Third positionism postures as the embodiment of martial virtue, but is it actually the embodiment of martial vice? To answer this question it is not sufficient to simply point to the sins of historical third positionist military-industrial complexes. We must seriously explore whether a superior alternative is feasible. If the zeroth positionist alternative is substantially superior it does not matter what objective virtues characterize the third positionist model because insistence on it does the nation a disservice as represented by the opportunity cost imposed. The following comparison is motivated thusly.
Basic Advantages
In the Power article we introduced proposed systems for the market-based production of national defense. Here we explore them in greater depth in terms of how they promote military superiority. Curtis Yarvin’s system, while it does have strong historical precedent in systems like the Hanseatic League, does not offer any mechanistic advantage over modern monopoly that defense insurance agencies (DIAs) do not, so we will focus on the latter exclusively. A historical precedent for an economically competitive military is that of the Indo-Europeans, a warrior aristocracy driven by aspiration to glory in battle. In this system warriors could freely gravitate to leaders who demonstrated the greatest prowess in commanding them. In combination with their skill in ironworking this system of consent rather than coercion-based command proved so effective that, with fewer numbers than many have thought (Kemp 69) the Indo-Europeans spread their civilization to the opposing extremes of Eurasia.
Most insurance policies today have an exclusion cause for damages caused by war. This is not because such perils are inherently uninsurable, but because insurers are legally prohibited from providing the means of safely underwriting a war policy, for such means would necessitate the insurance company competing with current states in the provision of what is regarded as the latter’s core function: national defense. The states we currently have are monopolistic, by definition they cannot abide competition. This is highly unfortunate not just because monopolistic states are the most murderous institutions that have ever existed but because there is such natural economy of scope between the defense and insurance industries. Insurers already cover acts of aggression such as theft and considering insurance is already the world’s largest industry there is little reason why it could not scale up to cover bigger acts of aggression. Furthermore, military wargaming is a highly actuarial discipline. Even without the benefits of market pressure, the life-and-death stakes involved result in considerable affinity on the part of the military for estimating the probability of perils.
Both security and insurance are highly scalable industries, and while there may exist a local optimum for the former at a level approximating that of the size of the average Western military today, insurance is an international industry, which means that the operating territory of a DIA’s parent company could serve multiple different macro-nations. While pan-european nationalists tend to be of strong third positionist leanings, this benefit is something they can certainly appreciate. This system treats disturbances of the peace as a problem that transcends the borders of any one country, which shifts the friend/enemy distinction away from “France vs. Germany” toward “French and Germans vs violent criminals.” In contrast with the blood-soaked history of european brother wars, especially the total wars of fascist and other modern states, this shift is the opposite of trivial. This system has an advantage over Yarvin’s Patchwork in that it exploits economies of both scale and scope to a greater degree and is more conducive to standardization on an international scale. Another advantage is that under such a system all policies not pertaining to security strategy are made entirely by individual landowners, which keeps conflict over social engineering to an absolute minimum.
Game Theory
Some third positionists object that game theory dooms a voluntary system of national defense from the get-go. This is actually just the standard public goods argument made by statists generally, burnished with a buzzword cribbed from popular social science. They argue that people will not contribute sufficiently to defense service on a voluntary basis because it is too difficult for providers of defense to exclude non-payers from benefiting from their protection. This is the alleged “free rider problem”. Multiple real-world instances contradict the free rider claim, however. Once instance can be found at the international level. Walter Block points out that During the Cold War, Canada and Mexico, despite enjoying the protection umbrella of the US military juggernaut, maintained armies of their own, as did most of the USSR’s neighbors. This is despite the fact that nations tend to act in their own perceived self-interest due to in-group preference. Another thing the public goods argument misses in the big picture is that much of our enjoyment of life itself is a form of free-riding. We do not pay for the lifting of our spirits at the site of our neighbors’ flower gardens in bloom. We do not pay for the fountain at a mall, nor are we even obligated to fund it indirectly by making a purchase at one of the shops. We do not pay others for their politeness cultivated through finishing school or a career in customer service. In the case of a DIA specifically, while it is hard to exclude non-payers from benefiting from instances where the DIA works, i.e. the enemy not damaging their property, it it trivial to exclude non-payers from receiving insurance payouts for the inevitable instances where a DIA is unsuccessful in protecting their property from damage. This is just a “for-profit” model, by the way. Nationalism, including support for national defense, is not instilled but innate, which is why “nationalism” and “innate” are cognates. Although propaganda can steer nationalist instinct for good or for ill, this instinct is something preexisting that propaganda appeals to, preexisting on the order of millions of years of evolutionary history. Despite already funding the largest military in history through high taxes, the American people also voluntarily fund numerous fully private charities that support servicemen and their families from cradle to grave. There is even a large and successful insurance company that explicitly caters to servicemen but without any official Department of Defense affiliation whatsover in USAA. It is therefore ludicrous to claim that people who so generously fund military support organizations would underfund the military organizations themselves when free to choose otherwise. It must also be noted that it is quite plausible to envision a scenario when choosing otherwise is rational. Like any human institution the defense industry is vulnerable to the madness of crowds and consequently charging off to unproductive wars against threats that turn out to be phantasmagoria. It is especially important therefore to be able to opt out and “self-insure” through increased support for militias comprising comparatively cooler heads.
