The Myth of National Defense
...More than 200 years after the Declaration of Independence, it seems appropriate to raise the question whether governments have in fact done what they were designed to do, or if experience or theory has provided us with grounds to consider other possibly more effective guards for our future security.
The present volume aims to provide an answer to this fundamental question.
In fact, this question has recently assumed new urgency through the events of September 11, 2001. Governments are supposed to protect us from terrorism. Yet what has been the U.S. government’s role in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
The U.S. government commands a "defense" budget of $400 billion per annum, a sum equal to the combined annual defense budgets of the next 24 biggest government spenders. It employs a worldwide network of spies and informants. However, it was unable to prevent commercial airliners from being hijacked and used as missiles against prominent civilian and military targets.
Worse, the U.S. government did not only fail to prevent the disaster of September 11, it actually contributed to the likelihood of such an event. In pursuing an interventionist foreign policy (taking the form of economic sanctions, troops stationed in more than 100 countries, relentless bombings, propping up despotic regimes, taking sides in irresolvable land and ethnic disputes, and otherwise attempting political and military management of whole areas of the globe), the government provided the very motivation for foreign terrorists and made the U.S. their prime target.
Moreover, how was it possible that men armed with no more than box cutters could inflict the terrible damage they did? Obviously, this was possible only because the government prohibited airlines and pilots from protecting their own property by force of arms, thus rendering every commercial airline vulnerable and unprotected against hijackers. A $50 pistol in the cockpit could have done what $400 billion in the hands of government were unable to do.
And what was the lesson drawn from such failures? In the aftermath of the events, the U.S. foreign policy became even more aggressively interventionist and threatening. The U.S. military overthrew the Afghani government that was said to be "harboring" the terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. In the course of this, thousands of innocent civilians were killed as "collateral damage," but bin Laden has not been captured or punished to this day, almost two years after the attacks. And once a U.S. approved government had been installed in Afghanistan, the U.S. government turned its attention to wars against other enemy states, in particular Iraq with its huge oil reserves. The U.S. refused even to rule out the employment of nuclear weapons against enemy regimes. No doubt, this policy helped to further increase the number of recruits into the ranks of people willing to use extreme violence against the U.S. as a means of retribution.
At the same time, domestically the government used the crisis which it had helped to provoke to further increase its own power at the expense of the people’s liberty and property rights. Government spending, in particular on "defense," was vastly increased, and a new government department for "homeland security" was created. Airport security was taken over by the federal government and government bureaucrats, and decisive steps toward a complete electronic citizen surveillance were taken.
Truly, then, the current events cry out for a systematic rethinking of the issues of defense and security and the respective roles of government, the market, and society in providing them....
...Based on this definition of government as a compulsory territorial monopolist of protection and jurisdiction equipped with the power to tax without unanimous consent, the contributors to this volume argue that, regardless of whether such a government is a monarchy, a democracy, or a dictatorship, any notion of limiting its power and safeguarding individual life, liberty, and property must be deemed illusory. Under monopolistic auspices the price of justice and protection must rise and its quality must fall. A tax-funded protection agency, it is pointed out, is a contradiction in terms: it is an expropriating property protector and can only lead to ever more taxes and less protection. In fact, even if a state limited its activities exclusively to the protection of life, liberty, and property (as a protective state à la Jefferson would do), the further question of how much security to provide would arise. Motivated like everyone else by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but with the unique power to tax without consent, a government’s answer will always be the same: to maximize expenditures on protection—and almost all of a nation’s wealth can be consumed by the cost of protection—and at the same time to minimize the production of protection.
Furthermore, a monopoly of jurisdiction must lead to a deterioration in the quality of justice and protection. If one can appeal only to the State for justice and protection, justice and protection will be distorted in favor of government—constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding. After all, constitutions and supreme courts are state constitutions and courts, and whatever limitations to government action they might contain is determined by agents of the very same institution. Accordingly, the definitions of life, liberty, and property and their protection will continually be altered and the range of jurisdiction expanded to the state’s advantage....
