I think government is the one market failure, the fact the market cannot keep governments from arising.
Different cases - the goal in Vietnam was not to win, and in the middle-east, conquest was never an open goal. For an army bent upon conquest and control, well, Germany seemed to do just fine in Europe and North Africa until those meddlesome outsiders got involved. In a society without central control, it’d be a tad more work - but setting up central control is a known art, not particularly difficult.
A private security company, geared toward investigation of small-scale theft and the like, is not going to be able to deal with an armored division coming over the hill. A private security company that can deal with such is unlikely to be able to sell their services during peacetime, and won’t remain in business.
Danno
I’m not certain about Australia, but in North America, the natives had access to the relevant technology. Firearms were available, and artillery was not much used in that conflict. What gave the invaders the decisive advantage was the central organization - they could outnumber any small tribe, gain control piecemeal - which is pretty much what they did. Had the natives had a continent-wide organization under central control, it may well have gone differently. Imagine if some of the New England tribes had been able to call in the Apaches, for instance…[^o)]
Funny - I always thought that the last few centuries were a tale of British misrule in Ireland - my Irish-American family always told the tales that way. There were raids back and forth before that, but when the British king decided he wanted to conquer Ireland, it happened.
Nope - individual landholders, when faced with an army, don’t have much chance. You’re not going to find any example in history of the locals successfully fending off a large, determined invasion.
It’d be lovely if it worked, but it won’t.
Danno
“Goddamn, I am so sick of hearing that analogy.”
Well, Solomon, the problem is that it seems entropy may be a universal (albeit statistical) law. Entropy has been applied to pretty much everything and has come out with no revision of its functional definitions. Whether it’s original application in thermodynamics or its application in information theory, it seems to work. Entropy is indeed a bitch.
A total free market is not a single system that can succumb to entropy. It is thousands of competing systems, which are constantly replaced with better ones. Entropy simply cannot obtain in such a situation.
Centralization wasn’t the only difference between aborigines and European settlers. Europeans practiced private property while aborigines practiced communal property. That gave the Europeans a decisive material advantage in any situation, with or without central organization.
There weren’t that many direct wars between natives and Europeans in the colonization of North America. There were wars where the natives were brought in to fight alongside Europeans in one of countless imperial wars, but otherwise the natives were just squeezed out. This changed radically with the constitution of the USA.
Large european armies deployed for colonial missions is mostly a 19th century phenomenon.
Nice point on Vietnam and Iraq. Do you think the US would have fared any better had they just aimed to conquer?
In the face of a late-30’s Germany, I agree that an AC society wouldn’t have too much hope. But then again, neither did the centrally-organised democratic nations of the time – it took the whole world to stop them. If a WWIII were to happen, an AC society would be under significant threat; both from the outside war-mongerers, and the pro-statists inside. Perhaps we can add WWIII to the list of things all societies just hope-like-fuck don’t happen: asteroids, deranged nano-tech scientists, Gore-esque global warming…
Re my war-time defence agency idea, I did say ‘reserves’. I don’t think it’s hard to picture a few companies seeking charity funding for the training of soldiers and the stocking of weaponry during peace time, who are set up to quickly mobilise the reserves come war time. Maybe a bit of competition there will find flashy new military innovations, too. [;)]
The question is flawed for several reason.
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The state is already “private” in that it creates private gains by socializing costs.
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Anarchism is simply demanding that the state follow the same laws as everyone else. You can’t be a government without being exempt from the law.
The point of the Iraqi war was to smash the Iraqi state, which they did. But having done that, the only bureaucracy they had available to use to control the country was the US military.
The goal, removing the possibility of Iraq creating a oil exchange trading in Euros, had been achieved when Bush hung his Mission Accomplished banner. The years of nation building were just to save face.
Why is it just the Europeans? True, there was more of it earlier, but it has happened in the 20th century, too. Have you ever seen a bumper sticker saying “Free Tibet”?
Danno, who’s gonna get to that right after lunch…
I expect that they’d have done better in the field, and that the folks back home would have made protests and election campaigns quite a bit different than they were. It’s hard to frame a war of conquest as a ‘just war’.
Unlike the other things you cite, history is chock full of examples of wars of conquest - to close the eyes, tap the ruby slippers together 3 times, and wish real hard they don’t happen would be remarkably short-sighted.
More wishful thinking, I’m afraid - have you looked at the MSRP of a single tank, bomber, or even a machine gun? Selling this as an insurance policy would be a tough sell, indeed - because the only thing more expensive than a well-equipped army would be not having one, and consumers can be remarkably short-sighted about such things.
I won’t claim that it cannot be done outside of government, but I fail to see how such a business could be prevented from becoming a government. If we have to have government (and I fear it is a necessity), it’d be far better to plan it as such, than to plan on doing without and learning to live with the result of the power-hungry designing it.
It’s failed in the USA - but if you consider the idea of a minimal government, in a world that’d never seen such a thing, opposed at home and laughed at abroad, they did a pretty good job, all in all. Trying again for such a goal is, IMO, a worthwhile task - and we’ll be ripe for it fairly soon. I fear that most existing governments are about to go bankrupt.
Danno, ever cheerful, eh?