Two Plus Two Newer Archives - AC defense, part I: Defending a free nation

Defending a free nation
I've decided to post a few articles on how to defend an AC territory from outside threats, this one being the first. I won't be quoting the whole article, but I will be quoting the parts I deem important to a discussion. I also encourage others (especially those skeptical of the viability of AC defense) to read the whole article, however unlikely that may be.

It notes pointing out while a free nation as we talk about it here may seem like an oxymoron, however the author seems to use it as a synonym for any AC (or what he frequently calls libertarian anarchist) area.
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The author points out that cooperation is always more likely to yield good results then aggression, however, the reality is some will still make that bad decision, and we must protect ourselves against that.

He then points out the flaws of a government defense-
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Second, government is impractical. Government is a monopoly: it prohibits competition and obtains its revenues by force. It thus faces far less market pressure, and its customers are not free to take their money elsewhere. As a result, governments have little incentive to cut costs or to satisfy their customers. Hence governments are, unsurprisingly, notorious for inefficiency, wastefulness, and abuse of power.

So, since I don't want a government, I obviously don't want a government military. However, even in societies that do have a government, I think it's still a good idea not to have a government military. A government which has an army that it can turn against its own citizens is a lot more dangerous than a government that doesn't. That's why so many of this country's Founders were so adamantly opposed to a standing army, seeing it as a threat to domestic liberty (see, e.g., the Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted by George Mason). (A standing navy worried them less because it's harder to impose martial law on land by means of sea power! If the United States had been an archipelago of islands, they might have thought differently.) In this country today, U. S. soldiers are reportedly being asked whether they would be willing to shoot American citizens! A free nation needs to find a less dangerous way of protecting its citizens.

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He then points out the flaw of centralization which has plagued many states throughout history-
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Centralized government poses yet another threat to a nation's liberty. The more that control over a society is centralized in a single command center, the easier it is for an invading enemy to conquer the entire nation simply by conquering that command center. Indeed, invaders have historically done just that, simply taking over the power structure that already existed.

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He also points out how decentralized nations have escaped this:
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For example, during the American Revolution the British focused their energies on conquering Philadelphia, at that time the nominal capital of the United States, on the assumption that once the capital had fallen the rest of the country would be theirs as well. What the British failed to realize was that the United States was a loose-knit confederation, not a centralized nation-state, and the government in Philadelphia had almost no authority. When Philadelphia fell, the rest of the country went about its business as usual; Americans were not accustomed to living their lives according to directives from Philadelphia, and so the British troops ended up simply sitting uselessly in the occupied capital, achieving nothing. Hence Benjamin Franklin, when he heard that the British army had captured Philadelphia, is said to have replied, "Nay, I think Philadelphia has captured the British army."

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He does concede though that extreme decentralization also has flaws. That being that since there is no organization in extreme decentralization (of defense) an invader can just pick off city after city, citing Alexander the Great's conquest of the middle east as an example. However, decentralization isn't inherently flawed, the flaw is organization. Therefore the goal (the author states) is organization without centralization.

The author's thoughts on achieving this balance:
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It is admittedly a difficult balance to strike. Before we despair, however, we should notice that the goal we are trying to achieve is relatively modest. The defense of a free nation will be limited to just that: defense. No military interventions around the globe, no imperialism, no foreign adventuring, no gunboat diplomacy. Which means that a free nation's defense budget will be much cheaper than those of its potential enemies. If we put that fact together with the fact that a free nation is also likely to have a much more prosperous economy than its enemies have, we can see some reason for optimism.

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The author then proposes something many ACists have said in the past here [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img] "Let the market take care of it", and explains why:
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As students of Austrian economics (see, e.g., the writings of F. A. Hayek) we know that the free market, by coordinating the dispersed knowledge of market actors, has the ability to come up with solutions that no individual could have devised. So why not let a solution to the problem of national defense emerge through the spontaneous order of the market, rather than trying to dictate ahead of time what the market solution must be?

