“Suppose that we were all starting completely from scratch, and that millions of us had been dropped down upon the Earth, fully grown and developed, from some other planet. Debate begins as to how protection (police and judicial services) will be provided. Someone says: “Let’s give all of our weapons to Joe Jones over there, and to his relatives. And let Jones and his family decide all disputes among us. In that way, the Jones will be able to protect all of us from any aggression or fraud that anyone else may commit. With all the power and all the ability to make ultimate decisions in the hand of Jones, we will be protected from one another. And then let us allow the Joneses to obtain their income from this great service by using their weapons, and by exacting as much revenue by coercion as they shall desire.” Surely in that sort of situation, no one would treat this proposal with anything but ridicule…..it is only because we have become accustomed over thousands of years to the existence of the State that we now give precisely this kind of absurd answer to the problem of social protection and defense.”
Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, page 68, quoted on pages 380-381 of Radicals for Capitalism, by Brian Doherty. The paperback copy contains a rather barbed piece of blurb by the publisher. The book is far from “hagiographic”, but is clearly sympathetic.
Doherty’s book is great. It is a bit of a shame that it does not say all that much about what happened in the libertarian scene in the UK, but that is a sort of British bleat from yours truly.
I like Rothbard in many ways- for all the reasons I don’t like Rand, really- but his ultima-anarcho-capitalism doesn’t seem to me to very much relate to reality. He suggests no state but then doesn’t offer any means to prevent one arising. We know that the world is full of states because initially well-armed populaces found themselves faced by somebody better armed and more organised. You only have to consider one old granny defending her property with a gun, against a gang of fifty young men with many guns, to see the inherent problem. If the state provides any service at all, it acts as a block to full-scale tribal warfare, in the main, by limiting the power of other gangs.
Anyway, you can take his metaphor differently. Let us suppose we have landed on this planet. Well, we’re all going to have our property and, human nature as it is, disputes are going to arise. If there are just a few of us that know each other, we may get along reaosnably with some kind of informal dispute resolution. But if there are many of us, and we are interacting with peope we do not know, then we’re going to require some common rules of interaction. We need to know the other guy is following the same rules as to e.g. property as we are. Then when a dispute arises we need some method of resolution which is already agreed on. It is enormously impractical to go around millions of people you don’t know making individual agreements in case you subsequently interact with them… see where I’m going with this?
I pretty much agree with Ian on that. Rothbard has many good ideas and observations, but taken in his entirety… actually he was a serious moonbat 🙂
The State is going to exist whether we ideally want one or not. The reason it arises is that, given the example, people will find a rather superstitious based reason to give the Power to the Joneses. The Joneses will have a degree of persuasive Power or know how to exploit existential fears so that giving them the Power is a better option than not.
Then we are basically at the mercy of the Joneses and can only hope that they are virtuous and desire only to be a conduit of defensive forms of Force (protecting life and property). Unfortunately we all know that the Joneses, even if they are virtuous enough, will eventually transform slowly into including an element of the Smiths, and also the Johnsons. And they will take the art of manipulation of fears to a new level, and begin to use offensive forms of Force against people. That’s when (in the Jeffersonian frame of reference) revolution is necessary. How sanguine that revolution is depends on just how adamant Smith and Johnson are to hold onto Power.
So I don’t believe that we are ever going to be without a State. People are just too superstitious a lot. Man’s gift (intellect) is also his curse in that he knows he is doomed to die. And fears eat away at him constantly. So we will always elect people from among us to Lead. It just needs to be recalibrated every so often when that Leadership ceases to be about protecting lives and property and more about dictating transcendental Good – complete with indoctrination, propaganda, and catechisms. When the Power given to the protectors ceases to be about protecting life and property to controlling life and property then a reset is necessary.
All we can do at this moment in time is wait for the inevitable misallocations of resources that occurs when anyone dares to be the controller of every resource and individual. It will inevitably lead to a collapse and mobs that will no longer be taken in by the siren song of Statists. When the Old Order is torn down, and chaos ensues, we can only hope that the reset is sensible and returns to a system of defensive Force. Unfortunately it can just as easily lead to the ascension of hardliners, left or right.
The likelihood of such an event increases the longer the rather softer version of Statists craft an Apparatus. The most useful lesson the rise of Hitler offers is that he took over an already assembled State Apparatus. He and his henchman simply cut any remaining tethers to freedom. The consolidation of the State pre-existed Hitler. He merely hijacked it.
