Posted on 02/20/2006 6:24:40 AM PST by Shalom Israel
Rifles were by far the least of our worries back then -- but even so, you need to have everybody armed with the same rifles in order to be able to efficiently supply your troops. Gosh ... rules and regulations regarding what weapons to bear?
We had almost no artillery, and almost no ammunition to fire from the guns we did have. We had no airplanes. We had no machine guns. We had to borrow or buy all of those from the British and French. We also had to rely on British transports to get our guys over to Europe.
And yet we defeated the British with no government-operated standing army. I'm glad you're coming around to my point of view.
Well, to begin with, Our Lamentable Author said that "Statists always seem to get it wrong...." That little word, "seem," is his little escape hatch. He's a charlatan, our author, and this piece is crap.
You need to read some history, sir.
The state never created property rights - they already existed. WE created the state to enforce those rights - the State's ONLY reason for being, national defense and the rule of law.
If taxation, both the visible and invisible, reaches much over 10-15%, there will rightly be many Murrays who think that ANY Fed'l Govt should make itself subsist on no more. Higher taxation always results in avoidance, legal or not.
Murray says to himself, "What good is a state that takes so much from it's people, where the poorest of them relatively have the most difficulty in accumulating wealth, much less the right to pass it on to their posterity (SS), however small an accumulation they've acheived, - to grow and compound with the next generation and so on?"
Is John Kerry a Murray? How was his 12% tax rate on $5 million in income "fair" when the two lowest rates are 10% & zero, and the highest rate 35%. He's only paid a third of what his income level precribes.
Murray sees those who've reached the low to mid six figure income levels and above, all of a sudden getting all kinds of tax credits, mortgage & business deductions, etc.; by investing in tax frees, creating family trusts, or just plain avoiding taxes by delaying taxable financial transactions that would otherwise free up capital for better opportunities. Poor Murray's income is too small to justify the expense of tax lawyers and accountants to do the same for him, and he therefore justly feels he's being taxed unfairly by comparison.
Those poorer than Murray will do their all to claim only enough income such that they remain below the income level where taxation kicks in. Those whose incomes are untaxable may also qualify for child credits - they actually receive a REVERSE tax. Childless renter Murray who can't itemize, rightfully chafes at the concept, as he's also paying school taxes via his rent.
Mises is a good place to start your study of the human action aspects of economics. You'll find that men seeking their own best interests are the main engines to be incentivized for the raising of living standards for all that state interventionism only hinders.
A bigger example of Govt imbicility couldn't be had right now. That being that some in Congress want to impose so called windfall profits taxes on the oil co's recent record profits - not record profit margins mind you (which are not much higher than when oil sold at $30/barrel). Nor were their margins today higher than those of other industries. Yet Congressmen will use voter stupidity to hype this as if THEY are our good Govt stewards looking out for us little people. If their profits are taxed beyond the norm, R&D will dwindle and fuel prices will rise, which hurts the least most.
The same way minimum wage prices the least skilled out of their jobs first.
Happiness is inversely proportional to the size & cost of the State. However, the State has seen fit to afford elites the means to virtually avoid taxation.
Your posts seem short on argument, and long on ad hominem. However, you seem to have missed my point. If you grant the initial assumption that statism is inherently wrong, then "are statists wrong" is not even a question. The only question is, "where did they go wrong?"
I can see that your intellectual resources are exhausted: if you had a cogent argument to make, you'd make it. That the minutemen, by contrast to the British regulars, were nothing like a trained professional military is not exactly controversial. Rather than exhorting me to "go read a history book," how about actually making an argument?
"The argument is pure buncombe."
Just as are your arguments for privitized defense. You seem to be arguing, as do a lot of libertarians, that you can indidually contract for national defense selecting the contractor that best suits your preferences. This form of national defense is simply not workable because there is nothing to coordinate the actions of the contractors providing that service. If you had any sense of defense matters you'd realize that a fractionated system of defense is easily defeated. 'Unity of Command' is one of the foremost principles of war. Wars cannot be won by committee.
"The founders disagreed with you. Those minutemen at Lexington and Concord were fighting to defend their lives, liberty and property. If every citizen is armed and ready to fight, to the last man, in self defense, then the nation is well protected indeed. The invading Canadian army will run into a solid wall of armed citizenry."
Wars are not won by individuals but by well disciplined units working under a centralized command and control system to achieve a specific objective.
Try this analogy. Just imagine a football team (national defense) formed using your libertarian priciples. One contractor provides a defensive safety and another provides another defensive safety. In all, eleven contractors provide a single player for the defense. Just how effective do you think this defensive team would be with multiple contractors determing the characteristics best suited for player selection or the defensive scheme or the defense to employ on a particular down?
Per Bylund works as a business consultant in Sweden, in preparation for PhD studies. He is the founder of Anarchism.net.Then Anarchism.net is the site for you.
Ah, but the problem comes when you contend that any governmental body is an instance of "statism." And it's compounded by the fact that "statism" is a word without fixed meaning. It's a convenient epithet that allows you to be against government, but simultaneously be for it in certain cases.
The minutemen certainly did defeat the British after Lexington and Concorde in 1775. The war, however, lasted until 1782 -- and we only won it because our troops were trained into an organized army. And because the British government was split on the topic of our independence. And because the British were poorly commanded. And, of course, because the French were helping us out.
