22A026 Wars in the ZGS by Jim Davies, 6/28/2022

They are inseparable; war and government go together. You want government, you'll get war.

Therefore, if you're not yet an anarchist, you are endorsing war. That makes you morally defective.

Wars consist of violent quarrels between governments. It follows that after all governments have vanished from the face of the Earth, so will wars. So, again, I could leave the rest of this page blank to convey the point; there won't be any wars when all humans live in zero government societies.

However that most desirable change will not happen overnight - not even in a single country, let alone all 215 countries. My Transition to Liberty suggests how it will take place in America, first. Let's suppose we're at the stage of having a ZG Former USA (FUSA) but with governments persisting elsewhere. A temporary but confusing and tricky period; hopefully, very short.

News of the very radical change in this country will have spread everywhere, so things will not be black & white; many other societies will be in states of flux. Their populations will be realizing that their own governments are neither necessary nor beneficial, and will be learning (from such as TOLFA, duly translated) why and how to live without one; State employees will be quitting their jobs in accelerating numbers and the rulers will be shaking in their boots.

When those rulers perceive their pending doom, they will get desperate, and may lash out. That's the danger of this transitional period. One or more may think to wage war against FUSA in the hope of strangling the movement to freedom. Suppose they plan to invade. What then?

Given that their own employees will have begun to walk off the job, they will first have a problem assembling an invasion force. Then they will face the severe difficulty of knowing what to do after landing, say on the coast of Maine. "Take me to your leader" they may say, but there won't be any leader. So their army sweeps through the country, trying to govern all residents - who will know to ignore them, or at least not to work for them in any way. How exactly are they to administer their conquest? To whom do they go, to obtain a surrender? Oops!

There will not even be a spokesman to announce he will not speak! And the task of imposing a government when none exists will be so formidably expensive as to motivate the invader to declare victory and go home - much like Napoleon did, after reaching Moscow in 1812 but finding it had been vacated. And if any extra persuasion is needed, there will be plenty of residents eager to practice their gun-control skills on patrolling soldiers at the dead of night. The costs of victory - or rather, of occupation - will be far too great.

Harry Browne's delightful short story A Visit to Rhinegold describes a comparable dilemma.

Once, therefore, members of one society have learned they can do far better without government, there will be no preventing the spread of the idea. The worldwide collapse of what has benighted mankind for ten thousand years will be unstoppable, like an avalanche.

Probably, existing national characteristics will remain - starting, obviously, with language. Germans will continue to speak German, Poles, Polish; the rich quilt-pattern of differing cultures will be everyone's to explore. But wars will vanish because no government will exist to wage them, nor will passports be used since every traveler will be welcome as a potential source of trade and profit. Mistrust will be replaced by contracts and exchanges among traders; all of whom will profit because of the remarkable fact that value is subjective - as true across former national boundaries as it is within a village. The media of exchange will be agreed between the contracting parties, and gold will be the favorite choice for the reasons given here; the inconvenience of exchanging one form of "money" for another will vanish.

Wars often bring refugees, in great numbers, who in turn bring instability to the societies kind enough to take them in; that too will cease. Individuals will migrate as they always have, in search of new opportunities, but the numbers will be small. Generally, everone regards "home" as best.

There's no evidence of organized violence (wars) prior to the emergence of governments 10,000 years ago, so humankind will resume the peaceful progress of the preceding 40,000 years* after this blood-soaked interruption. Our race can look forward to a future of almost unimaginable brightness.

* I take Spencer Wells' estimate of the date, 50 millennia ago, when hom. sap. left Africa following an evolutionary leap.