate a right involuntarily is no delegation at all. The right has simply been obliterated. And I do not see how this can be justified. By what right does one group of people, calling itself a government, arrogate to itself the right to take away the rights of others? As for taxation and conscription, I can't see that these are anything more than fancy words for theft and slavery. Second, government is impractical. Government is a monopoly. It prohibits competition and obtains its revenues by force. It thus faces far less market pressure, and its customers are not free to take their money elsewhere. As a result, governments have little incentive to cut costs or to satisfy their customers. Hence, governments are, unsurprisingly, notorious for inefficiency, wastefulness and abusive power. So, since I don't want a government, I obviously don't want a government military. However, even in societies that do have a government, I still think it's a good idea not to have a government military. A government which has an army that it can turn against its own citizens is a lot more dangerous than a government that doesn't. That's why so many of this country's founders were so adamantly opposed to a standing army, seeing it as a threat to domestic liberty. See, for example, the Virginia Declaration of Rights drafted by George Mason. A standing navy worried them less because it's harder to impose martial law on land by means of sea power. If the United States had been an archipelago of islands, they might have thought differently. In this country today, US soldiers are reportedly being asked whether they would be willing to shoot American citizens. A free nation needs to find a less dangerous way of protecting its citizens. The dangers of centralization. Centralized government poses yet another threat to a nation's liberty. The more that control over society is centralised in a single command centre, the easier it is for an invading enemy to conquer the entire nation, simply by conquering that command centre. Indeed, invaders have historically done just that, simply taking over the power structure that already existed. By contrast, a society in which power is decentralised lacks a command centre whose defeat or surrender can deliver the entire nation into bondage. For example, during the American Revolution, the British focused their energies on conquering Philadelphia, at that time the nominal capital of the United States, on the assumption that once the capital had fallen, the rest of the country would be theirs as well. What the British failed to realise was that the United States was a loose-knit confederation, not a centralised nation state, and the government in Philadelphia had almost no authority. When Philadelphia fell, the rest of the country went about its business as usual. Americans were not accustomed to living their lives according to directives from Philadelphia, and so the British troops ended up simply sitting uselessly in the occupied capital, achieving nothing. Hence, Benjamin Franklin, when he heard that the British Army had captured Philadelphia, is said to have replied, Nay, I think Philadelphia has captured the British Army. The dangers of decentralisation. Having pointed out how excessive centralisation can make a nation more vulnerable to foreign domination, let me also point out a respect in which extreme decentralisation might seem to pose a similar threat. In the 4th century BC, the mass murderer we fondly remember as Alexander the Great conquered nearly all of the area we know today as the Middle East. If you want to read a terrifying story, put down the latest Stephen King novel and pick up Aryan's campaigns of Alexander, which in dry and matter-of-fact style records how this erratic psychopath and his tired and ageing army somehow swept like lightning across the shattered remnants of the Persian Empire. Conquering city after city, after city, after city, after city, after city. Now, if the various cities had organised some sort of collective defence and attacked Alexander simultaneously, they would have destroyed his army. Hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved, and hundreds of cities would have kept their freedom. Instead, the cities faced Alexander one by one, each confident of its own unassailability, and one by one, they fell. This might seem to show that some sort of centralised defence is needed in order to provide effective security. But I don't think it shows exactly that. It does show the need for organisation, for collective, concerted, cooperative action. But not all organisations should be viewed in terms of a top-down hierarchical model, in which a central authority issues directives and imposes order on the lower ranks. The key to defending a free nation is to have a system of security decentralised enough to lack a command centre the enemy can capture, but organised enough so that the invader must face a united collective defence, not a series of individual skirmishes. In other words, the key is organisation without centralisation. Organisation without centralisation, then, is the goal. How to realise that goal is, of course, another matter. An encouraging note. It is admittedly a difficult balance to strike. Before we despair, however, we should notice that