“If you’re right, then you’re wrong: conventional weapons are equally threatening, so eliminating nukes doesn’t eliminate the threat.”
It does because once the fight is a conventional army verses a conventional army, the various PDAs could maybe stand a chance in any invasion, except if the fight is only for strategic resources like oil rigs or to marginalize trade (blockaids, etc) between ‘us’ and another enemy country.
“You are assuming, a priori, that nuclear-equipped nations would attack a nation who, by virtue of its disarmed status, presents no threat to them.”
The threat does not have to be an invasion army… it can be trading with an enemy… it could be economic. Other non-nuclear nations didn’t for example pose the threat to the USSR for example, but in addition, had those nations been attacked, the US and NATO would have retaliated.
“we are discussing a hypothetical situation in which nobody legitimately has that sort of power”
I’m not sure what you mean here by ‘legitimately’
“In which case those corporations would quickly lose their business to firms that were willing and able to protect their customers and their property, and their assets would likely be liquidated and absorbed by the same.”
So… what prevents a competing PDA from ‘throwing in’ with an enemy state?
Nukes aren’t magical. They’re just big bombs. The threat from a big conventional warhead is exactly equal to the threat from a nuclear device of the same yield. Using nuclear energy for the explosion doesn’t change anything, except that the same explosive force can be packaged in a smaller device. The largest fission bomb ever produced had a yield of about 500 kilotons. A one-megaton thermonuclear device has a thermal radiation radius of about ten miles, and the blast radius is even smaller. Yes, it would be really, really bad news for you if one of these things went off in your neighborhood, but they simply don’t represent the massive threat you’re worried about.
To represent such a threat, we’d have to be talking about thermonuclear weapons, not nuclear, and they’d have to be delivered by missile, and there would have to be thousands of them.And that kind of threat can only be financed by government force.
Even if Sam Walton, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison were all genocidal maniacs, they couldn’t afford to put together such an arsenal. They wouldn’t even try: there are much more efficient ways, dollar for dollar, to kill lots of people.
Your excessive worry reminds me of an action movie: after one bomb goes off, the credits roll, and we’re left to imagine that somehow the world has come to an end. It hasn’t; only the movie has come to an end. If New York were erased tomorrow, 99.87% of the world’s population would still live on to address the threat and wreak terrible vengeance on the psycho killers.
The point you’re missing is that none of that matters in the great scheme of things. An attack that took out America’s three largest cities, assuming they killed everyone, would leave 95% of the US population alive. If the able-bodied men are all armed, the attacker has accomplished nothing: the people would continue refusing to bow to his demands, and would repel any invasion vigorously. The scenario is far less plausible than you think it is in the first place, but even if it happened, so what?
Well because of what Len just said: “Even if Sam Walton, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison were all genocidal maniacs, they couldn’t afford to put together such an arsenal”
I also said why it would do a state no good to deploy its arsenal against Libertopia. With a kill radius of a dozen-or-two miles, and a population that simply isn’t afraid of fear itself, there’s nothing to gain. The vast majority of the population will not have been killed in the strike, and the followup invasion will still meet a rifle behind every blade of grass.
The only thing that makes a nuclear attack scary, in any existential sense, is that you have a superstitious fear of it. If someone told you he has a nuke, you’re apparently ready to fall down and worship. I’m not. If someone is fool enough to use a nuke on me, the survivors will kill him out of self-interest.
The other factor you’re missing is that Soviet Amerika will be building nuclear weapons with slave labor while in much-more-prosperous Libertopia, disintigration rays will be available on the shelves at Lowe’s. You’re re-fighting WWII, when a truly free society will be reaching for the stars.
But you haven’t. Deploying a nuclear arsenal fails to accomplish the desired end if the victims refuse to submit.
On a meta level, our respective arguments reflect our personal willingness or unwillingness to submit to threats in general. You’re willing to submit. If everyone thinks as you do, then having a nuke would make me planetary Emperor, sure. But if everyone thinks as you do, a baseball bat would make me planetary Emperor. The problem isn’t my weapon; it’s your cowardice.
But that only brings the question full-circle. If you’re right, then your fear has already been realized: Bush has the nukes, and he’s planetary Emperor. So the problem of nukes in a free society is no different than the problem confronting us already: an armed madman versus a plantful of cowards.
It doesn’t answer though a business caving into a nuclear threat from some state… A PDA wouldn’t be able to guard against nuclear attack, as admitted by it’s advocates. When that aggressive state decides to attack a business with nukes, other businesses would cave into that threat (by paying some sort of tribute, or on a promise to stop trading with the aggressive states enemies) instead of losing all of it’s assets, infrastructure, etc. It’s a simple cost-benefit analysis.
