David Friedman writes:
"Imagine buying cars the way we buy governments. Ten thousand people would get together and agree to vote, each for the car he preferred. Whichever car won, each of the ten thousand would have to buy it. It would not pay any of us to make any serious effort to find out which car is best; whatever I decide, my car is being picked for me by the other members of the group. Under such institutions, the quality of cars would quickly decline."
I respond:
"Imagine fighting wars the way we buy cars. Ten thousand people would disperse and do whatever each preferred. Whichever way he felt best, each of the ten thousand would go. It would not pay any of us to make any serious effort to find out which direction was best; whatever I decide, my army is sure to be destroyed by the centrally-commanded enemy army. Under such institutions, the government would lose wars until it ceased to exist."
Government is fundamentally about violence.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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32 comments:
Government is fundamentally about violence.
You've hit the nail on the head, Steve. Friedman's lost the plot here; heck, Western Civilization has lost the plot.
Government is fundamentally about violence.
The key is learning when it's become about violence against you.
Anarcho-tyranny rules the day.
Steve you could have used the example of the Republican Anarchists and the Republican Communists during the Spanish Civil War. The Anarchist voting on military operations vs. the centrally commanded Communists
JCR
why do they try to f with you steve? You always end up smoking them.
What if they gave a war and nobody came?
Prior to large-scale national governments, wars were skirmishes of this tribe or that cutting each other for a hill or a dale. Not masses of marching men mulching each other with modern munitions. If everyone has Big Government so that they can fight wars, then they will have Big Wars.
The rise of statism meant the unnatural deaths of many millions. World Wars 1 & 2 were fought on the largest, most centralized scale. It's called statism.
Statism's reduction-to or exposure-as absurdity was and is the possibility of nuclear war. We've collectivized right up to the brink of an all-or nothing fate: the entire human civilization could croke with a keystroke.
Big Government = Big War = Boom.
Scattered anarchists do little harm in comparison.
Obviously anarcho-capitalism is silly, but Friedman's point is not illegitimate.
Government action should be reserved for the relatively few things -- like organized violence against enemies -- that it can do more efficiently than the private sector. Health care is not one of those things, any more than steel production is.
Ultimately it's always an efficiency/quality argument.
Good point, Steve.
I'm not entirely convinced, though. For the simple reason that as Friedman's example is contorted -- as if cars are produced, marketed, sold, and used on an entirely "individualistic" fashion -- so is yours -- as if all that goverment does is to innocently protect us from "violence" without fully specifying how violence occurs, from whom, what price we end up paying for to sustain military-industrial complexes, etc.
So, let's assume we need a monopoly of violence: the trouble is specifying at which scale? Should the Fed have a monopoly of violence over all the US as contrasted to states' rights to deal with things internally? How about the world? Should we have a monopoly of violence at a global scale? (Is that part of the reason you liked "Iron Man" so much: that the guy said "peace is one guy having a bigger stick than the other?" I thought it was every guy having a more or less equal length stick -- with a more or less equally civilized DNA profile -- that makes peace possible, since in the former case the guy with the bigger stick sooner or later ends up buggering the fellow with the shorter one.)
More importantly, if government is about violence, then how has it ended up regulating everything from whom we hire to how we educate our children, to how much this or that chemical should a car emit, how much money we should spend for the military industrial complex? You believe "we" are deciding the latter figure on a rational, justifiable mechanisms -- bearing in mind Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracies?
As with evolutionary models of human behavior, we have a problem of scale here. What may appear perfectly obvious at a scale of human societies composed of 30 individuals max is hardly that obvious at a scale when we're talking 300 million people.
My $0.02.
JD
I do not know where this quote comes from, but, "Law are enforced at the end of a gun".
A great example of this are the different groups of Warlords in Africa and the Middle East.
A particular Warlord (and his crew) will run/own some area. They get a "cut" of everything that goes down. Then, for 3 days out of the year, some UN peace-keeping crew will be in town with more and bigger guns and a few tanks and helicopters. The Warlords just sit back for a while and wait for them to leave.