As I said -- you need to learn some history.
And for what it's worth, my comment about artillery, etc., referred to our military position in 1917.
"Probably not very well, but the article doesn't seem to be limited to consideration of what is required to provide for the national defense, and I don't think there's a case to be made that any action that is justified in the name of national defense is equally justifiable for any other reason."
Of course not. But the author falls into a similar trap when he argues that if something is not justified in the name of national defense it cannot be justified for any other purpose.
But since you bring that up, libertarians from the Von Mises Institute like to argue that all functions of government can be better performed by the private sector quite commonly pointing to the use of privitized police and courts. I have similar problems with those arguments as well.
Suppose all police and courts are privitized. Let us further suppose that you and I are neighbors and have a dispute over say our property boundary. I go to my court and get an injuction against you. You go to yours and get an injuction against me. We both call in our separate police forces and try to enforce these injuctions. I think there is a problem there that illustrates why some functions must be public and why they must be compulsory in the sense that all must abide by them.
So the US government is a 'contractor'? Just exactly how do you contract, in a voluntary manner, with the US Government?
I'm sure your historical studies will also have reminded you that the Minute Men were so-named because they were training as an organized military body who were supposed to be in formation within a minute of the alarm being sounded.
I think his point is that the US has contracted out a lot of the functions of national defense. This is somewhat true, in the case of support functions and security (as opposed to fighting).
Just exactly how do you contract, in a voluntary manner, with the US Government?
Doesn't an all-volunteer military fit that description?
Actually not--but it sounded like it, because I referred to a "Contractor". My point was to argue that defense is both excludable and rivalrous, and hence doesn't meet the definition of a public good. For the sake of that argument, there has to be a hypothetical provider, which I referred to as a contractor. I did not intend to imply that the ideal national defense would involve rival "private army" companies, for example.
This form of national defense is simply not workable because there is nothing to coordinate the actions of the contractors providing that service.
You're sneaking in a notion of "coordination", which naturally enough implies centralization, which implies government... but Lexington and Concord were fought by all volunteers, who trained voluntarily, and whose unit of organization was local rather than central. The foundation of any rational defense without government would have to be a heavily-armed populace.
If we posit a well-armed militia with no commanders, and no other defense measures, we still get a surprisingly robust picture: any would-be invader faces the reality that victory will be incomplete until the last man is killed. This raises the cost of invasion prohibitively high in any rational scenario. (There's room for discussion of the doomsday scenario in which Iran gets a sun-killer bomb; but that problem already exists today, and doesn't change very much regardless of the model of national defense.)
Not that private armament is all we would have. Your critique of the libertarian position assumes that we're dealing with armies, and the only interesting question is who commands them. Under privatization, aspects of defense would become separate specialties with their own markets. Rather than taxing Illinoisans to protect the shoreline from air-raids, for example, some sort of early-warning system would be maintained and paid for by those defended. It would probably have dual-use, and raise some revenue by subcontracting to meteorologists, for example.
Anti-terrorist measures would be handled less by the military and more by domestic security agencies. For example, today many utilities are vulnerable to attack. A combination of insurance carriers and security contractors would mitigate those risks for their own purposes, and the results would be better than today. Airport security would be very different than today, and 9/11 style attacks would be considerably less likely. Various "military" functions would be assumed instead by plain-old security guards, insurance companies, and other providers.
The one thing we almost certainly wouldn't have, though, is an expeditionary force. Kind of a shame, really; we'd have difficulty invading foreign nations without an expeditionary force...
One contractor provides a defensive safety and another provides another defensive safety. In all, eleven contractors provide a single player for the defense.
As I illustrated above, a football team is a bad analogy. We aren't dealing with such a monoculture. More realistically, we'll have many separate industries: one providing protection from lone gunmen or suicide bombers; another protecting from fire (and incidentally, incendiary attacks); another selling arms to citizens; another providing personnel screening; etc.
It's unclear to me who would handle heavy-lifting such as aircraft or missiles, but that's for the market to figure out--I'm not in charge. The likeliest scenario I can see is that many security companies will pool their resources to hire a missile-defense company, in exactly the same way that most insurance companies today actually insure their insurance policies with reinsurers. General Re, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, carries billions in "super-catastrophe" policies today. It would be in their interests to maintain early-warning and defense installations to protect their assets. 9/11 cost them something like $2 billion. A nuke in NY would cost them much, much more.
That is not the actual claim. Many, perhaps most, libertarians are minarchists, not anarchists.
And it's compounded by the fact that "statism" is a word without fixed meaning.
All words in every language suffer from that defect to some extent.
Another reason WHY the fact that there are oodles of planets out there, does NOT mean that there is life on them - just because there are lots of them.
"I think his point is that the US has contracted out a lot of the functions of national defense. This is somewhat true, in the case of support functions and security (as opposed to fighting)."
I suspect that but wanted to give him the opportunity to make that case.
"Doesn't an all-volunteer military fit that description?"
That would depend upon your definition of a contract. The problem is the ability of the government to modify the contract at will. Take for example, extending the period of service in times of a national emergency. Remember when you 'contract' with the government, you are contracting with a "Sovereign Power'. By definition, that is not two equals entering into a contract.
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