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However, the author views this answer as incomplete. For one, providing, ahead of time, some realistic scenarios of what AC defense would look like helps bring people over to the AC side.

He then points out the three main voluntary economies, those being profit economy (what most of us think of when thinking of AC), the charity economy, and the labor economy.
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In the Profit Economy, the people who want some good or service X can obtain X by paying someone else to provide it. In the Charity Economy, the people who want X can obtain it by finding someone who will give it to them for free. In the Labor Economy, the people who want X can obtain it by producing it themselves. As Jacobson notes, when free-market anarchists start looking for voluntary private alternatives to government, they tend to think primarily in terms of the Profit Economy — while left-wing anarchists, on the other hand, tend to think primarily in terms of the Labor Economy. Yet in any real-world market system, all three economies coexist and interact, in different combinations depending on culture and circumstances.

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As you would guess, the first solution in the profit economy is private defense companies. However, some market anarchists are pessimistic about this idea, for reasons of free riding and the public goods problem. The author claims that there are solutions to this, and although he doesn’t go into it here he links two previously written articles where he has-
Funding public goods; Six solutions
The nature of law, Part I
The author then addresses some of the problems with a profit economy solution:
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There are other problems associated with a Profit Economy solution. A united military defense seems to require some degree of centralization in order to be effective, and there is the danger that a consortium of protection agencies selling national security might evolve into a government, as the Anglo-Saxon monarchs in the Middle Ages, thanks to the pressure of constant Viking invasions, were able to evolve from military entrepreneurs providing national defense in exchange for voluntary contributions, to domestic dictators with the power to tax and legislate.
This danger might be especially pressing if the consortium's soldiers are more loyal to the consortium than to the clients. Political authors from Livy to Machiavelli have warned against the use of foreign mercenaries rather than citizen soldiers, because it is easier for a government to turn foreign mercenaries against its own citizens. A vivid example of this was seen during the Polish government's attempt to crack down on the Solidarity movement in the 1980's; when a crowd had to be crushed and beaten, the government used Russian troops, because they feared Polish troops might be divided in their loyalties. (This perhaps gives us some reason to view with alarm the increasing use of multinational U.N. forces by Western governments.)

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And his defense against these objections:
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But the problem is perhaps not insuperable. A consortium of defense agencies would lack the mantle of legitimacy and authority available to a king or government, which would make a power grab more difficult. Moreover, the citizens of a free nation would presumably be armed; and the freedom of any people against an encroaching government rests, in the final analysis, on their possession of arms and their willingness to use them.

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The author then points out that historically the more armed a population has been the less likely it was to be oppressed by a central authority.

Next up is the charity economy-
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People donate money all the time to causes they care about. And the more prosperous they are, the more they donate. Unless libertarian economics is hopelessly wrong — in which case we might as well give up now — people in a free nation would be extremely prosperous. And they would presumably care about national security. So we can predict that a great deal of money could be collected for purposes of national defense by charity alone. Since, as mentioned above, the financial needs of a truly defensive national defense are relatively modest, charity could easily be a major source of defense funds.

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However the author does admit that determining who the recipient of these funds may be difficult and believes the issue to be to deep for this article. He sees another problem, that being that rich people would be the ones donating a lot, and that they may donate to the point that whatever companies they donate to may “skew national security decisions in their favor”. However he sees this as much less a problem-
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Government magnifies the influence of the rich, because government decision-makers do not own the money they control, and so are willing to spend a larger sum to promote corporate interests than they actually receive from those interests in the way of bribes and campaign contributions. Private protection agencies' costs would be internalized, and so the corporate class would be deprived of this crucial lever.

