2

Is there any account of why war between states would be unlikely? A statist might offer two reasons for considering interstate war a smaller threat than interagency war:

i) Since governments possess territorial monopolies, citizens of different states come into conflict less often than the customers of different protection agencies would.

ii) There is less competition among governments than there is among protection agencies. The large costs of moving from one country to another, including the barriers that governments themselves often place in the way, enable a government to extract monopoly profits from its populace with little fear of losing ‘customers’ to a rival government. Therefore, a government has less cause to wish to eliminate rival governments than a protection agency has to wish to eliminate rival agencies.

These are valid considerations. On the other hand, there seem to be several reasons for expecting the problem of intergovernmental warfare to be more serious than that of interagency warfare:

i) Business leaders tend to be driven chiefly by the profit motive. Government leaders are more likely to be driven by ideology or the desire for power. Because of the enormous costs of armed conflict, the latter motivations are much more likely motives for armed conflict than the desire for financial gain.

ii) Due to their monopolistic positions, governments can afford to make extremely large and costly errors without fear of being supplanted. For example, the estimated combined cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is $2.4 trillion,22 and yet the U.S. government need fear no loss of market share as a result of this dubious investment. If each American could choose between a government that carried on these wars and one that did not and if each individual were guaranteed to actually get what he chose, then even the most ardent hawks might find themselves thinking twice about the price tag. Fortunately for the government, individuals have no such choice.

iii) Governments have better propagandistic tools at their disposal than private businesses. Since most people believe in political authority, the state can claim that citizens are morally obligated to go to war, whether they support the war or not. The state may portray combat under its command as ‘fighting for one’s country’, which is generally seen as noble and honorable. A private business seeking to increase profits by killing competitors would have a harder sell.

iv) Human beings are far more willing to kill those who are perceived as very different from themselves, especially foreigners, than to kill ordinary members of their own society.44 Consequently, it is easier to convince people to go to war against another country than it would be to convince people to attack employees of another company.

v) Modern military training employs techniques of intensive psychological conditioning and desensitization to overcome soldiers’ humane instincts. The U.S. military adopted techniques of this kind in response to Marshall’s findings concerning the low rate of firing by World War II soldiers. As a result, the rate of fire reportedly increased from under 25 per cent in World War II to 55 per cent in the Korean War and close to 90 per cent in the Vietnam War.42 Employees of a security company, however, are less likely to submit to military-style conditioning, since they would not see the need of combat with other security agencies to begin with.

vi) Due to its pervasive control over the society from which its soldiers are drawn, the state can and does apply powerful sanctions to soldiers who refuse to fight or citizens who refuse to be drafted. Under a governmental system, those who refuse to fight at their government’s command must flee the country to avoid imprisonment or execution;42 under an anarchist system, those who refuse to fight at their employer’s command must merely find another job.

vii) Because of their monopolistic position and their ability to collect nonvoluntary payments from the populace, governments tend to have far greater resources than nongovernmental organizations, enabling them to accumulate vast arsenals even during peacetime. For example, as of this writing, the U.S. government maintains ten Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, which cost $4.5 billion apiece plus $240 million per year for maintenance!4 while generating zero revenue. As a result, when war breaks out between governments, it is far more destructive than any kind of conflict involving any other agents. The death toll from war in the twentieth century is estimated in the neighborhood of 140 million,4= and the problem may yet prove the cause of the extinction of the human species.

Taking all of these observations into account, then, it appears that warfare is a greater concern with governments than with protection agencies.