Returning to game theory specifically, it turns out that game theory actually supports the value of reciprocity that is foundational to zeroth positionism. In the 1980s Robert Axelrod ran a series of tournaments where different game theory experts submitted algorithms designed with the objective of winning an iterated prisoners’ dilemma scenario. The winner was a simple one: The “Tit for Tat” strategy, wherein cooperation was the default approach undermining one’s opponent for a quick short-term gain was used only in retaliation, just as violence in libertarianism is used only in retaliation. This paints a clear picture of how cooperation evolved under conditions of anarchy described earlier. How much greater then, is a cooperative military under the command of a governmental authority under conditions where reciprocity can fully flower?
Not only does game theory support zeroth positionism at the level of its fundamental ethic but also in its application resulting in nuclear weapons proliferation. Bertrand Lemennicier offers a mathematical demonstration of why McNukes promote peace in “Nuclear Weapons: Monopoly or Proliferation”. He starts the thought experiment with the simple scenario where only one party has nukes. In this case there is a strong temptation to aggress because there is no comparable threat of retaliation. The US government dropping fission bombs on a prostrate Japan at the end of World War II appears to confirm this. We can regard this scenario as the third positionist ideal if we define the one party as the set of states within white nation-states. This is unrealistic due to the fact that the Chinese and North Koreans have nukes and their IQs do not appear to be declining below a mean critical to maintaining status as a nuclear power within the foreseeable future. At the level of the nation-state third positionists insist on this party being the state only. This may be “realistic” in that it is the status quo, but is it realistic in terms of promoting peace? Compared to competitive proliferation this actually turns out to be significantly more hazardous. Before we proceed with summarizing Lemennicier’s demonstration as to why, we should address a couple of arguments in favor of statist cartelization of nuclear polities.
One argument is that as nuclear weapons proliferate, there is, ceteris paribus, an increased chance of accidental launch. The first thing to point out is that competitive proliferation does not necessarily mean a higher number of nukes per nation, it means a higher number of organizations, be they municipal, regional, national, or international, having access to nukes. Access does not mean that all organizations with the means to manufacture or purchase nukes will do so. Most billionaires and corporations outside the security industry would content themselves with conventional security measures due to the high cost of maintaining and safeguarding nukes and that most threats to their security come from within their countries rather than elsewhere. Due to military scalability, it is conceivable that an international free market in defense would produce a number of nuclear firms that is fewer than the number of current nuclear states. Let us assume, however, that an international free market would, regardless of the number of nuclear firms, produce more nukes, which is not unreasonable if we treat nukes as goods, as monopoly by definition restricts the production of goods. We can argue this would increase safety, because the more nukes produced, the more “reps” manufacturers have in making failsafes and developing safe handling procedures. Increased output is associated with economies of scale, and the cost savings from such economies can be invested in better safety. There is also the more fundamental fact of free market competition’s superior information and knowledge efficiencies over socialism.
Fortunately, we have not had have a real-world accidental launch yet. We also have not yet had a nuclear third positionist or zeroth positionist regime to make a proper observational comparison. The best real world comparison of political economy’s possible effect on nuclear technology is Three Mile Island vs Chernobyl. The former was the result of a concatenation of unfortunate malfunctions in monitoring equipment, whereas the latter was the result of reckless and incompetent experimentation with heterodox safety procedure on the part of its personnel. The Three Mile Island incident was only a partial meltdown that exposed local residents to about as much radiation as a chest x-ray, in actuality a demonstration of how safe Western nuclear energy was, whereas Chernobyl was a full meltdown that blew the roof off of the plant and released massive doses of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere, killing 31 people within three months, The Three Mile Island plant was run by GPU, a publicly traded utility company, whereas the V.I. Lenin Plant at Chernobyl was run by the Soviet Ukrainian government. In the cases of responsible usage of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, the historical record weighs in favor of proliferation and more market-oriented production, respectively.
Let us also address specifically the phenomenon of a potentially higher number of organizations having nukes. Might this result in less standardization of safeguards, increasing risk of accidental launch? There is little reason to think so. The market for PC peripherals has a vast number of firms yet nearly all use the USB standard. The “UL” marker that many household appliances have stands for “Underwriters Laboratories”, which is a private safety certification firm. Private certification firms enjoy a network effect from standardization, keeping their number few, but this effect is still highly precarious due to potential competition. If a dominant firm is caught taking bribes; their certification of even non-bribing firms becomes worthless in the latter’s eyes and they will switch to a competitor as soon as possible. A government safety agency is monopoly and therefore a monopoly on venality as well. It carries the perceived special authority of the state yet it is no less difficult to bribe state officials than anyone else. As a monopoly, however, it does not face nearly the same level of pressure to maintain its integrity as a market.
