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10A067
Defending the Nation
by Jim Davies, 11/8/2010
"So how would you defend America, without a government?" Pea-brained statists suppose the question is a "gotcha." Some reply by visualizing large defense firms, for whose services most would contract, rather as one may buy insurance or the protection of a free-market firefighting service. Perhaps it will happen that way - whatever is voluntary is good - but I think we need to probe a little deeper. The premise is that America has rid itself of all government, and as shown here under Zeroizing It that can only happen when all government employees walk off the job, which will happen only when they all understand what government really is, which can happen only after they have been rather well re-educated. Now, that re-education is in process, it will not take many more years, but it really will result in the total absence of government; therefore, there will be no "nation" to be defended, because a "nation" is a group of people ruled by a government. Therefore the question of defending it is moot. Instead of a "nation" there will be a society, a collection of people living near each other and interacting for mutual benefit; we may call that a free "market." Nobody will rule them. No obligations will exist, except those undertaken voluntarily by contract. Now, what external threat might face such a society, from which it would need defending? Normally in all history, Government A (Nation A) has set out to conquer Nation B so as to gain some of what its subjects are producing. It sets out to displace those rulers and steal the loot they are enjoying (or lebensraum they are using, etc.) One slavemaster is replaced by another. The change may make life worse for the producers, the slaves (us) or not - but it's seldom a change worth dying to prevent; yet that's exactly what the defending government demands its subjects do. It pretends to exist in large part to defend them (hence the question, at the head of this Blog) but in reality its people exist to defend their government. So when we have thrown off the slavemasters, what exactly is left for a foreign attacker to covet? - nothing. Just the burden of trying to re-impose rule on a set of people that has already decisively rejected all rule; and for that, he'd have to bring with him millions of enforcers, bureaucrats, grunts. The German government was able to subdue France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Poland, etc in 1940 because it needed only to impose a thin top layer on an existing structure of rule; if no such structure exists to be taken over, the task of ruling becomes impossibly expensive. No attack will ever begin. Then in addition, news of Americans' rejection of our government will have spread; our immediate, dramatic increase in prosperity will have been noticed, and the people currently subject to the rule of all potentially hostile governments will be preparing to shed theirs like we did ours. Those governments will be preoccupied with trying to prevent that, leaving no resources for a probably fruitless foreign adventure. The age-old, lethal game of conquer thy neighbor will have ended. |
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