You and I are both far likelier to die by lightning strike than by WMD attack. And we're even more likely than that to die by the hands of a mugger--though we're overwhilemingly likely to die of natural causes. If you're inteterested in defense against any sort of unnatural death, you'd optimize your expenditure of resources if you buy a handgun and train with it regularly.
market failures have made ballistic missile defense impossible.
Really? I don't know if you've heard of super-catastrophe insurance, but it's an amazingly high-stakes game. General Re, only one carrier of supercat, spent about $2 billion post 9/11. If New York were nuked, they'd spend many times that in settlements. It's certainly in their interests to minimize that risk, commensurate with their investment. So your assertion that such a thing cannot possibly be produced by market forces is not nearly so self-evident as you'd like to think.
And of course I can't resist pointing out that ballistic missiles were invented in Nazi Germany. Government failure created the risk, and now you predict that a market failure prevents any response? What "market failure" stacks up to the V2 in terms of its harmful impact on mankind? I'd take a millennium of market failures over just a few decades of government failures!
...someone who's spending a great deal of time explaining to me how delicious his imaginary steak is ;)
If that's your main charge against me, then we're both guilty. The discussion isn't about how things are now; we both know how things are now. The discussion is whether any other way is possible. You argue no; I argue yes--but we're both arguing about theoretical possibilities, not actual realities.
So you're basically telling us that, in the absence of a national defense, General Re insurance will elect to spend tens of billions of dollars yearly to form its own military to prevent attack by somebody like North Korea, Iran, or the Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany, or Imperial Japan (none of whom would have been stopped by your insurance company army from building up their offensive capabilities), or whomever else might wish to take their chances at plucking a ripe fruit like the US?
You're kidding, right? I remember a Richie Rich comic book with a similar plot, but the cartoonists weren't actually serious about it.....
Actually, no. I don't deny that it's possible, I merely point out that it's not particularly practical, insofar as it offers no apparent tangible benefits over the current system, and has several flaws that don't currently exist. I have the luxury of defending something akin to the status quo, meaning that I don't have to demonstrate the impossibility of your proposal - I merely have to show that it's no better than what we have now, which it isn't, and hence there is no incentive to change.