Another argument in favor of cartelization concludes from the fact that some people are maniacally irrational that nuclear proliferation not only increases the risk of accidental but intentionally cataclysmic launch. There are several problems with this. First, although many people who are attracted to power are psychopathic, psychopathy is not the same as psychosis. Psychopathic means deviance from common concern for one’s fellow man while psychotic means prone to severe episodes of deviance from reality itself. Although psychopathy correlates with psychosis, most psychopaths are not psychotic. Attainment of the level of power necessary to wield nuclear weapons requires a level of attunement to reality that effectively precludes psychosis. It is important to remember that marketization here is not an Oprah Winfrey-style lottery but an orderly and competitive process where only competence that goes far beyond not being psychotic is entrusted with nuclear weapons. This process does select for a certain psychopathy, however, a trait that has been observed to be common among both politicians and CEOs. The kind of psychopath selected for in CEOs, however, is, unlike in politicians, a benign kind overall. It is necessary to have a certain deviance from common concern for fellow men in order to make the hard decisions concomitant with running a successful business. While politicians make hard decisions too, they are incentivized by the monopoly they run to make decisions that enrich themselves and expand their power at the expense of their clients, whereas a businessman’s self-interest is much better aligned with that of his clients because the market mechanism only enriches him when he creates value for them. Such value in the case of national defense includes minimizing risk of intentionally cataclysmic launch. What if a CEO becomes psychotic? While of course a politician is no less likely to become psychotic in office, the formally corporate structure of competitive governmental organization provides significantly more safety in that the launch codes are held not by the CEO’s aide but by the board of directors or by the shareholders directly, as described in Yarvin’s model in the Power article. It is trivial for the board or shareholders to revoke nuclear privileges in such an unfortunate and rare case.
Returning to nuclear game theory, Lemennicier’s demonstration goes as follows: He assumes rationality on the part of all players. “Rationality” in his demonstration is rational in terms of third positionist values in that it means seeking to acquire the most territory and resources. He assumes two possible strategies: Aggressive (Hawk) or Cooperative (Dove). He begins with a scenario with two players, John and Peter. Nuclear war is assumed to have both gains and costs. Each player if armed, will only launch a nuclear attack when the expected gains exceed the costs. The scenario begins with the case where only one player has nukes. In this case Hawk is the dominant strategy because the non-armed player will always surrender and the armed player will gain all of the former’s resources. The cost to the armed player is zero. When both have nukes, however, each player will only play Hawk if he expects the other to play Dove. The probability one player will play Hawk is therefore a direct function of his estimate of the probability the other player will play Dove. This is because total destruction is assumed in the case of both playing Hawk. In this case gains are zero, and each pays the full cost of war. Each player is indifferent to strategy when the net gains from each strategy are equal. Under this condition Lemennicier extracts a formula from the payoff matrix:
John’s estimate of the probability that Peter will play Hawk = Gain when John plays Hawk and Peter plays Dove / Opportunity Cost of War when John plays Hawk and Peter plays Hawk
“Opportunity Cost” here means the sum of the direct of cost of war to each player and the gain each player would have realized had they both played Dove instead.
John will play Hawk when the gain ratio on the right hand side of the equation exceeds John’s estimate of Peter’s Hawkishness. As the cost of war increases, the probability that Dove is played also increases. What happens when we increase the number of players? If we assume the players’ expectations of one another are rational then there is no reason that one player’s estimate of the others playing Dove will differ significantly from the others’ estimates. Making this simplifying assumption allows us to multiply the probability estimate side of the equation by the total number of players and to increment the direct cost term by the number of players added. The other terms do not change. Another assumption in this model is that the gain of war does not change with the number of players. This assumption is reasonable pertaining to territory for the nuclear age because all land on Earth has been homesteaded at this point. If a higher number of players is indicative of increased political competitiveness and therefore increased general prosperity, we could concede that the potential gains of war increase as well, though Lemennicier does not make such an assumption. If we do make this assumption, however, due to the law of diminishing marginal returns the prosperity return to political competitiveness must be less than 1:1 with respect to the number of players. This means that as the number of players increases the gains increase less than the costs, and that as this number approaches infinity the gain ratio approaches zero. This outcome is the same whether gains increase with the number of players or not. This is likely why Lemmenicier does not bother introducing the assumption in the first place. As the gain ratio approaches zero so too does the probability that anyone will play Hawk. The frequency of nuclear conflict therefore also diminishes toward zero as the number of players increases.
Nuclear weapons evoke an eschaton that leads many to believe that such weapons somehow transcend the laws of self-defense. Third positionists are Hegelians, i.e. historical relativists, and thus sometimes argue that a change in technology “changes the game”. When we take a scientific view, however, we see that those same laws apply to nuclear weapons in full. Just as more guns means less crime, as John Lott has titled his seminal work regarding reducing restrictions on that weapon class, more competition in the production of nuclear weapons means less war crime.
Demotic Subversion
A significant way in which third positionism also corrupts national defense is via its democratic pretenses. “Democratic” as describing third posititionism does not mean direct rule by the people as the social democrats would have it, but rule in the name of the people (demotic). This is not an unreasonable connection given the fact that both Hitler and Mussolini were democratically elected and fancied themselves rulers in their nations’ names. When the nation is consolidated under a monopolistic state in the modern fashion, wars between states become wars between whole nations. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn contrasts the types of warfare the traditional and modern systems necessitate in “Monarchy and War.” Leddihn, having first provided historical examples of republics reverting to monarchy to offer hope for civilized reform, proceeds to connect the collectivist kind of nationalism advocated by third positionists to democracy and its destructive militarism. He observes that democracy results in the politicization of the whole society, and this holds true whether the democracy is direct, representative by a parliament, or representative by a fuhrer. Because the foundation of government is usually the military, when “the people” are “the government”, democracies are liable to introduce conscription, as per the “duty” that a citizen’s “political freedom” entails. Leddihn describes military indoctrination as a tragic consequence necessitated by general conscription:
“One of the most immediate and degrading consequences of the general military service in the time of war was the ‘indoctrination’ of the draftee. They were in their vast majority innocent and largely even unwilling civilians whose enthusiasm for fighting and killing was very limited. So they were taught to hate the enemy, degraded to the impersonation of wickedness, ugliness, and devoid of all virtue. This had been different in previous ages, when soldiers were men—gentlemen as well as ruffians—who loved to fight and offered their services to anybody who led and paid them well.”
