101 lines
6.7 KiB
Plaintext
101 lines
6.7 KiB
Plaintext
Defeating Hussein Without Government
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<p>The aftermath of 9/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist.</p>
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<p>For many years before the WTC came down I believed that America<br />
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could be better defended by have no government than by the system we<br />
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have now, I imagined a nation of heavily armed militias, without<br />
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the power-projection capabilities of a conventional military but<br />
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with the capability to inflict a world of grief on an invader — and<br />
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with nobody having the authority to tell them to surrender. We<br />
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could have a home defense better than Switzerland’s, our larger<br />
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population and longer distances doing for us what mountainous terrain<br />
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does for the Swiss.</p>
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<p>There would still be a place in an anarchist America for<br />
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professional soldiers — not many, but a few heavy troop formations<br />
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would be kept on retainer by consortia of insurance companies. Yes, I<br />
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said insurance companies, that’s because how free markets socialize<br />
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shared risks. Normal law enforcement would be funded by pools set up<br />
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by vendors of crime insurance looking to reduce their payouts;<br />
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national defense and overseas power projection (to the extent the term<br />
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still had meaning in a stateless society) would be funded by people<br />
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who bought war insurance (say, businesses with overseas assets to<br />
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protect).</p>
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<p>These measures, I was and am convinced, would stop conventional<br />
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wars of conquest dead in their tracks. Invade a nation of 350,000,000<br />
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libertarians, most of them routinely armed? Yeah. Right. Any<br />
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War-College-trained military officer will tell you that urban warfare<br />
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against guerrillas on their home ground chews up armies faster than<br />
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anything else. Witness Stalingrad.</p>
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<p>Without a government, many of the <em>reasons</em> people might go<br />
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to war against America would also vanish. No entangling alliances, no<br />
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foreign policy to object to. Conventional terrorism would become a<br />
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lot dicier proposition in a libertarian anarchy, too — as in<br />
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Israel, where armed civilians have on numerous occasions thwarted<br />
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attempted massacres by shooting back. And, of course, the WTC would<br />
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probably still be standing if the <em>passengers</em> had been<br />
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armed…</p>
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<p>I grew up in the shadow of the Soviet threat. Theirs was an evil,<br />
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evil system, but they were at bottom geopolitically rational. They<br />
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calculated their chances very cold-bloodedly, and never pushed the<br />
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big red button. An ungoverned America would have stood them off, I<br />
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believe, long enough for the inevitable Hayekian collapse to remove<br />
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the problem.</p>
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<p>But now we face the prospect of weapons of mass destruction dropping<br />
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into the hands of people who are behaviorally indistinguishable from<br />
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stone psychotics. That prospect poses problems of a different nature<br />
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than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did. Because what Al-Qaeda<br />
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wants is not driven or constrained by geopolitics, by pragmatism, by a<br />
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rational estimation of risk and reward. They have no population to<br />
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answer to even in the limited sense that Hitler and Stalin did. They<br />
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were madmen, but they were constrained by the necessities of leading<br />
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a country.</p>
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<p>Under the present system, I see no alternative to state action as a<br />
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way to suppress this threat, up to and including conventional warfare<br />
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and the proconsular occupation of significant parts of the Arab world.<br />
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I am not happy with this evaluation; war is the health of the State,<br />
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and statism is the most lethal enemy humanity will ever know short of<br />
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a giant meteor strike (those who think this statement hyperbolic are<br />
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recommended to read Robert Conquest’s “The Great Terror”). The<br />
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question that drives <em>this</em> essay is whether, supposing the<br />
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U.S. were to become a market anarchy, there would be other means to<br />
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the same end.</p>
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<p>It’s a tough case. Al-Qaeda would not hate us any less; it is not,<br />
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at bottom, U.S. policy that enrages them, it is the fact of our wealth<br />
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and freedom and refusal to submit to the One True Way of Allah. An<br />
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ungoverned America, more wealthy and more free by the exact measure<br />
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that its productive capacity is spent efficiently on a network of<br />
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security agencies and judicial associations rather than being wasted<br />
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on the support of parasitic government, would hardly enrage them<br />
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less.</p>
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<p>Al-Qaeda in itself is not an exceptional threat; in a properly<br />
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armed society the 9/11 hijackers would never even have <em>tried</em><br />
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their stunt, because they would known that the certain outcome was<br />
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death in a hail of civilian bullets. It is the combination of<br />
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Al-Qaeda-like suicidal fanaticism with state sponsorship (specifically<br />
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the ability to produce chemical/biological/nuclear weapons) that<br />
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strains the anarcho-libertarian theory of national self-defense, It<br />
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does so by dramatically lowering the cost of aggression for both<br />
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sets of bad guys; the fanatics get the capability to strike a<br />
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hammer-blow at the Great Satan, and their state sponsors get<br />
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deniable cat’s paws.</p>
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<p>It is worth pointing out, however, that it strains the statist<br />
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theory of self-defense almost as badly. A governed U.S. has the<br />
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neo-imperialist option (conquer Iraq, install Colin Powell as<br />
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miltary governor, and try to transform the place as we transformed<br />
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Japan), and that may even appear to be the option with the lowest<br />
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odds of catastrophic failure, but we don’t actually have any clue<br />
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whether this will actually <em>work</em> — Al-Qaeda might well<br />
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be able to get their bombs from the failing states of former-Soviet<br />
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Central Asia, or from North Korea. The historical situation<br />
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is truly unprecedented.</p>
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<p>Harder than the theoretical problem, perhaps, is the practical one.<br />
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How to oppose that expansion of state power without acting as an<br />
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unwilling enabler for the terrorists? In some ways that’s easy;<br />
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pushing to abolish all the police-state bullshit at airports is<br />
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a no-brainer, since tiger-team tests of the system consistently show<br />
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that none of it has made smuggling weapons on board more difficult<br />
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(now, as before 9/11, approximately 30% of attempts succeed).</p>
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<p>In a wider sense, though, it’s a very difficult question. One I<br />
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will be thinking about — and possibly writing about — in the<br />
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coming months.</p>
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<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=81941258">Blogspot comments</a></p>
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