After they leave, the Warlords are back to being the biggest bullies on the block.
This is pretty much how the Volkswagen came about. OK there wasn't a referendum in Germany on what the car should be like everybody just delegased this decision (& all the others) to Adolf but it was, as the name suggests, as a generic beast for everybody & worked quite well.
Wars fought on the opposite principle are rare but the early Viking raids certainly count & were remarkably succesful. Though leaders of Viking fleets started calling themselves royalty they were much more like project directors or CEOs.
I think you are all way behind the times.
Government is a far away function run by computers and technocrats.
Elections are a relic of the past. They are of absolutely no consequence because they are carefully crafted to never allow the electorate to vote on any issue of consequence.
The belief that politics and elections matter is a romantic relic treasured by intellectuals. The rest of us ignore it all.
A funny thing happened. The great Utopia turned out to be Costco and the iPhone. In America, educated folks barely work, in the old sense of laboring.
I get a kick out of politics, and out of reading Steve's perceptive comments. But none of it has anything to do with my life. I can't even think of a reason to vote anymore, and I no longer believe that politics matters in any substantial way.
The American model has triumphed on a global scale. Unless the Jihadists succeed in putting back on the table issues like morality and respect for men, politics is a dead issue. The Jihadists are the only group with an alternative political platform.
Did David Friedman *really* produce Ilsa The She Wolf? He did, according to everything2.com.
You baby boomers had much groovier porn.
Are you guys trying to rewrite an econ 101 text here? Government is fundamentally about collective action -- things that people might want to have happen, but that individuals have to be forced to do because of free-rider problems and so on. So yes, it's about force, but in many more spheres than war.
For example: environmental regulation. Everyone might want clean air and water and a stable climate, but people won't clean up their act unless they are assured that everyone else will do so at the same time. Which requires the threat of force. Any individual voluntary contribution (driving less or whatever) is much too small to make a difference, hence people won't voluntarily coordinate in a decentralized fashion around the solution everyone wants.
Consider that the centrally-commanded U.S. military did not do so well against the decentralized viet-cong in that guerrilla conflict known as the Vietnam war. Also, the centrally-commanded IDF wasn't so hot against the more decentralized Hizbolla in Lebanon in summer of '06.
Indeed, the revolutionary war itself was won by a rag-tag bunch of guerrillas against the larger, centrally commanded British army.
Steve, you might want to reconsider the use of your analogy.
Government is fundamentally about violence.
Perhaps this is a moral argument for less government.
The funny thing is, the disorganised Iraqi insurgents have been doing rather well against the centrally directed US military following just this car-buyer strategy at small-group level.
If Martin Van Creveld and others are right, the efficacy of centrally directed violence is declining rapidly and big government's main reason for existing is on the way out.
> Health care is not one of those things, any more than steel production is.
Tuberculosis control? Quarantine? Standards and inspection? Licensing of medical professionals?
Actually Friedman probably understands that government is fundamentally about violence. Mt libertarians believe that and tend to wamt to reserve the state's responsibilities to law and war.
"Consider that the centrally-commanded U.S. military did not do so well against the decentralized viet-cong in that guerrilla conflict known as the Vietnam war."
Actually your armed forces beasted the Viet-Cong, it was the North Vietnamese Army that gave you problems.
Simon -- the Iraqi insurgents are almost totally destroyed in Iraq. They lost. Just as the VietCong were destroyed after Tet.
The "victory" by the MECHANIZED, Blitzkrieg NVA, only happened after the US withdrew, and Congress determined to inflict a defeat on the US with-held air support unlike the prior year where the mechanized NVA was destroyed by air attacks from Thailand.
This is the weakness of Libertards, they let ideology get in the way of well, reality.
The entire history of human evolution and social structures has been towards MORE cooperation and MORE egalitarianism. Hunter-gatherers were very egalitarian, but could not project power compared to pastoralists and certainly agriculturalists. They constantly got chased out of places and suffered HUGE year to year attrition -- "anarchy" in practice as Wade's "Before the Dawn" or Keeley's "War Before Civilization" led to 4% annual losses in males, and about the same in everyone else. If someone objects to someone else courting his wife/girlfriend/intended, he can stick a spear in him and before you know it, alliance/clan warfare.