Leddihn goes on to provide two example of mercenary noblemen who offered their services to multiple different nations: Prince Eugene of Savoy and Baron Gideon Loudon. Loudon, interestingly offered his services first to Frederick II of Prussia but was rebuffed and consequently ended up joining the army of the Holy Roman Emperor and defeated Frederick in battle. This freewheeling individual enterprise in the military domain is reminiscent of the Indo-European military described at the beginning of this article.
Conscription within European nations, by contrast, traces its lineage to sordid roots in the French Revolution. It was an institution that Napoleon retained in his coup, and the success of his military campaigns (which were the result not of conscription but of his strategic genius) caused other european nations to institute it out of belief such a measure was necessary to compete with the likes of France. This included the American Union in its war against the Confederacy. The Union’s success was due neither to strategic genius nor conscription but a population nearly three times larger the Confederacy’s along with superior industrial might. Lincoln’s devastation of the South along with the tyrannies imposed on the North in his crusade to impose his vision of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is one of history’s greatest indictments of democracy and collectivist nationalism together. His view of America not as a collection of nations settled among sovereign regional states but as a singular nation to be corralled as tax cattle is a view shared by third positionists.
Pursuant to the goal of macro-nationalist solidarity, pan-nationalist movements such as those of Bismark and Garibaldi would make public spectacles of synchronized military gymnastics and parades. The third positionist regimes of interwar Germany and Italy, along with Soviet Russia, would continue these due to their demotism. They are silly distractions to a serious military. The warrior of redoubt is content knowing his training has equipped him with the means to defend himself and his family and has no need for adulation from crowds of strangers. These spectacles are symptomatic of what Leddihn calls the “horizontalization” of society, which contradicts third positionists’ advertisement of themselves as promoters of effective martial hierarchy. The hierarchy they promote is an unaccountable military-industrial complex over ordinary taxpayers.
Worse than being encouraged to gawk at the standing army looming over them, civilians are indoctrinated similarly to the soldiers, indoctrinated to hate enemy nations, to regard them as subhuman. This is necessary for the civilian population to accept total war where attacking concentrations of civilians is part and parcel of such conflict. This is in contrast to traditional wars which were primarily feuds between royal families where the objective was to outmaneuver the enemy to win the battle with minimal damage to even the royals’ estates, let alone the subjects. The masses can only be motivated to total war through appeal to their base bloodlust, which makes total war difficult to conclude. Politicians are inhibited in offering peace terms generous enough to induce a losing enemy to sign what could be considered a genuine treaty, rather than a treaty under brutal terms that is nothing more than a written acknowledgment they value their survival more than their pride. Politicians think demagogically; noblemen think dynastically. Such noblemen were driven out in the nationalist consolidations of Germany and Italy. Leddihn points out that when the German League liberated Sleswig-Holstein from Danish rule they did not permit the legitimate noble heirs to return to power. The Third Reich became heir to the consolidation of Bismark’s Second Reich, a consolidation by a “National Liberal in an initiative of nationalist progressivism”. Leddihn laments this development for its diminution of generosity’s source in the nobility:
“After all, generosity is a virtue more frequently found in the small top layers than among the masses. It takes, after all, intelligence to suspect that generosity very often pays while egotism does not.”
While like the nobility politicians are a class apart from the masses, unlike the nobility they are beholden to the base desires of the masses. The nobility are concerned not with votes or adulation with their rents/land taxes being paid, thus they much better can act with a view toward the wellbeing of their long-term descendants in war and other domains of statecraft.
In fairness to the Third Reich, Leddihn notes that in 1935 they petitioned Britain to agree to a pact where in the event of war all parties would avoid aerial attacks on civilians in the hinterland. Britain’s Labor government turned down the pact on the purported grounds that such a measure “[along with] all efforts to humanize war would make wars more acceptable and would thus be a blow to the noble cause of pacifism.” Is this evidence that third positionist heads of state are actually the peers of noblemen in the magnanimity of their attitude toward war? In the full context of modern German history it is a weak datum. This petition coincided with the beginning of the Third Reich’s massive military buildup. They likely anticipated the possibility of war with Britain resulting from their planned invasion of Poland, especially given Britain’s having sided with the Slavs against Germany in World War I. Desiring to minimize German civilian casualties would be consistent with Hitler’s plans to colonize Slavic territories with surplus German population. Churchill’s predecessors in the Labor government served him well waging war the way he desired against Germany through terror bombing of urban civilians. Hitler eventually did retaliate, albeit reluctantly. The RAF advised Churchill against such bombing in the first place, so humaneness in war was inconsistent within both sides. Hitler’s seeming benevolence toward the British at Dunkirk is confounded by the fact that Goering advised him that the Luftwaffe would be able to intercept the evacuated British in the channel and thereby reduce German casualties. There are always exceptions that prove the rule, but the rule that the combination of nationalist consolidation with demotism is a noxious one is well substantiated by history overall.
