National Defense

Commerce, Markets, and Peace: Richard Cobden’s Enduring Lessons
by Edward P. Stringham
"Many conservative advocates of market-based economics passionately support a large military, while many opponents of a large military oppose markets. Nineteenth-century classical liberal Richard Cobden, however, maintained that the military and the market were substitutes: more military entails less market."

Defending the Homeland
May 1, 2002
by Robert Higgs
"The Pentagon’s business-as-usual defense policy—obviously—failed to defend the American people on September 11. Nor will it defend them in the future. Just possibly, what's good for Lockheed-Martin, the top brass at the Pentagon, and the congressmen in cahoots with them is not necessarily good for national security. But then, who cares? We’ve now got the Office of Homeland Security to protect us."

A Discourse of Standing Armies; shewing the Folly, Uselessness, and Danger of Standing Armies in Great Britain
by Thomas Gordon
"Cato” (of Cato’s Letter’s) continues his attack on the waste and militarism of the British Empire which this critique of the idea of permanent “standing” armies."

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Defying Leviathan
by Andy Duncan (Henley)
"All in all, The Myth of National Defense is a fabulous book, and one which I can highly recommend even to confirmed Minarchists, so they can refute it at their leisure. Its one drawback is that it does lack the organic unity of the Professor's earlier book on democracy, mainly because he failed to write the whole thing himself. But just the chapter by Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, alone, makes up for this."

Historical Examples of Nonviolent Struggle
by the Albert Einstein Institute
A short list of successful nonviolent protests.

Homeland Security: Learning from Japan
by Edward A. Olsen
". . . the United States and Japan must recognize that the more the American people accept the wisdom of focusing on genuine homeland national defense and avoiding interventionist internationalism, the more likely it is that sound U.S. realism will guide the United States toward a significantly reduced global security role."

The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production
edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
See The Myth of National Defense for a description of the essays in this book.

The National Defense Myth
reviewed by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"In the entire history of economic and political ideas, you can find only a handful of writings that argue along these lines, and nothing that makes the argument in this level of detail or with this level of theoretical and practical rigor. This volume is the best proof I've seen in years that intellectuals can perform essential services to society: shattering myths, causing a complete rethinking of widely held fallacies, assembling historical evidence in patterns that reveal certain theoretical truths, and making obvious the previously unthinkable."

Privateering and National Defense: Naval Warfare for Private Profit
by Larry J. Sechrest
"Almost all economists declare that national defense is a “public good” that will be provided in sub-optimal quantities—or not provided at all—by private, profit-seeking firms. The purpose of this paper is to challenge just that sort of statement. The attack on national defense as a public good which must be provided by the state will be two-pronged. One part, the briefer of the two, will raise theoretical questions about public goods in general and national defense in particular. The second part will be devoted to a detailed survey of privateering, a form of naval warfare conducted by privately-owned ships which lasted from the twelfth century to the nineteenth century. What privateers were, how they operated, the legal customs that grew up around them, how effective they were, how profitable they were, and why they disappeared will all be addressed. The common employment of privateers during wartime will be offered as empirical evidence that defense need not be monopolized by the state."

The Quickest Route to Defense Privatization
November 10, 2003
by William Buppert
"The time is fast approaching when the choice won’t be a luxury but a necessity. The potential blowback to our current adventures overseas will arrive at our shores sooner than later and the entire military organization we currently employ is an offensive weapon with limited defensive capability to defend continental America. The Cold War is over but you wouldn’t know it if you spent a day in the Pentagon. Current fiscal policies of infinite debt restructuring, double-digit increases in discretionary spending and the huge inevitable waste of government programs will culminate in a day of reckoning after which the duty of national defense will have to be privatized to a growing extent."

The State as the Only Defense Against Nuclear War
by Roy Halliday
This paper draws out the implications of the argument that a state with nuclear weapons is the only defense against other states with nuclear weapons.

The security of a free state
by Aaron Russo
"Many of my friends like to say -- and I tend to agree with them -- that the Second Amendment should have been the First Amendment. It is upon the right to keep and bear arms that all our other rights depend. A right that we're not able or allowed to defend is no right at all." (3/31/04)

They Didn't Attack Switzerland
by Bill Walker
"The features of the Swiss system for keeping the peace are simple. They mind their own business, and they have very strict gun control. By which they mean that every Swiss male must have a gun, except for those who have to carry a mortar or missile launcher. Females are not subject to universal military training, but if you go to a Swiss rifle range, there are always girls blasting away too. After 9-11, the Swiss told passengers to carry their bayonets onto their airliners . . . somewhat different from the US response of panicked victim-disarmament. (You are aware that 99% of US pilots are STILL disarmed?)"

without a State