It was Western Europe, monogamy and the average guy (oriented towards making better tools all the time) that tipped agricultural society into modern Industrial society that NEEDS honest, effective, and transparent government.
Including a legal system enforcing equal rights for all, property rights, protection of the less powerful, and so on.
"Anarchy" quickly devolves into the rule of the strongest over the weakest. Gaza, Iran, Pakistan, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe are good examples. Western government as imperfect as it is solves the question of how ordinary people prevent the rule of the most physically brutal and strong over everyone else. We get thus on the bad end, Bill Gates and George Soros instead of say, Charles Taylor or Ayman al-Zawahari. And for all their ills, a guy like Gates can marshal enormous resources that a guy like Zawahari just can't.
"Consider that the centrally-commanded U.S. military did not do so well against the decentralized viet-cong in that guerrilla conflict"
The U.S. army wiped out the Viet Cong. South Vietnam fell when the North Vietnamese army, about as regular a force as you could get, sent more tanks than the Germans has at Stalingrad against them.
Are there really still people who don't know this?
Kurt,
You need to brush up on your history a bit. The American army did very well against the Viet Cong, which was operationally obliterated in 1968. The North finally won the war in 1975 via a conventional tank assault, the kind you would have seen in Korea or WWII - had they relied on the VC, Vietnam would be partitioned to this day.
Hizbollah is every bit as centralized as the IDF, with training, ranks, and modern communications. Nazrallah called all the shots from his bunker in Beirut, aided by Iranian advice, expertise, and intelligence. Israel's mistake was expecting Hizbollah to fight the way they had in the past - as undisciplined rabble.
Finally, the British army was kicking Washington's ass up and down the thirteen colonies and would have continued to do so without the intervention of the French (well disciplined and centrally directed) military.
Whenever warriors come in contact with soldiers they lose, or they win by spending twenty warriors for every enemy soldier. That's the way it's been since at least the Romans.
"Prior to large-scale national governments, wars were skirmishes of this tribe or that cutting each other for a hill or a dale. Not masses of marching men mulching each other with modern munitions. If everyone has Big Government so that they can fight wars, then they will have Big Wars."
The Napoleanic wars were skirmishes? Didn't millions die in those wars? Goya was so traumatized by what he saw that we owe a lot of great, macabre art to those wars.
The half a million dead during the Civil War? 50,000 in a couple days? And supposedly the Revolutionary War claimed more dead for the number of people fighting it than any war to date, though I'm not too sure of that claim.
The 100 years war of 14th century? The 30 years war of the 17th century? These too caused widespread decimation. The Paraguayan wars that killed 60% (or more) of the male population in the late 1800s.
Actually what was especially special about WW I & II were the number of civilians killed and the way they were targeted. More civilians than soldiers died. But even this is not unique to modern warfare,since slaughter of the countryside is an old battle aftermath.
I'm not disputing that WMD kill a lot more people, but wars always have killed as many as they could with the tools they had. Never underestimate the human capacity for mayhem.
I'm constantly amazed that people continue to claim the VCs won the Vietnam war. This is the idea of George Lucas and the Wookies. Noble primitives overcome the decadent technologists. Humbug.
The US won every battle in Vietnam. There was no Dien Bien Phu that drove us out. The US people acting through their Congress chose to be humiliated.
Strategically, of course, we won in Vietnam. Our well publicized purpose was to stop or delay the spread of communism.
We stopped communism. The South East Asian countries now look to Western free market societies as models. No one wants to emulate Cambodia under Pol Pot or North Korea under Kim Il Sung. The dominoes didn't fall.
We could have won militarily in Iraq at any time in the last five years with virtually no American casualties. We have the Neutron bomb after all. We have unquestioned air supremacy. What could Al Quaida do against a determined campaign of genocide from the air?