the goal we are trying to achieve is relatively modest. The defence of a free nation will be limited to just that. Defence. No military interventions around the globe. No imperialism. No foreign adventuring. No gunboat diplomacy. Which means that a free nation's defence budget will be much cheaper than those of its potential enemies. If we put that fact together with the fact that a free nation is also likely to have a much more prosperous economy than its enemies have, we can see some reason for optimism. Let the market take care of it. Most libertarians have heard the joke, how many libertarians does it take to change a lightbulb? None. The market will take care of it. Perhaps we can give the same answer to worries about national defence. As students of Austrian economics, see, for example, the writings of F.A. Hayek, we know that the free market, by co-ordinating the dispersed knowledge of market actors, has the ability to come up with solutions that no individual could have devised. So why not let a solution to the problem of national defence emerge through the spontaneous order of the market, rather than trying to dictate ahead of time what the market's solution must be? In a sense, I think that is the answer, but it's incomplete. As students of Austrian economics, see, for example, the writings of Israel Kursner, we also know that the efficiency of markets depends in large part on the action of entrepreneurs, and on the Austrian theory, entrepreneurs do not passively react to market prices, as they do in neoclassical economics, but instead are actively alert to profit opportunities, and are constantly trying to invent and market new solutions. I see our role in the Free Nation Foundation as that of intellectual entrepreneurs. Our coming up with solutions is part of – though by no means the whole of – what it means for the market to come up with solutions. We are the market. The light bulb joke captures the Hayekian side of libertarian economics, and Hayek's insight is an important one. But before following Hayek in a tirade against the evils of constructive rationalism, we should remember to balance the Hayekian insight against the equally important Kursnerian insight that the working of the market depends on the creative ingenuity of individuals. I would thus suggest a different ending to the joke. How many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb? I'll do it, for a dollar. The three economies. In short then, although we cannot hope to predict precisely what solutions the market will come up with, it's worth trying to figure out what could work, and indeed, like good entrepreneurs, try to influence the market process in the direction of the solutions we like. In any case, we'll have an easier time getting people to join the Free Nation movement, if we have something to tell them about how we propose to defend the nation we hope to found. In attempting to devise solutions to the problem of national defence, we need to make sure that we're not limiting our search to an excessively narrow range of options. In this context, I find extremely useful a distinction that was first explained to me by Phil Jacobson. Jacobson pointed out that one can distinguish three kinds of economy, the profit economy, the charity economy, and the labour economy. I'm not sure I'm using Jacobson's exact terminology, but never mind. In the profit economy, the people who want some good or service X can obtain X by paying someone else to provide it. In the charity economy, the people who want X can obtain it by finding someone who will give it to them for free. In the labour economy, the people who want X can obtain it by producing it themselves. As Jacobson notes, when free market anarchists start looking for voluntary private alternatives to government, they tend to think primarily in terms of the profit economy, while left-wing anarchists, on the other hand, tend to think primarily in terms of the labour economy. Yet in any real-world market system, all three economies coexist and interact in different combinations depending on culture and circumstances. Suppose, for example, that a family emergency arises, and I need more money than my regular income supplies. How can I get the extra money? I might take a second job, or get a loan. Both of these solutions are available through the profit economy. If I take the job, I am paying for the money with my labour. If I get a loan, I am paying for the loan through interest payments. In either case, I solve my problem by finding someone who will help me in exchange for some good or service I can offer. Or I might appeal to a private charity or to a government welfare programme, or obtain an interest-free loan from a friend. In this way, I will be getting my money through the charity economy. I find someone who will help me for free. Or I might cut down on expenses by growing my own food in my garden. Or perhaps I could draw on the pooled resources of a mutual aid organisation. This solution involves the labour economy. I find some way of helping myself, perhaps in concert with others who are helping themselves. In looking for free market approaches to national defence then, we should be sure to consider ways in which each of Jacobson's three economies might be able to help.