Conscription
We now focus on contrasting the zeroth and third positionist stances on conscription, a policy Leddihn cited as an instance of democracy’s noxious effect on war. Conscription is a form of abduction and forced servitude that third positionists support despite the fact that the collective survival that motivates men to enlist is among the most powerful instincts in existence. The notion that “too few” enlist without conscription is hogwash. First of all, too few for what? If a war is so unpopular that fighting it would be literally impossible without conscription, it is unlikely that victory in that war is beneficial to the nation as a whole. Indeed, most ordinary people have a good nose for bankers’ wars, even if they cannot implicate the banks explicitly. They come to support them only with extreme propaganda and false flag operations such as Americans in both World Wars, Afghanistan, and both Iraq wars. The premise of the notion that there is a single minimum required headcount ignores the substitutability of military hardware for labor, as Gary Becker points out in his 1957 essay arguing against the draft. Some argue that paying enough to attract enough volunteers would be too costly to the taxpayer. This is not an argument that third positionists are entitled to make, however, because their philosophy is that no cost to the taxpayer is too great if a “national interest” justifies it in their view. Let’s throw them a bone, however. Becker refutes this argument as well, drawing attention to the high elasticity of labor supply in comparable civilian industries. High elasticity in labor supply means that a small increase in wage for an occupation results in a large influx of labor to it. Even after the largest and most destructive war in history the American military was able to raise about 1.5 million men in 1947 and 1948 paying a relatively low wage compared to the civilian sector. The economic case against conscription goes further than dollars and cents, however. Economics is also heavily concerned with incentives, and although obvious we must still point out here that people forced to work against their will are generally less productive than those who voluntarily chose their occupation as the best among the alternatives available to them. White American southerners of sturdy Borderlander fighting stock have enlisted in the military in droves since Nixon ended the draft, as they had before, to the point that many falsified their age to enlist during World War II. It is due to the military’s current infection with wokeness that enlistment is now declining. The draft in fact was a significant factor in the Vietnam War’s unpopularity that ultimately ended it and one could argue that Vietnam was the last good war that America fought in the sense that at least we were fighting communists. The imposition of conscription is a good indicator that the war is bad, and the necessity of conscription to even stand a chance of winning a war guarantees that the war is bad. In view of the horror of war, conscription is among the worst forms of slavery, especially given how prone statists are to engage in bad wars.
Even after their warm bodies argument is refuted conscription advocates argue that such a measure is necessary because “we don’t want to be a military of mercenaries”. The first thing to address is the notion that doing something primarily for money is ignoble. Hardly any of us holds an occupation primarily for the love of it, the economically rigorous definition of labor, in fact, is: “Activity that is compensated for the sacrifice of preferred activity.” As with any trade, we engage in it only because we value the money we receive in return more than the sacrificed activity. Many conscripts are monetarily compensated anyway, and to the extent they fight out of the desire to avoid the pecuniary costs of court martial they are no less “mercenary” than enlistees. Even literal slave conscripts like those of Xerxes’ army fight not for love of country but in exchange for avoidance of the whip or withheld meals. What about the Spartans, who could be described as being conscripts from birth? Obviously the fact of the Persians also having conscription means that conscription per se could not have been the difference maker in that particular conflict but could third positionists still argue that the Spartan military was an instance of conscription working? No, because in the Spartan’s case conscription was an incidental feature of their extreme militarism, and it was the attrition to their aristocracy’s ranks caused by such militarism that resulted in their nation’s downfall. The Spartans are in this regard actually an argument in favor of the free market in national defense and the kind of accountability it imposes. The claim that free market suppliers of military labor are somehow less loyal than conscripts is uncompelling, because fighting for money and fighting for one’s country are hardly mutually exclusive. Stockholm Syndrome is about the best argument one could honestly make for conscription in this regard, but this condition is hardly regarded as healthy or even all that persistent. Even in the case of a mercenary’s sole concern being money, reputation for loyalty is remunerative to maintain, especially in a free market for his services. A mercenary who reneges on his contract for a higher fee elsewhere is hard pressed to ever find fighting work again. Loyalty, especially to a state, is not a suicide pact either. If the enemy state you are fighting is marginally more tyrannical than your own but in the middle of the war yours is overthrown by revolutionaries who are downright totalitarian, switching sides is a legitimate act of counterrevolution. “What about the Romans?” conscription advocates might say. “Did not their hiring of foreign mercenaries contribute to their downfall?”. On the contrary, like the Spartans, the Romans’ downfall was their founding stock’s diminishing, especially in relation to the lesser peoples they allowed in their homeland. The Romans’ mercenary corps, however, comprised mostly Goths, who certainly were not a lesser people. The Goths, in fact, were Germans, whom the Romans were never able to conquer. In the latter days of the empire they were actually strong enough to extract tribute from the Romans and enjoyed a higher per-capita level of wealth (Asha Logos). Had the Romans not hired the Goths, in fact, their empire would not have lasted nearly as long. It must also be pointed out here for the sake of completeness that notwithstanding the reputational reinforcement of loyalty, mercenaries need not be foreign.
A final point to make regarding conscription is that opposition to it does not mean opposition to any kind of mandate of military service. Such a mandate may under zeroth positionism take the form of service, or subscription thereto, being a condition on which property is purchased or rented. It is likely that more sustainably free societies would have such conditions. A common requirement would be a subscription with a waiver for those who serve a minimum number of years.