We’re going in circles at this point. You keep saying, “They will cave.” I keep saying, “They won’t cave.” My business wouldn’t cave: we’d pretend to cave, while arming insurgents within the nuclear state and fomenting civil war there, and just generally assymetric-attacking the hell out of them. Assuming they threatened me with nukes in the first place.
If you’re right, then all discussion is moot: the state will never die. Nukes aren’t going away, and worse things will be invented. States will have them, and therefore will always be too powerful to resist, etc., etc. So the only choice left is the status quo. Who are YOU voting for? McCain, or Obama?
When the species evolves to the point that anarchy is even possible, rather than purely mental masturbation, people will not be swayed by threats, nuclear or otherwise, because they won’t be the contemptible species of p**sies we know and loathe today.
The question is how far we have to go. Optimists like Rockwell and Block think that we’re already ready to stand up to bullies; people just need a little education. Which puts me in an awkward position. As a misanthrope, I can’t help but suspect you’re right. But if you’re right, ALL the discussion on this forum is moot, libertarians everywhere are completely wasting their time, and we’d be much better off pooling our money on a lobbyist.
…sorry to ressurect this, but I’ve been too busy to reply.
RE: Len,
Well, I am right on the need for some sort of state for protection against other states. It’s not a bad thing to have some sort of government that’s completely decentralized except for a few sectors (like defense, or the courts). I don’t understand why all of the government-hating libertarians can’t instead of pooling their money on lobbyists go and lobby some SE Asian country (instead of spending all their time fighting the neo-cons here) and use money to influence elections there and become the great civilization they claim will rise from anarchy. Most misanthropes though are pretty much 99% talk and no action though…
If you believe there are sectors of government that should be getting tax revenue, why don’t you go out and fund them? Why not collect the money voluntarily?
Hoppe disposes here briefly of the public goods arguments for the provision of security (and the entire argument more generally). In particular, see the last sections where he describes how private defence would work and the quotes from de Molinari. Under an anarchist system there will be as much defence as the market desires.
Because there is only one moral coercive monopoly, and that’s on the use of force.
The only thing that a free-market is not capable of producing is a defense force that would be fully capable of defending against a state-funded/operated military… conventional or nuclear.
Wars are won by killing people and breaking shit. No entity does that better than a state.
If initiating the use of force is wrong, why is it right only when the individuals who do it ban others from doing it? That’s essentially what you are saying.
I honestly don’t understand why you think this and I don’t think I could convince you otherwise.
Which is completely ineffective against an aggressive state. Most businesses instead of expecting their PDA to fight a costly war would just assume to not trade with the enemies of that aggressive state, or pay some sort of tribute, or sell goods to that state at below their market level, in exchange for their infrastructure to be blown to bits with one simple nuke. As mentioned above, a proper business would simply make a cost-benefit analysis and see that for the same reasons they would not go to war with each other they might not go to war with a state.
I’m going to take issue with what you said here. You seem pretty certain that “no one would use [a nuke] against us”, but says who? I’m not trying to be all neo-con fearmonger and I certainly think it would be a good idea for the U.S. to rid itself of its nuclear weapons, but you are living in a very utopian world to outright proclaim that no one would use nukes against us.
I think often times libertarians forget that the world is POPULATED with states. Some states far worse then our own. Some with leaders far worse then ours (hard to imagine, I know[:P]). Though it may be a small chance that somoene would nuke us it’s definitely not out of the question. Too many times people take Ron Paul’s fantastic non-interventionst philosophy to absurd levels and come to the conclusion that if we’d never been in the middle-east there would never be the possibility of fanatical Muslim terrorism. Yes, if we hadn’t been crusading around in support of Israel and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children (among other unspeakable atrocities) the likelihood of terrorism against us is going to go way down knowing that radical Muslims would hardly have strong enough incentives to recruit potential terrorists, but is it really intelligent to assume that there would never be a radical Muslim willing to come over here and blow himself up because he doesn’t like our culture, or whatever? I don’t think so. Likewise, I say libertarians be consistant and not look at the world in such a “American government bad, the rest of the world good” type of attitude. I say we should look at the world in a “every state bad” kind of attitude, and not underestimate what other governments are capable of.
Snliii, making the same assertions over again will not make your case. You’re still trapped in a statist mindset. Besides, if that is all what most businesses wanted to do, you have no right to force them to do otherwise. The fact that you merely bring up the social contract suggests to me you have not even bothered reading Hoppe’s article.