It is nonsense to claim that irregular troops have any chance against American armed forces. These groups only appear potent because we have adopted rules of engagement that keep us from being fully effective.
At a dinner party shortly after we invaded Iraq and Afganistan I commented that while it was at the time unclear if the enemy had weapons of mass destruction there was no doubt that we certainly had them. To those who argued that the Afghans had sucessfully resisted the British and the Russians from their mountain fasts, I suggested that we could just seed those mountains with Antrax. Those lands would then be denied to humanity for decades. Naturally, all present were schocked and horrified by my obscene and immoral suggestion. However Scipio Amelianus would have understood my point and so would Curtis LeMay.
Americans currently have learned some very false lessons from Vietnam and Iraq. Many seem to believe that guerrilas are potent adversaries.
Guerillas are in fact very easy to defeat by a strong central military that power is motivated. The US simply hasn't had the political will lately to be effective. That's fine with me. I don't personally care for bloodbaths. But we shouldn't confuse compunction with inability.
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
-- George Washington
Good point albertosaurus, I recommend Harry Turtledove's novella, "The Last Article", as an example. It's an alternate history of what happened to Gandhi and India in a world where the Nazis won.
albertosaurus:
Everything you say is correct as far as it goes -- but it is a mistake to consider the West's civilization will to be something that can be revived easily -- or at all.
Consider the late Christopher Reeve: a healthy man with the body of Superman thrown from a horse and paralyzed. His nervous system refused to transmit the appropriate signals to his arms and legs (which were healthy for a fair amount of time before they wasted away from disuse). Our military is like Reeve's well muscled back one week after his fall -- still theoretically strong, but:
a) wasting away slowly due to the lack of civilizational will (women in the military, reduced AFQT recruiting standards, etc.) and
b) not particularly mobile due to our civilizational paralysis
Reviving the will of a civilization is like restoring freedom of motion to a paralyzed man. A broken leg is perceptible and more easily fixed. A broken will, like a broken nervous system, is intangible without the right instruments but no less catastrophic.
To diagnose our paralysis, remember this: killing the enemy in the manner you describe requires us to harden our hearts, to dehumanize them, to strictly demarcate a line between "us" and "them" and to act as one with respect to that line. Internal criticism would be restricted for those who expressed sympathy for the enemy rather than those who condemned him.
This is needless to say a complete inversion of our current situation, in which we are propagandized from birth to embrace the other, to prostrate ourselves before him and to seek forgiveness for the sins of our ancestors. Much rending of garments and status-seeking is based on how compassionate one can be towards the other, and many groups are working towards an America which is a microcosm of the world -- with a consequent inability to ever again mark anyone as "other".
albertosaurus:
I admire your passion. I believe this chest-beating is called "spunk" by conservatives. You forgot to add the "if all the muzzies were in one place..." argument.
All that remains now is for you to explain how the West has lost its "civilizational will." Listening to conservatives, one gets the impression that liberalism is something that happened to the West like a meteor: that it just fell from the sky, and it somehow did all this damage.
There's another explanation, admittedly not very popular among conservatives like posters here who either view history as a JRR Tolkien kinda morality play or conservatism as being part of the winning team. That explanation is, "overwhelming power" brings the host civilization's demise together with all those "others" who refuse to be "in one place" and make that civilization's job more difficult, drats.
It's admittedly a more "wise elder" approach which, in a youth culture-oriented place like the US where even conservatism is defined by adrenalin and testosterone (by the "MTV Jackass" criteria of who "rules" even), doesn't stand a chance of being popular.
So bring on the Neutron bomb, pal. Really. Finish the job. Create an overwhelmingly overwhelming military structure to wipe off all the pesky dickheads who happen to have other lineages than yours and, therefore, resist being reduced to just extras in your history books written by your winning-team mates where you are the only top dog, the leading characters.
