So you are saying in a stateless society private defense agencies would battle over ANWR with stealth bombers? Have you any idea what that would cost? It wouldn’t be anywhere near profitable. War isn’t very lucrative, that’s why only states do it. It’s a huge investment, you need to pay the manpower and guns… how are you going to sell that to your investors? Then you need to garrison the place to defend it. And you still need to mine the resources, which barely breaks even in a lot of cases. Even if it’s likely that you will be able to conquer some resource, before you can earn back your investment someone’s going to steal it from you. The more profitable it is, the more someone will want to take it from you. The last owner would probably rather blow it up than to hand it over intact. And owning resources isn’t really that valuable in a developed economy anyways, it’s all about information and services. Every investor will rather put his money in internet stock than some plot to conquer ANWR.
I addressed all of this in a previous thread:
The kind of large-scale force you are talking about wouldn’t be economically feasible, it simply wouldn’t exist. There’s no economically worthwhile purpose for stealth bombers and I don’t think any larger force than a few people with guns has ever existed in a stateless environment. --nero
In most cases, the threat of mass destruction without any hope of a successful defense will force the owners of inefficiently managed and under defended resources to submit without firing a shot.
Lastly, the costs of coercion is not that great. The US spends a paltry 4% of GDP on defense in contrast net profit across the entire economy is probably greater than 5% of GDP.
so by your definition, if an operating expense is greater than a mere 4% of operations than it is not cost effective ---- hence your entire argument is debunked since profits (an essential and beneficial component of capitalism) is a greater expense than defense !!!
the bottom line here is that many pacifists ancaps desperately want to believe that their system of choice is peaceful — however, this fantasy is simply not true.
if you really want peace, freedom, stability, and relative prosperity ---- look to an attenuated version of constutional federal republicanism than the one that currently existed.