Without Government, Will Psychopaths Nuke Us?
Answering reader questions on market anarchism
Longtime readers know that I devote significant effort to communicating with readers—answering questions, having long conversations, or just goofing off. A lot of good stuff happens in these discussions that doesn’t get seen, other than by the participants and anyone who chooses to read the thread.
I think it is worth highlighting some of the information expressed in these conversations, so that is what I will do here.
One devoted reader asked a question that is quite common, in one form or another. Basically…
If there were no government, wouldn’t psychopaths or supervillains acquire nuclear weapons and either deploy them or use them for blackmail?
Here is the answer I gave, off the top of my head and without edits:
Nuclear bombs are incredibly expensive. Fissile materials have to be mined and then enriched. Delivery technology must be invented, improved, built, and maintained. States can do this because they can steal your money through taxation or print it (and enrich themselves and their cronies in the process due to the Cantillon Effect).
In a condition of market anarchism, a private person must acquire this wealth through providing goods and services. He would have to be a successful businessman—offering things that people want, things that people feel would make their lives better—BEFORE he can get the wealth necessary to build even a small number of missiles/bombs.
So does our nuclear-mad psychopath intentionally seek success in business just so he can acquire the wealth needed to develop even a small arsenal? Maybe.
But then we must ask—what are his incentives to do so? Bloodlust? Lunacy? Again, maybe, but certainly not a common scenario.
Meanwhile, we know the perverse incentives of the state. We know that “War is the heath of the state.” War makes the state more powerful. War allows centralizers to centralize. War allows some to become fabulously wealthy making weapons. “Democracy” allows all of these costs to be passed on to the people. And the nationalism of the modern state allows authorities to convince people in their own lands that people in far-off lands are their bitter enemies. To sacrifice their wealth and treasure, to sacrifice themselves and their children to fight this far-off enemy. And if you are unwilling to fight, they can draft you and kill you if you refuse.
The private psychopath in a condition of market anarchism has none of these incentives and none of these abilities. The state, by contrast, has all of them. The state has a record of using nuclear weapons. The state can build and maintain a world-destroying number of them. The Japanese were suing for peace when “we” dropped Fat Man and Little Boy, just to show the USSR we meant business.
I am not saying that psychos will not exist in a condition of market anarchism, or that such a condition will be perfect. But when we compare that possibility to the current reality, how can we possibly prefer the current reality?
There is much more to be said on this topic, but that is fodder enough for more discussion.
So what do you think? What do you fear more? States with 3,000 nuclear missiles or the occasional supervillain with three?
There's also Higgs' comment on the broader issue of the pros and cons of a strictly-voluntary society versus a 'state supremacist' system:
“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.
In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.” ~ Robert Higgs
All politics are local. In my hometown the state of Massachusetts took over 3 hotels and are paying for hundreds of illegal aliens to live there for free. Free housing, free food, free health care, free cable, free phones, free utilities, free WiFi, free transportation, free laundry service, well you get the picture. There was a man there that was raping his under age daughter constantly. People knew it and were complaining. Governor Healy got word from the man hired by the state to run these hotels the state contracted out. The police went to the hotel to get the child molester, but not to arrest him, no, they moved him and his daughter to another Holiday Inn. Recently the young girl gave birth to her father’s child. She had turned 17 and the state put her up with the child in another hotel, I’m sure Governor Healy granted dad, grandpa, the pedophile visitation rights. The young girl is receiving all the same free stuff that her father was getting. I and the rest of Mass. tax payers are forced to pay for this.
My neighborhood has been overwhelmed with break-ins, car thefts, and cars being broken into at night. All of the stores in town are being robbed daily, many now keep their merchandise in locked cabinets. The police are called but do absolutely nothing.
So for me I’m not so worried of nuclear bombs going off, I’m mostly concerned with first these psychopath politicians who consider me the enemy. And second looking out my window, seeing my truck being Brocken into, and having to confront one of these psychopaths Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas let into the country, probably released from a mental hospital in Venezuela. For sure I will be the one who gets arrested. So that’s life in a communist sanctuary state. Isn’t communism great!