Don't be surprised, though, if you see your own civilization disintegrate into dog-eat-dog internal power struggles a couple of decades after that. He who lives by the colt, shall die by the colt. He who selects their overwhelming power-obsessed bully brethren as their leaders, shall end up being crushed under the feet of their own brethren -- as those bullies sell their nations to "neocons" and similar vermin just to keep the corrupt power structures they are now addicted to intact since overwhelming power corrupts overwhelmingly.
JD
albertosaurus:
"It is nonsense to claim that irregular troops have any chance against American armed forces. These groups only appear potent because we have adopted rules of engagement that keep us from being fully effective."
effective =/= "kill everyone". Effective is achieving your strategic objective, which in Iraq's case was to eliminate Saddam, eliminate non-existent WMDs, and create a functioning liberal democracy.
Anarchy vs. government is a false dichotomy.
David said...
Big Government = Big War = Boom.
Scattered anarchists do little harm in comparison.
Getting rid of government is like getting rid of firearms, it only works if everyone plays nice and disarms as well. Besides, scattered anarchists usually don't win when the enemy is willing to attack civilians the way the Norman conquerers were. There are exceptions though.
Does Friedman also believe this:
If the southern border was meant to have a fence the Free Market would have built it by now!
Kurt and Simon and their opponents would enjoy reading John Robb's thoughts on "Global Guerrillas" and "the emerging marketplace of violence."
Also, everyone should read William S. Lind on war.
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/
If the southern border was meant to have a fence the Free Market would have built it by now!
Well, the southern border is meant to have a fence, and if there were a Free market, it would have been built by now. Unfortunately, there is no genuine Free market, but umpteen government regulated pseudo-markets keeping people from dissociating from people invading their country (an act categorized as "discrimination"), and since building that fence has been made a government duty, the Free market a.k.a the People* have their hands pretty much tied behind them.
But you never mind me, you keep on subscribing to the Marxist belief that all this is happening because of too much Free market -- forgetting that the vast majority of people are thinking exactly like you (and yet they expect the Market to get the hell up and do the job, go figure). Every militarist -- who views all human affairs as some form of warfare and, therefore, believes they have to be centrally administered like a Prussian army, instead of being allowed to prosper in a Darwinian ecology -- is a natural member of the universal club of "Crypto-Marxists without Names, Fronts and Tiers." You know that an idea has really succeeded when people stop mentioning the name of its originator.
JD
* Real tricky metaphor, this one. Just as some think "society" is an invisible beast that selectively makes some people (e.g. blacks) kill others at a higher frequency, some people think a market is something like ether, barely visible yet omnipresent everywhere. They think it's supposed to make the wishes of everyone happen any day real soon now. Sensible people like Marxists think it should be under the watch of SPLC or ADL or it'll run amock and "discriminate" or something. Amazing how many distorted mental images the bloody free market generates.
It is, of course, none of these. It's just an exchange network between "individuals" who all happen to have *relatives*. For some reason, those individuals, when wearing uniforms or working for government, are assumed to be "wonderful" people, but all schmucks and shysters when working to their own benefit. Perhaps we need to build robots who'll work "selflessly" for goverment jobs. People are so blind to their own selfishness that they never give up on this sexual fantasy of having others work "selflessly" for them.
Government is about denial of freedom - to those who don't conform to expectations established and enforced by the elite. The main objective of the elite is to stifle, destroy, undermine, or infiltrate any institution that can serve as a launching pad for opposition to its goals.
"At a dinner party shortly after we invaded Iraq and Afganistan I commented that while it was at the time unclear if the enemy had weapons of mass destruction there was no doubt that we certainly had them. To those who argued that the Afghans had sucessfully resisted the British and the Russians from their mountain fasts, I suggested that we could just seed those mountains with Antrax. Those lands would then be denied to humanity for decades. Naturally, all present were schocked and horrified by my obscene and immoral suggestion. However Scipio Amelianus would have understood my point and so would Curtis LeMay."
Funny story: I was also at a dinner party when I brought up that I rape babies for fun. The guests were just as shocked as yours were. I wasn't invited to anymore dinner parties either, did the same happen to you?
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