My fundamental principles lead me to advocate total freedom from the initiation (as opposed to reaction) of coercion. The principles are the important part, but sometimes I have trouble explaining what the world might look like in the absence of government regulation. National defense has always been tough.
I just found this article on mises.org, a chapter from Morris and Linda Tannehill’s The Market for Liberty. The authors swiftly refute dozens of misconceptions of how or whether defense would function in a free society.
One sticking point I’ve always had is with freeloaders. If people can voluntarily pay into regional defense services, couldn’t some opt out and still get the benefits from those who choose to pay? That doesn’t seem stable.
Here’s an enlightening excerpt:
A major portion of the cost of defense against foreign aggression in a laissez-faire society would be borne originally by business and industry, as owners of industrial plants obviously have a much greater investment to defend than do owners of little houses in suburbia. If there were any real threat of aggression by a foreign power, businessmen would all be strongly motivated to buy insurance against that aggression, for the same reason that they buy fire insurance, even though they could save money in the short run by not doing so.
An interesting result of this fact is that the cost of defense would ultimately tend to be spread among the whole population, since defense costs, along with overhead and other such costs, would have to be included in the prices paid for goods by consumers. So, the concern that “free riders” might get along without paying for their own defense by parasitically depending on the defenses paid for by their neighbors is groundless. It is based on a misconception of how the free-market system would operate.
The role of business and industry as major consumers of foreign-aggression insurance would operate to unify the free area in the face of any aggression. An auto plant in Michigan, for example, might well have a vital source of raw materials in Montana, a parts plant in Ontario, a branch plant in California, warehouses in Texas, and outlets all over North America. Every one of these facilities is important to some degree to the management of that Michigan factory, so it will want to have them defended, each to the extent of its importance. Add to this the concern of the owners and managers of these facilities for their own businesses and for all the other businesses on which they, in turn, depend, and a vast, multiple network of interlocking defense systems emerges.
That’s freakin’ cool!