Defeating Hussein Without Government
<p>The aftermath of 9/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist.</p>
<p>For many years before the WTC came down I believed that America<br />
could be better defended by have no government than by the system we<br />
have now,  I imagined a nation of heavily armed militias, without<br />
the power-projection capabilities of a conventional military but<br />
with the capability to inflict a world of grief on an invader &#8212; and<br />
with nobody having the authority to tell them to surrender.  We<br />
could have a home defense better than Switzerland&#8217;s, our larger<br />
population and longer distances doing for us what mountainous terrain<br />
does for the Swiss.</p>
<p>There would still be a place in an anarchist America for<br />
professional soldiers &#8212; not many, but a few heavy troop formations<br />
would be kept on retainer by consortia of insurance companies.  Yes, I<br />
said insurance companies, that&#8217;s because how free markets socialize<br />
shared risks.  Normal law enforcement would be funded by pools set up<br />
by vendors of crime insurance looking to reduce their payouts;<br />
national defense and overseas power projection (to the extent the term<br />
still had meaning in a stateless society) would be funded by people<br />
who bought war insurance (say, businesses with overseas assets to<br />
protect).</p>
<p>These measures, I was and am convinced, would stop conventional<br />
wars of conquest dead in their tracks. Invade a nation of 350,000,000<br />
libertarians, most of them routinely armed?  Yeah.  Right.  Any<br />
War-College-trained military officer will tell you that urban warfare<br />
against guerrillas on their home ground chews up armies faster than<br />
anything else.  Witness Stalingrad.</p>
<p>Without a government, many of the <em>reasons</em> people might go<br />
to war against America would also vanish.  No entangling alliances, no<br />
foreign policy to object to.  Conventional terrorism would become a<br />
lot dicier proposition in a libertarian anarchy, too &#8212; as in<br />
Israel, where armed civilians have on numerous occasions thwarted<br />
attempted massacres by shooting back.  And, of course, the WTC would<br />
probably still be standing if the <em>passengers</em> had been<br />
armed&#8230;</p>
<p>I grew up in the shadow of the Soviet threat.  Theirs was an evil,<br />
evil system, but they were at bottom geopolitically rational. They<br />
calculated their chances very cold-bloodedly, and never pushed the<br />
big red button.  An ungoverned America would have stood them off, I<br />
believe, long enough for the inevitable Hayekian collapse to remove<br />
the problem.</p>
<p>But now we face the prospect of weapons of mass destruction dropping<br />
into the hands of people who are behaviorally indistinguishable from<br />
stone psychotics.  That prospect poses problems of a different nature<br />
than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did.  Because what Al-Qaeda<br />
wants is not driven or constrained by geopolitics, by pragmatism, by a<br />
rational estimation of risk and reward.  They have no population to<br />
answer to even in the limited sense that Hitler and Stalin did.  They<br />
were madmen, but they were constrained by the necessities of leading<br />
a country.</p>
<p>Under the present system, I see no alternative to state action as a<br />
way to suppress this threat, up to and including conventional warfare<br />
and the proconsular occupation of significant parts of the Arab world.<br />
I am not happy with this evaluation; war is the health of the State,<br />
and statism is the most lethal enemy humanity will ever know short of<br />
a giant meteor strike (those who think this statement hyperbolic are<br />
recommended to read Robert Conquest&#8217;s &#8220;The Great Terror&#8221;).  The<br />
question that drives <em>this</em> essay is whether, supposing the<br />
U.S. were to become a market anarchy, there would be other means to<br />
the same end.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a tough case.  Al-Qaeda would not hate us any less; it is not,<br />
at bottom, U.S. policy that enrages them, it is the fact of our wealth<br />
and freedom and refusal to submit to the One True Way of Allah.  An<br />
ungoverned America, more wealthy and more free by the exact measure<br />
that its productive capacity is spent efficiently on a network of<br />
security agencies and judicial associations rather than being wasted<br />
on the support of parasitic government, would hardly enrage them<br />
less.</p>
<p>Al-Qaeda in itself is not an exceptional threat; in a properly<br />
armed society the 9/11 hijackers would never even have <em>tried</em><br />
their stunt, because they would known that the certain outcome was<br />
death in a hail of civilian bullets.  It is the combination of<br />
Al-Qaeda-like suicidal fanaticism with state sponsorship (specifically<br />
the ability to produce chemical/biological/nuclear weapons) that<br />
strains the anarcho-libertarian theory of national self-defense, It<br />
does so by dramatically lowering the cost of aggression for both<br />
sets of bad guys; the fanatics get the capability to strike a<br />
hammer-blow at the Great Satan, and their state sponsors get<br />
deniable cat&#8217;s paws.</p>
<p>It is worth pointing out, however, that it strains the statist<br />
theory of self-defense almost as badly.  A governed U.S. has the<br />
neo-imperialist option (conquer Iraq, install Colin Powell as<br />
miltary governor, and try to transform the place as we transformed<br />
Japan), and that may even appear to be the option with the lowest<br />
odds of catastrophic failure, but we don&#8217;t actually have any clue<br />
whether this will actually <em>work</em> &#8212; Al-Qaeda might well<br />
be able to get their bombs from the failing states of former-Soviet<br />
Central Asia, or from North Korea.  The historical situation<br />
is truly unprecedented.</p>
<p>Harder than the theoretical problem, perhaps, is the practical one.<br />
How to oppose that expansion of state power without acting as an<br />
unwilling enabler for the terrorists?  In some ways that&#8217;s easy;<br />
pushing to abolish all the police-state bullshit at airports is<br />
a no-brainer, since tiger-team tests of the system consistently show<br />
that none of it has made smuggling weapons on board more difficult<br />
(now, as before 9/11, approximately 30% of attempts succeed).</p>
<p>In a wider sense, though, it&#8217;s a very difficult question.  One I<br />
will be thinking about &#8212; and possibly writing about &#8212; in the<br />
coming months.</p>
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