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The National Defense Myth
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Donald Rumsfeld puts on a good face for the public, but an internal memo revealed by MSNBC shows startling confusion. "We lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he writes. "Is our current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get'?"

There you have it: a typical government program. Hundreds of billions down the drain, and nothing to show for it but confusion. Imagine a private business admitting that it doesn't know if it is making profits or losses. Imagine blowing through a trillion dollars and not knowing whether you actually accomplished anything at all. That private firm would be doomed, but the warfare state just keeps chugging along.

Later in the memo, Rumsfeld asks obliquely: "Do we need a new organization?" In a word, yes, and it shouldn't be government.

We’re dealing with the oldest political error: the belief that because everyone wants something, government should or must provide it. If the error is pervasive, the result is the total state. If it is completely uprooted, the result is the purely free society.

For example, everyone agrees that the nation needs defending. If you believe it can't be done privately, that government should just do it, you run the risk of unleashing Hell. Thus has the US government presumed the right to shell out half a trillion of other people’s money every year, build and threaten the use of weapons of mass destruction, place troops in nearly 130 countries, and generally build the most well-funded, destructive, expansive, meddlesome military empire in all of human history. The result has been ever more threats, ever less actual defense, ever higher costs....