Further Advantages
Having fended off the critique arguing for conscription’s necessity, we can now resume our offensive taking the form of demonstrating the market military system’s mechanical superiority. One advantage of such a system is its combination of scalability with local agility and responsiveness. While something like training in small arms handling may benefit from a high degree of standardization on a large scale, tactics are something that can be adapted most readily by a marketized military, for example, forces from an area near a major river can concentrate on using it as a natural defensive structure, or on how to avoid being backed into it. Macro-nations tend to occupy country whose terrain varies greatly: Bavarian Alps vs the north German Plain, the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains vs the Great Plains, etc. Where there is overlap in service in a locale, a direct observational experiment arises where the locals can shift their subscriptions to the DIA that adapts training, tactics, and strategy best to that locale. In certain locales, perhaps those with highly unusual geography, the DIA may spin-off the cadre, which then outsources geographically neutral basic training to the original DIA or others. It is likely, however, that overlap will persist in most places despite superior local adaptation by one DIA because of other considerations that their customers make.
One of these considerations is the substitution between manpower and hardware mentioned in the discussion of conscription above. Some customers may wish to keep more troops out of harm’s way even if this means paying more. Capital deepening and technological improvement in the military hardware industry keeps the cost of substitution down. A free market helps curb excess hardware production at the expense of personnel training as occurred in National Socialist Germany (Riemann). It also curbs the production of boondoggles like the F-35. Other customers may see high technological usage or dependence as fragility, desiring numbers to always be a source of strength if not a decisive advantage.
Another consideration customers have is tolerance of collateral damage. Even within libertarian circles there is a broad preference spectrum, especially concerning proportionality. For Ayn Rand, who considered collateral damage in war to be entirely the responsibility of the aggressing state, the optimal amount of force used was however much maximizes the physical safety of the defenders only, which removes any limit an amount that can be considered acceptable. Murray Rothbard was of a more humanitarian bent, contending that due to diminishing returns to force in increasing the defender’s own safety, there was a limit beyond which the application of additional force constitutes an act of aggression on the defenders’ part. Resolving such subjectivity is what the free market is made for. Blowback from indiscriminate prosecution of a war by one agency make in the most extreme case result in another agency in the same country declaring war on the indiscriminate agency. The threat thereof, however, reduces the likelihood of this last resort. The unleashing of evolutionary selection through free market choice will result in a sustainable range of force that is used in waging war.
National defense is associated primarily with defense against external threats, but under competitive models internal defense is a large part as well. In The Private Production of Defense, Hoppe substitutes “aggression” for “defense” in “defense insurance agency” to emphasize the comprehensiveness of the service provided. Aggression as libertarians define it includes all violations of the property norm, including fraud. All violations include those committed by people in government. A free market in policing provides higher quality policing, which means more apprehension of criminals and fewer abuses of the innocent, at a lower cost. Monopolized policing, however, shreds accountability for abuse. An egregious abuse in today’s monopoly is of qualified immunity. Qualified immunity is immunity from liability for damages caused by a policeman, provided such damages were caused under certain qualifying conditions. Today, the qualification is merely that the policeman did not break any “clearly established” law. Of this the Independent Institute’s Chris Calton writes:
“Given that statutory law cannot reasonably anticipate all the unique circumstances that officers will face, nearly any abuse of power meets the criteria for qualified immunity, even in cases in which an officer brazenly defies reasonable expectations for appropriate conduct.”
In the same article Calton cites several cases of qualified immunity abuse, including the notorious murder of Daniel Shaver captured on his killer’s police camera.
The Gestapo does not appear to have been any better than today’s ZOGbots. A law passed in 1936 exempted the Gestapo from responsibility to administrative courts, meaning that ordinary citizens could not sue the Gestapo to conform to any laws. Under the policy of Schutzhaft (“protective custody”), the Gestapo had the ability to imprison people without judicial proceedings (Infogalactic).
When the provision of law and order is monopolized policemen become agents of disorder. In contrast, free markets in law produce laws converging on the ideal balance between the rights of policemen to defend themselves and the rights of civilians to recourse when they are harmed. Free markets in courts provides for careful adjudication of such law. Free markets in policing curb abuse by making abusive police offers easy to fire. Real world instances of free market justice systems are hardly limited to those cited in the Power article, either. The San Francisco Patrol Special Unit is descended from the private special patrols were started in the 1840s to protect miners and merchants. Today it has authorization to carry out limited police functions such as issuing citations and enforcing city regulations, on top of providing contract-based protection for property owners. It is currently only semi-private, being the only private security consortium that is allowed to operate under the city of San Francisco’s charter. Even with this restriction, however, it provides service at a per hour rate that is lower than what off-duty municipal police provide (Grigg). In Britain, TM Eye is a private police force that within two years of its founding brought prosecution against more than 400 criminals with a 100% conviction rate. It has conducted investigations into several murder cases the Metro police have not completed and provided help in cases of rape, missing persons, burglary, theft, stalking and blackmail. 43 criminals have been jailed (Camber).
Historical Precedents
Like policing, voluntarist production of external defense is not limited to the speculation of free market philosophers. There exists strong historical precedent for voluntarism from the non-governmental sector in a number of places. One relatively recent instance is the American War for Independence. Although George Washington disdained militias, favoring a formalized strategy of military engagement, necessity forced him to adapt his army to the guerrilla tactics that characterize militias. Actual militias played a significant role in the war as well; the term “Minutemen” refers to militia men who could be “called up within a minute”. Officially they were conscripts into the Continental Army, but they earned their moniker because of their eagerness to fight notwithstanding. A number of scholars believe that rejection of Washington’s guerrilla tactics for stubborn persistence with conventional warfare was a significant contributor to the defeat of the Confederacy, for which many of Washington’s descendants fought (Stromberg).