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He expands on this issue in this article-

Long then goes into the labor economy. Being that both options delegate power to other powers, some individual defense would be important. He goes into the benefits of an armed populace and having many small militias-
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A possible drawback to a heavy reliance on armed civilian-based defense is that it cannot take effect until the enemy has already entered the country — at which point it might seem that the cause is hopeless. But Machiavelli, in his Discourses on Livy, argues persuasively that it is better to meet the enemy on your own home ground rather than his — if, he adds, you have an armed populace. If your populace is not armed, he warns, you should engage the enemy as far from your own soil as possible.
I have often heard it said that it takes roughly three times as many troops to invade a country as to defend it; the defender knows the territory better, does not face hostile locals, and has a much shorter and so less vulnerable supply line. Many military theorists have argued that the South might have won the Civil War if they had stayed put and relied on sniping and guerilla warfare against the invader instead of marching forward to meet the Northern troops on equal terms, in regular battle array. The armed citizenry of Switzerland has long posed a powerful deterrent against potential invaders, enabling that country to maintain peace and freedom for what in comparative terms is an amazingly long time. (Of course, having your country surrounded by Alps doesn't hurt!)

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He then addresses a potential problem with this:
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But recall the lesson of Alexander: unless an armed defense is organized, an invader can simply pick off individual armed neighborhoods one at a time. What is needed, then, is some kind of citizens' militia. But a militia called up and directed by a centralized government poses difficulties we've mentioned already. The key, remember, is: ORGANIZATION WITHOUT CENTRALIZATION.

The best kind of militia, then, might be one organized along the following lines. Begin with a number of local neighborhood militias, run by their members on a democratic basis — the military equivalent of the mutual-aid societies discussed in previous issues of Formulations. A number of these local militias get together to form a county militia, which in turn combines with others to form a statewide militia, and so forth — so the ultimate National Militia would be organized as an "association of associations" (the French anarchist Proudhon's formula for what should replace the state), with power and authority running from bottom to top rather than top to bottom. (As for manpower, although many militias have traditionally relied on conscription, this seems unnecessary; if a nation is genuinely under attack — as opposed to engaging in foreign interventions — there is never a shortage of volunteers. And where the populace is used to bearing and handling arms, the training period required for new recruits would be shorter.) Members of each militia would elect their commanding officers (as American soldiers did during the Revolutionary War), and so on up to the commander-in-chief of the National Militia. This bottom-up approach, replacing the top-down approach of a traditional military, would make it much more difficult for the supreme military leader to seize power. Such a militia might well be able to achieve the goal of organization without centralization

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Long then brings up a technique that may seem odd to most: non-violent resistance. He cites several cases where nonviolent resistance has been successful. He concedes though, that sometimes it doesn't work. However, so does Violent resistance, and we should weigh the factors involved in case to decide which type works in which scenario.

So in summary, Long belives all of these could be used at the same time in an libertarian anarchist area-
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• First prong: a regular high-tech military defense, supported by paying customers and charitable contributions alike.
• Second prong: an armed citizenry, organized into a decentralized militia.
• Third prong: organized nonviolent resistance

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The author actually believes (with good reason) that the biggest problem may be that an AC defense would attack other nations, using their comparitive advantages-
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• free nations are more prosperous, and thus better armed;
• they are more politically stable, and thus harder to defeat through treachery;
• there is higher morale among their citizens, thus making them better soldiers;
• equal opportunity and free competition among citizens tend to reward, and thus to foster, what Machiavelli calls virtù (by which he means, not "virtue" in our sense, but a combination of self-discipline, boldness, and ingenuity — which are nice things to have in your own nation, but can be dangerous traits in a vigorous and aggressive nation next door);
• and the high standard of living enjoyed by free nations leads to an increase in population, thus creating a pressure to expand into the territory of their neighbors.

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He explains that this problem could very well effect citizens of a free nation just how America's interventionist policy has hurt American citizens (my example, not Long's).

Well, that's it, looks like I copy/pasted more then I expected, didn't want to leave anything important out. For getting to the end, hears a joke for those anti-libertarians out there which is in the article:

How many libertarians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, the market will take care of it.

alternative answer: I'll do it for a dollar.