National Defense and Anarcho-Capitalism

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Are you saying that those two things are NOT (or would not be) good for the general welfare? I would doubt extremely much if one were to assert that the infrastructure of the interstate highway system was not a worthwhile investment, which has come to greatly benefit all Americans."



That's not what I'm saying at all. In fact roads and highways were of such great benefit to all Americans that by 1800 there were nearly 70 different companies providing private roads (turnpikes) with over 400 turnpikes already having been built. That's 1800. There was no NEED for public funding of roads. The reason that road construction was monopolized by government was mercantilism. Politicians used the power of their office to subsidize certain private road companies and construction projects (roads and canals, actually) to benefit their campaign supporters. The justification given for this, the free rider problem, was a smokescreen, clearly, since investment in private roads was heavy. Even though the rate of return on investment was lower than other industries (only 3% per annum), this was not detering capital investment, since the bulk of capital investment in road companies came from local entrepeneurs and businessmen, who knew that good roads meant routes for their imported and exported goods.

In fact, every instance of government "internal improvements" subsidies (roads, canals, railroads, etc), was an unmitigated disaster. They were so fraught with cost overruns, corruption, outright theft, squandering of public monies, and downright uncompleted and useless boondoggle projects, that almost every state in the Union had outlawed what we now call corporate welfare and "internal improvements" subsidies by the mid 1850's. It wasn't until the American mercantilists triumphed with Lincoln's election and the War Between the States that such laws began to be repealed. And now road provision is a disaster of similar scale, but people rarely recognize it as such, because they have nothing to compare it too. They have no idea what a real private interstate system would be like. I'll be starting a thread on it sometime. Suffice it to say that our road system, like our education system, is a disaster, the kind of disaster you always get when you have Soviet-style provision of a "public good." Traffic jams are what you get when capitalists provide the cars and socialists provide the roads.



"My first point was a general agreement with your critics, especially regarding defense against a huge organized military foe such as Nazi Germany or the USSR. As Natedogg and I merely expressed serious doubts as to whether a non-state could effectively deal with certain such concerns, the above being one such concern, the onus isn't on us to show that it couldn't, but rather on you to show that it could (since that is your apparent assertion; we're expressing some degree of doubt of that assertion)."

This is a fundamental misconception on your part. I hear this so much that I may start another thread on it. Suffice it to say the onus is NOT on me to provide every detail of a market provided service X. Rather, the onus is on the statist to demonstrate that X A) "should" be provided for, and that B) Coersion and central planning can provide X in a "better" way than the private sector could.

This is really, really fundamental. So fundamental that I can't understand how people can fall for it.

Consider the "God of the Gaps." The devotees of Intelligent Design tell us that there are biological structures for which no evolutionary mechanism can be imagined for their origins. Or rather, they personally cannot think of an evolutionary explanation. Thus they claim, no evolutionary mechanism is even possible, and therefore God, er, the Intelligent Designer must have designed it that way. This argument is transparently fallacious.

Guess what? We have the exact same argument for the "Government of the Gaps." Because the statist cannot personally think of how the private sector could provide for national defense, the roads, education, health care, vaccines, police, courts, bakeries, clean water, etc., he asserts that it cannot, and therefore Government is required to perform those functions. This argument is 100% fallacious. 100% fallacious.

Now, I understand how someone would want to hear how the private sector could provide for X, and would like to hear some kind of plausible free market explanation. And lest we take our analogy too far, we do have to remember that Government really does exist, and is all too observable. But the point remains. It is NOT my problem to explain exactly how, in every minute detail, the free market would provide for X. It is rather the statist's task to explain why it can't.