A strong militia culture is crucial in the maintenance of a free and sovereign nation. A substantial portion of the nation’s defense should be provided on a not-for-profit basis by people who are not full time military professionals. The ideal dynamic is one of great fluidity between full-time professional providers of national defense and part-time amateurs, which discourages tribalism of the “thin blue line” variety. To help bridge this line ex-military professionals serve as natural militia leaders, not just elite private security for the wealthy. There should be non-profit militias that are large enough for their administrators to be full-time professionals. The culture should celebrate the militia to the same degree it does the military because a mass militia culture greatly helps prevent the re-emergence of statism among the military. This celebration can manifest in material incentives like the awarding of discounts to militia as well as military members. Resale covenants on property requiring participation in national defense can include militia participation as a qualifying activity. Militia training in such a nation is regarded in the same way as exercise: The conditioning of soundness of the body politic.
An instance of for-profit voluntarist defense is the history of privateering. Privateering is a method whereby a citizen of one nation may force another nation to pay restitution for damages caused by one of its citizens. With government permit called a letter of marque and reprisal, the aggrieved party may hunt the other nation’s merchant ships and seize their cargo. This practice can be scaled when the damage is caused by the waging of war by another nation’s government. The great value of this practice is disrupting the enemy’s economy and by extension its supply lines. Thousands of privateering ships were employed in Elizabethan England, the Seven Years’ War, King George’s War, the War for Independence, and the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson recognized the military importance of privateering:
“every possible encouragement should be given to privateering in time of war with a commercial nation. . . . Our national ships are too few in number . . . to retaliate the acts of the enemy by licensing private armed vessels, the whole naval force of the nation is truly brought to bear on the foe.”
Some historians like Faye M. Ker believe that without privateering America would have been unable to hold off Britain’s navy in the War of 1812. Privateers are sometimes confused with pirates for obvious reasons, however, the former were effectively disincentivized from degenerating into the latter through the use of surety bonds. Privateers, unlike pirates, adhered to rules of engagement under international law such as never firing on a target ship under false colors. Because a substantial part of their profit derived from their prizes, privateers sought to capture rather than destroy their targets, unlike their socialized naval counterparts. This incentive enriched their own nation not only directly but also indirectly by leaving the present enemy’s capital base intact for trade production in peacetime. Privateers were highly effective: Canadian privateers captured around 600 ships during the War of 1812; the famous Liverpool Packet alone accounting for a tenth of these. In the French conflict with Spain and Holland from 1672-1679, French privateers captured at least 1300 Spanish and Dutch Ships. During War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97), the city of St. Malo captured “3,384 English and Dutch merchant ships and 162 escorting men-of-war.” with 40-50 privateers sent out each year. French privateers captured or destroyed more than 1000 English and Dutch ships during the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1713) (Sechrest).
There are even historical instances that indicate the superiority of privateering over socialized navies. In the first fourteen months of the Seven Years’ War, French privateers captured 637 British values, and much of their success was due to the fact that “commanders of the King’s ships appear to have been shamefully lax in the unpleasant duty of convoying merchant vessels, and in pursuing the privateers of the enemy.” In 1813 America sought to cripple British shipbuilding by disrupting its importation of essential materials from Russia. America sent three ships to intercept trading ships from these nations in the Arctic circle. One was the navy frigate President, which was 1576 tons with 52 guns and 460 men. The other two were much smaller privateers, the schooner Scourge and the brig Rattle Snake. The President burned one brig while the privateers captured or destroyed at least 23 ships, many of which were “large, square-rigged, oceangoing vessels”. Privateers were, in the opinion of The Republic’s Private Navy author Jerome Garitee, “America’s only effective marine force” in the War of 1812. Unlike America’s navy, America’s privateers were not driven from the sea by the British. Privateering was so effective that in the USA’s early years a number of congressmen opposed having a socialized navy because they saw privateering as a better option. Tragically, protection racketeering on the high seas would prevail instead in the 1856 Declaration of Paris where seven maritime nations banned privateering. The only reason for this, which is now clear, is that socialized navies could no longer abide a free market in naval warfare exposing their inferiority (Sechrest).
Expansionism
The primary normative function of the military is defense, because expansion, if desired, is impossible without the former. The degree to which third positionism is inherently expansionist is a matter of some debate. Some third positionists are universal nationalists, meaning they recognize that imperialism is often detrimental to even the imperial nation and believe in self-determination for all nations. Others such as Richard Spencer, however, explicitly reject what he calls “omninationalism”, calling instead for a white imperium. Even universal nationalists, however, are hard-pressed to claim that third positionism has no inherent tendency toward expansionism at all. For one thing, all third positionists, being statists, believe in a maximal expansionism of government against competitors in the security industry within their country. Furthermore, they do not believe there should be any real limits to the scope of government’s activity outside of security provision, which is expansionist against the rest of the nation. A specific intervention third positionists support is protectionism, which they use to promote a significant degree of autarky. Autarky is impoverishing due to its rejection of comparative advantage. Protectionism therefore produces pressure to offset autarky’s economic shortcomings through territorial expansion.
