The Will to Be Free.

• Author: HUMMEL, JEFFREY ROGERS
• Position: Defense and state

The Role of Ideology in National Defense

The practical superiority of markets over governments has become readily apparent. Only the most dogmatic of state apologists continue to deny this obvious fact--at least with respect to the production of many goods and services. Free-market economists and libertarians go much further, of course. They affirm the market's superiority in nearly all realms. Yet only a handful of anarchocapitalists, most notably Murray Rothbard, have dared claim that a free market could also do a better job of providing protection from foreign states.(1) National defense is generally considered the most essential of fall government services.

This widely conceded exception to the efficacy of markets scorns to have irrefutable empirical confirmation. If private defense is better than government defense, why has government kept winning over the centuries? Indeed, the state's military prowess has more than seemingly precluded the modern emergence of any anarchocapitalist society. At one time, as far as we know, all humankind lived in stateless bands of hunter-gatherers and had done so since the emergence of modern man some fifty thousand years ago. But beginning around 11,000 B.C., a gradual transition to plant cultivation and animal husbandry--in what is variously identified as the Neolithic, Food Production, or Agricultural Revolution--fostered a steady increase in population densities. These denser, settled populations became susceptible to what the distinguished historian William H. McNeill (1992) has aptly termed microparasites and macroparasites. Microparasites are the assorted diseases and other pests that have constantly plagued civilization until (and to a lesser extent since) the development of modern medicine. And macroparasites are governments, which arose either through conquest or in reaction to the threat of conquest, until they now dominate every corner of the globe.(2)

Radical libertarians, such as Rothbard (1974, 1978), explicitly acknowledge the historical triumph of governments over primitive stateless societies when they embrace the conquest theory of the origins of the state.(3) Yet this acknowledgment boxes them into an apparent paradox. How can they attribute the origins of government to successful conquest and simultaneously maintain that a completely free society, without government, could prevent such conquest?

In the following pages, I attempt to resolve this paradox. Doing so obviously hinges on establishing a crucial difference between the conditions that permitted governments to arise in the first place and those that would characterize a future free society. So let us initially turn our attention to the first set of conditions, to ascertain exactly what aspects of the Agricultural Revolution created such fertile soil for the growth of coercive monopolies.

Population Growth and the Emergence of the State

Unlike the state, warfare predates the Agricultural Revolution. It was endemic among bands of hunter-gatherers. But it never led to permanent conquest. Why not? The explanation is simple enough. Hunters and gatherers could easily exit to new land. "Where population densities are very low," writes Jared Diamond, "as is usual in regions occupied by hunter-gatherer bands, survivors of a defeated group need only move farther away from their enemies" (1997, 291). This option ceases to be viable only with the higher concentrations of population supported by food production. "No doubt, if tax and rent collectors pressed too heavily on those who worked the fields," admits William H. McNeill, "the option of flight remained. But in practice, this was a costly alternative. It was rare indeed that a fleeing farmer could expect to find a new place where he could raise a crop in the next season, starting from raw land. And to go without food other than what could be found in the wild for a whole year was impractical" (1992, 82).

In other words, hunting and gathering tends to prevail when land is relatively abundant. Yet this very abundance condemned hunting and gathering to a Malthusian dilemma. Without any serious land scarcity, hunting-gathering societies had little incentive to establish or enforce clear property rights in natural resources. Population therefore expanded, ultimately subjecting this most basic form of production to diminishing marginal returns. The most extreme manifestations of the resulting overutilization of common resources are the species extinctions that many authorities now attribute to primitive hunters. Such extinctions have their modern counterparts in the current inefficient harvesting of whales and other resources from the commonly owned oceans.

Whether humans were the primary agents in the disappearance of woolly mammoths and some two hundred other species of large mammals in the late Pleistocene is still debated, but the lack of enforceable property rights in land indisputably created a free-rider or negative-externality problem among competing bands of hunters and gatherers that caused their numbers to steadily expand. At some point, the growing population drove returns to hunting and gathering so low that settled agriculture and animal husbandry became more productive. This change in relative productivity then provided incentives for the necessary innovations in plant cultivation and animal domestication. Thus, rising population densities became both the most important cause and one of the most important consequences of the Agricultural Revolution. Migratory bands of scattered hunters and gatherers were supplanted by larger, relatively sedentary populations of farmers and herders.(4)

Property rights in land now emerged as the spread of agriculture made this resource increasingly scarce. At the same time, however, settled populations became increasingly vulnerable to both microparasites and macroparasites. Macroparasites could take the form of marauding raiders who plundered their victims and perhaps exterminated them. But "[a]daptation between host and parasite always tends toward mutual accommodation," as McNeill (1992, 87) puts it. The most successful macroparasites were the warriors and rulers who stumbled into some kind of long-run equilibrium with their coerced subjects. They extracted enough resources through tribute and taxation to be able to ward off competing groups of macroparasites, but not so much that they killed off their host population. They, in short, usually operated within the range of the Laffer curve apex, for those rulers who seized too much or too little wealth often suffered military defeat at the hands of other rulers. In this fashion, egalitarian bands evolved first into tribes and then into chiefdoms and finally into hierarchical states.

The free-rider problem, which economists have long presented as a normative justification for the state, is in reality a positive explanation for why the state first arose and persisted. All the earliest governments about which we have any knowledge had relatively small ruling classes dependent on wealth transfers from a much larger subject population. Why did not the more numerous subjects ever rise up and overthrow their masters? The free rider is the key. Revolutionary activity is always extremely risky, but nearly all subjects would benefit from a successful revolution, regardless of whether they participated in it or not. This condition remained an enormous obstacle to organizing the masses. Small, concentrated ruling classes, in contrast, faced fewer free-rider problems in carrying out their conquests. The history of the state, therefore, over the millennia from the Agricultural Revolution to the present has become an always dreary and sometimes horrific litany of special interests triumphantly coercing larger groups.

Numbers are not utterly irrelevant, however. All other things equal, bigger armies have an advantage over smaller ones. As governments continued the hallowed human tradition of waging war, they found it useful to motivate their subjects to fight for them. This quest helped bring about the oft-cited alliance between state and religion, between throne and altar, between Attila and the Witch Doctor.(5) All states promote some ideology, whether religious or secular, that legitimizes their rule. Legitimization makes the state's subjects more docile generally but in particular provides more willing fodder for war. It "gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others. At the cost of a few society members who die in battle as soldiers, the whole society becomes much more effective at conquering other societies or resisting attack" (Diamond 1997, 278).

Governments ruling over greater populations could more easily defeat their rivals. Even today, it is fairly obvious who would win a war between Germany and Luxembourg, between China and Hong Kong, or between the United States and Grenada. Recall, moreover, that the state owes its origins to the rising populations of the Agricultural Revolution. When ancient governments intruded on remnant bands of hunter gatherers, the population difference was severe. Couple that with the devastating impact of the microparasitic diseases spawned and spread by denser agricultural societies on peoples not exposed long enough to have developed some natural immunity, and the population difference became even more overwhelming. Whether it was the indigenous San (Bushman) of South Africa being driven to the marginal lands of the Kalahari Desert by the cattle-herding Bantu, or the Aboriginal Australians being decimated by the guns and diseases of the invading Europeans, stateless societies of hunter gatherers were always displaced.

Resource Mobilization, Warfare, and Competition Among States

Population is obviously not the only factor influencing military outcomes. A casual perusal of the...