Four uncomfortable truths about government militaries
Every year on Veterans Day, the establishment media is full of articles of hero worship for soldiers. But there are some truths that need to be confronted about government militaries which the establishment media will not address. Let us address some of those here.
1. The troops do not defend your freedom. The troops work for the state, not for you. Contrary to statist myths, the state does not work for you, just as masters do not work for slaves and farmers do not work for livestock. Of course, masters will take care of and protect slaves to some degree and farmers will take care of and protect livestock to some degree, but this is not primarily for the well-being of the slaves and livestock, as starry-eyed state propagandists would have us believe. It is only so that the master or farmer can more effectively exploit the slaves or livestock. After all, slaves and livestock who are ill-cared-for are less productive, and slaves and livestock who are not defended may escape and/or be exploited by others, which makes them less exploitable by the master or farmer.
One can also see this truth about the purpose of troops by empirical observation. Wars have been fought in the name of increasing liberty at least since President Woodrow Wilson’s claim that World War I was about “making the world safe for democracy.” Since that time, liberty has steadily been lost to encroachments by the leviathan state. The easiest way to silence a pro-military statist is to ask them to name one freedom that has been gained by the myriad wars and overseas misadventures following 9/11.
The idea that government soldiers defend freedom carries with it an implicit assumption that if the government soldiers did not defend freedom, then this vitally important task would go undone. This is a positive claim which carries a burden of proof that statists generally do not bother to try to fulfill. Perhaps it is because they know they cannot; after all, government militaries are funded by taxation and currency debasement, which violate property rights and freedom of association. To quote Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an expropriating property protector is a contradiction of terms. And there is no reason why the market should fail to provide a service that is strongly desired by everyone for everyone (except for a few criminals, and even they want it for themselves but not for their victims), to the point that most people will tolerate the oppressions of statism just to obtain a counterfeit version of it.
From this, one can only conclude that either the troops are willfully doing the opposite of defending freedom or they are being deceived. Since they (like most other people) are propagandized to the point of saturation by government schools, churches, and establishment media programming and advertising, it is reasonable to conclude that the latter is usually the case.
2. Praising the troops is selfish and irresponsible. Self-defense is one of the most fundamental rights, and the most important personal responsibility, as the abdication of this responsibility endangers all other rights and responsibilities. Of course, there is nothing wrong with hiring another person or group of people to help one fulfill such a basic need. But as shown above, governments are not hired by you, do not work for you, and do not provide defense services in an objective sense. The troops are ultimately in the position they are in because too few of us do what is necessary to provide for our own defense, including self-defense against the state. It is therefore because of the selfishness (in the form of risk aversion with respect to confronting aggressors) and irresponsibility of most of the American people that the troops are risking their lives at the behest of politicians in the first place.
3. Uniforms are not moral magic. From the act of argumentation, one can show the fact that morality is a valid concept and that there are moral rules which should be considered binding upon all people at all times. We should therefore hold a soldier to the same moral standard as a private citizen. In the line of duty, a soldier commits actions which would be punishable crimes if you or I did them. Every killing of a civilian is an act of murder. Every act of invading a innocent bystander’s private property is an act of trespassing. Every act of destruction that damages an innocent bystander’s property should require restitution. Putting on a uniform and excusing such behavior as doing the job assigned by one’s superiors in the name of a collectivist concept is morally irrelevant.
4. Defense would be better without government militaries. Admittedly, there are no empirical examples of a free market of private military companies providing military defense services in lieu of a government military. Part of the reason for this is that governments will use as much force as they must to keep such an idea from being tested, as its success would doom the state by depriving it of its essential monopolies (the other being criminal punishment). But there are reasons to believe that this could work, and that common criticisms of this idea do not withstand scrutiny.
The first thing to note is that a government military has a monopoly, and that this monopoly is maintained not because they satisfy customers in a free market so well that no one cares to compete with them, but because the state will use its military to destroy any competition within its borders. The presence of a monopoly with involuntary customers necessary leads to inferior quality of service and higher costs, as the monopolists need not provide superior quality of service and/or lower cost of service vis-à-vis a competitor. The opening of provision of military defense to a free market of competing providers must therefore lead to superior quality of service and/or lower cost of service.
The most common criticisms of competing private defense companies are that they will fight each other, that they will lead to rule by warlords, and that they will become a new monopoly on force. Rule by warlords and monopoly on force describe the situation under statism, so if the worst-case scenario is that eliminating government militaries just gets us another government military, all other cases must turn out better than this, making these into powerful arguments in favor of privatizing military defense. This leaves the concern that the private service providers will fight each other. We must recognize that the current service providers do fight each other, which caused 90 million deaths in the 20th century. As such, the bar of service quality that private military defense providers must exceed is set rather low. Fortunately, private military defense providers are limited in ways that government militaries are not. A private service provider must bear the cost of its own decisions, and engaging in aggressive wars is more expensive than defensive actions only. A company that sells war is thus at an economic disadvantage against a company that sells peace. Without the government monopoly on legal services granting immunity to the private soldiers as it does to soldiers of the government military, the private soldiers will be subject to the criminal punishments made prevalent by the defense companies in the area in question. The agencies that decide to fight also must take care not to damage or travel on ground held by customers of other agencies, as this would be considered trespassing, and a trespasser with an intent to murder others in a war is a trespasser who may be killed in self-defense. Thus one could expect to see every private property owner not involved with the warring agencies taking actions to destroy both sides of the conflict whenever they occupy land that is not owned by their customers. (And with no state to forbid ownership of certain types of weapons, the private property owners would be much more capable of stopping military hardware than they are now.) There is no guarantee against such a fight, but there are enough incentives working against it to consider it a remote possibility.
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