Benefits and costs of the U.S. government's war making.

• Author: Higgs, Robert
• Position: Etceteras ...

In 1795, James Madison observed that "of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare" (qtd. in Porter 1994, 10). Experience during the past two centuries has confirmed the continuing validity of Madison's observation. Apart from all the sacrifices of life, liberty, and treasure that wars have entailed directly, wars have also served as the prime occasions for the growth of the central state, and hence in the United States they have fostered the long-term diminution of civil and economic liberties and the ongoing subversion of civil society.

Every government recognizes that force alone is an inefficient means of propping up its position. At the margin, bamboozlement can be effectively substituted for the use of force, especially in so-called democratic systems, where many ordinary people have embraced the fable that they themselves "are" the government because they cast a ballot every few years. Hence, every government seeks to ease its retention of power by persuading people that it acts only in their interest. A government that goes to war promises its subjects that it is doing so only in defense of their security and freedom. "Yet," as Bruce D. Porter has noted, "having borne the burden of the state for five hundred years, we find that it has rarely fulfilled its twin promises of security and freedom" (1994, 21).

Indeed, the government's alluring claim is almost always false. In matters of war making, as elsewhere in its wielding of power, a government acts in the interest of its own leaders, with as many concessions as necessary to retain the support of the coalition of special-interest groups that keeps those leaders in power. In Randolph Bourne's now-hackneyed phrase, "war is the health of the state." This claim is not simply a wild-eyed ideological pronouncement; it is as well established as any historical regularity can be. Entire books, such as Porter's War and the Rise of the State (1994) and my own Crisis and Leviathan (1987) and Against Leviathan (2004), have documented it in excruciating detail.

Aware of this reality, some of us steadfastly resist any claim that war will promote either liberty or security; we do not expect that notwithstanding what has almost always happened previously, nature will change its course on this particular occasion. Although many people can be persuaded that the risks war poses to their own life, liberty, and property rights are justified--in other words, that these risks are necessary and only temporary sacrifices in the service of their own long-term security and liberty--the realistic and well informed among us understand that those who embrace this faith are taking a gamble against very long odds.

In the United States, the government has been at war, more or less, since 1940, which is to...