22A049 Free Markets or War by Jim Davies, 12/6/2022

Recently I've been reading my father's WW2 diary, and one fact became very clear almost at once: whereas the BritGov had made very inadequate military preparations for fighting Germany, its bureaucrats were ready and waiting to impose rationing on the people it purported to protect. They sprung into action the moment the starting pistol was fired.

The diary shows that rationing would begin the very same month (September, 1939.) First gasoline, then a list of common foods. The system was fully designed and ready, and "ration books" arrived by mail in November. The government was fully prepared to limit and control what everyone could buy; in that, there was no neglect or delay.

The rationale for rationing is that governments rely on near-universal support when they wage wars, and that would be impossible if the result of a conflict were to send sky-high the prices of basic foods like meat, eggs, bread, butter and sugar; and if warfare meant the supply would fall, prices would indeed rise and then only the better-off could afford to eat. Not the way to motivate the masses.

So I got to wonder: suppose we invert that reasoning. Suppose that a free market were in some way left inviolate by some kind of constitutional limit; "government shall not in any way prevent the free supply or pricing of any good or service." Wouldn't that make war-waging impossible?

Yes, it would! As soon as some essential food supply was reduced by enemy action, its price would rise so the less-affluent would go hungry. Then they would agitate for the war to end. If conscripted, they would protest: Hell no, we won't go! - and so the government would have to end its war (or not begin one in the first place.)

Notice: so far, I'm assuming government continues to exist, but is limited by charter as above. The outcome would prevent anything worse than a minor war, whose effects do not much disturb important prices back home. Nearly all wars prior to 1914 were of that kind (Napoleon's and Lincoln's excepted.) But when U-boats can easily sink oil tankers from Persia and beef-carriers from Argentina, that no longer applies. So the choice is: big war plus rationing, or free market plus small (or zero) war. A free market would prevent big wars.

All very well, a critical reader might respond; but say more about that constitutional limit, which somehow guarantees a free market!

Sorry, I can't. When push comes to shove (and often, merely to nudge) they pay no heed whatever to constitutional limits. Of course they do; if they were to be limited, they would by definition no longer be a government! Either the ruler rules, or some scrap of parchment rules, and scraps of parchment have no cops or guns or courts or prisons at their disposal. "Government is not reason... it is force."

So while it's true that government in a society with an inviolate free market would be severely limited in the scale of war it could wage, unfortunately that's no more than a theoretical ideal - an Utopian dream. Its implementation would not be feasible; if put in place, it could not last.

Accordingly, limited government being impossible, the choice for everyone is: government plus unlimited war, or zero government and free markets plus no war.

You choose.