[r9etb]

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.

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.....

[Shalom Israel]

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...

Not at all--I'm saying they'll take steps to protect their investment. Those steps will be more cost effective, and more imaginitive, than the government could take under similar circumstances, because they know the actual dollar value of their risk, and the actual dollar costs of their efforts.

By way of comparison, the Apollo program cost about $100 billion in today's dollars. In 2004, a privately-built craft achieved a suborbital spaceflight for a cost of about $25 million. What does that show? After all, my cellphone has more computing power than NASA did in the 1950s... well, that's exactly the point. The free market could have achieved spaceflight whenever it was deemed cost-effective. Today a wealthy hobbiest could--and did--bankroll the whole thing. But Kennedy decided he wanted to go to the moon then and there, and he could--and did--forcibly take about one gulf-war's worth from the American people to fund it. That the money could have been better spent is proven by the fact that the free market didn't decide to shoot for the moon on their slide-rule technology.

The application of this parable to missile defense should be obvious. The reason you think the idea so risible is that you imagine there's only one way to do it, and that the government's amazingly inefficient way is it.

Future generations will find the whole SDI thing as funny as we (should) find the Apollo program: it's impressive what was accomplished with primitive technology, but funny when you realize that inside most people's 22nd-century iPods is everything you need to disarm a 21st-century warhead.