The historical instances of third positionist regimes, National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, were both expansionist, especially Germany. Both retained the macro-linguistic empires established by Bismark and Garibaldi. National socialist ideology called for Nordics to rule over peoples they viewed as inferior, especially the Slavs, whom Hitler particularly hated. The Nazis were clearly not content with restoring Germany’s pre-1918 borders because they invaded Prague after they had already annexed the Sudetenland and invaded Poland long after the Nazis took effective control of Danzig. Fascist Italy sought to recapture the glory of the Roman Empire with its ill-fated escapade in Ethiopia. The destruction of these countries that resulted is a cautionary tale against runaway militarism coupled with imperialist hubris.
Zeroth positionism is neutral on the value of expansionism per se. The principle of libertarianism at its core is agnostic to the scale of its own application. If one makes makes the value judgment to universalize it, is difficult to justify an offensive war even for the sole purpose of liberating a foreign nation from a tyrannical government due to considerations of collateral damage mentioned earlier. It comes down to not only a value judgment weighing liberty vs survival, but also a judgment as to whether it is your own place to make the former judgment for the tyrannized nation. In any case, it is not at all necessary to show that zeroth positionism is more effective at empire-building than third positionism because our rubric is not what is most prestigious or beneficial to a nation’s government and its defense contractors but what is objectively best for the nation itself. The historical record indicates that imperialist nations end up being ruled by foreigners, as chronicled in numerous instances by Kemp in March of the Titans. Even if we pretend that empire-building is an objective national good, however, zeroth positionism is still superior. All the preceding reasons as to why a free market in defense is superior to a monopoly apply to offense as well. This holds true not only for the military but for the maintenance and administration of an empire. The ability of the founding nation’s citizens to opt out at will provides a check on the tendency of empires to overextend. The international scalability of the insurance industry provides considerable capacity for military buildup on an imperial scale, while competition in government provides capacity for responsiveness to the diversity of local cultures that necessarily exist within an empire. The relegation of government to enforcement of landowners’ policies, rather than setting policies itself, mitigates conquered nations’ resentment against foreign rule and preserves international cultural diversity. The last item assume empire-building for the sake of liberating foreign nations from comparatively less accommodating governments. This assumption is not necessary to zeroth positionism, however. It is theoretically possible to be a kind of chauvinist who values liberty for his nation and his alone but is a totalitarian imperialist toward other nations. Even a chauvinist of this kind will still rationally prefer a free-market military for the sake of conquering and subduing foreign nations more efficiently.
Having compared the third positionist model of national defense with the zeroth positionist one in a number of different aspects, we find that the third positionist model wanting by objective standards of national interest. What is thought by many to be an unassailable position regarding what, if any services must be monopolized, turns out to be vulnerable. It is vulnerable both on empirical grounds showing that marketized militaries are certainly not mere conjecture, as well as on theoretical grounds within the very theoretical framework invoked to dismiss marketization: game theory. The efficacy of the nations’ bravest men is not a game for economic central planners to play with. They are at their most effective when their commanders are held accountable by the market mechanism. Without such accountability runaway militarism is what results, always to the nation’s ruin. It should be hardly any revelation in fact, that “taxpayer-funded security” is as much of an oxymoron as “protection racket”, because they are ultimately one and the same. In the words of Michael Malice, “national security is too important to trust any monopoly with, let alone the government.”
Sources
Asha Logos. Our Subverted History Series. Part 4 – The Germanic Peoples. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLN29_DFNgg&list=PLru9zi8j7G3Nsz03pkBzFdv_1tRxdCMJo&index=4&pp=iAQB
Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, 2006.
Becker, Gary. “The Case Against the Draft.” 06/19/2007, Hoover Institution. https://www.hoover.org/research/case-against-draft
Block, Walter. “National Defense and the Theory of Externalities, Public Goods, and Clubs”. Published in The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2003. https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production
Calton, Chris. “How Qualified Immunity Became Absolute Immunity for Police Officers”. 08/01/2019 The Independent Institute. https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-qualified-immunity-became-absolute-immunity-police-officers
Camber, Rebecca. “Britain’s first ‘private police force’ has caught 400 criminals with a 100 per cent conviction rate after taking on cases regular officers are too busy to look at”. 02/02/2018. The Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5346699/First-private-police-force-caught-400-criminals.html
“Chernobyl disaster”. https://infogalactic.com/info/Chernobyl_disaster
“Gestapo”. https://infogalactic.com/info/Gestapo
Grigg, Will. “Too Good for Government ‘Work’: The Death of a Baton Rouge Peace Officer”. 06/22/2018 The Libertarian Institute. https://libertarianinstitute.org/everything-will/too-good-for-government-work-the-death-of-a-baton-rouge-peace-officer/
Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. “The Private Production of Defense,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 14, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 27. https://mises.org/journal-libertarian-studies/private-production-defence
Kemp, Arthur. March of the Titans: The Complete History of the White Race. Ostara Publications, 1999.
Lemmenicier, Bertrand. “Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation or Monopoly?”. Published in The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2003. https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production
Riemann, Günter. The Vampire Economy New York: Vanguard Press, 1939 https://mises.org/library/vampire-economy
Sechrest, Larry J. “Privateering and National Defense: Naval Warfare for Private Profit”. Published in The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2003. https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production
Stromberg, Joseph R. “Mercenaries, Guerrillas, Militias, and the Defense of Minimal States and Free Societies”. Published in The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2003. https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production
von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Erik. “Monarchy and War”. Published in The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2003. https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production