If we don’t have rather mild “revolutions” to clean out the transformation from defensive governance to offensive governance, the more likely the eventual steps to do so will be bloodier and the chances increase greatly that we could get hardliners. The key is to convince people not to be taken so far through the exploitation of their fears, to educate people that the greater dislocation between themselves and their fears with the supposed “security blanket” leaves too much room for building the very Apparatus that they should fear. Superstition is a deadly combination of fear and the remote “solutions” one demands to placate those fears. Getting back to the Joneses, the idea will be we will elect Jones and demand he be removed to gilded towers and not look too closely at his policies. If he is amongst us, and The Plan too plain and clear, the illusion is lost.
PDH, I don’t know if Rothbard should be categorized as a moonbat. In large distribution of ideas from anarchanism to statism, left and right, I deem that (after seven years of frequenting this site and the likes of Mises.org) there are points which separate those of us in the portion of the curve from anarch-capitalist to minarchic, and that I am somewhere in between, but that the differences are much fewer than with other points on the curve. The differences, by all means, should be examined and critiqued, but if we easily toss off the differences and moonbatism, those who are more clearly Statist have an easier time compromising with each other to our detriment. I don’t see a problem with starting from anarcho-capitalism as a foundation and make concessions from there.
Brad, both comments are very insightful – thanks.
Anyone who did not think the Soviet Union was a threat of the very highest magnitude to the civilised world is the purest distilled essence of moonbat, Brad. A barking species of the genus ‘Moonbaticus’ in fact.
“The State is going to exist whether we ideally want one or not.”
Do you realize that this is a metaphysical assertion?
PDH, I don’t have a doubt that in the quest for rationalizing his anarcho-capitalist ideals Rothbard may have gone too far in minimizing the Soviet threat, but I also see how any kind of extra-territorial threat can be capitalized upon by specific internal elements to advance its own Statist aspirations. I guess that’s where I find myself between the anarcho-capitalists such as Rothbard and many here at Samizdata. I believe, at times, that many samizdatistas are too reactionary and default to militarism too quickly. I have a healthy fear of foreign threats without, I hope, resorting to xenophobia, but I also have a healthy fear of domestic threats.
I believe wholeheartedly that Welfarism and Warfarism are connected at the hip. The Statist left hands out entitlements with ease, and quietly resort to the necessity of thumping skulls to pay for it – off screen. Meanwhile the Statist right accentuates threats to justify its own existence and eventually finds ways to control production and behavior. The end result will be the same. The great question for me is how and when collective action will be used to defeat legitimate threats without becoming what you are fighting. Those who may stray a bit from a common sense path and under appreciate a threat doesn’t, in my book, constitute moonbatism. An improper calibration between legitimate threats? Yes. Mystic, insane moonbatism that endeavors to keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? No.
The prime example to me is our current wars in the Middle East. I have a proper fear of radical Islamism and a slightly lesser fear of non-radical Islamism (purely from an economic point of view). Non-radical Islamism is still exceptionally Statist, and like any Statist construct has its own ends in mind. I think there is plenty of history how “moderate” Statists in the region have used the radicals as “useful idiots” for its own ends. But this prattling about we’ve had over the last 7-8 years is merely public relations with muscle. I am all in favor of an East/West reckoning if that is necessary. Let’s get on with it. But the actions I have seen thus far from Bush/Obama are cynical Statist warring ultimately for its own ends, not the protecting of life and property of the people.
If it helps, I have argued (basically commented on) articles by Lew Rockwell at his site that he was illogicaly supporting Democrats and leaving the door open for leftism as a reaction to his ire at the wars being fought – not HOW they were being fought but WHY. He was allowing his anti-war stances to cloud his judgements on the Statist left threats at expense of the Statist right threats.
That, ulitmately is the conumdrum I find myself in, dreading the domestic strengthening of the Statist left and right while seeing the threats off shore – left/right and secular/theocratic. The notion is to not get so carried away by fears that I let anyone of the Statist threats to win. That’s why I think it is important that those who are “off the path” only slightly from each other to persuade one another. If we continue to have the likes of Rothbardians and Randians dismiss each other, or samizdatistas dismiss both, we will continue to be a non-factor and allow the Statists to make their compromises and continue to forge a mutually beneficial Apparatus. The game is coming quickly down to its end.
Rothbard’s moonbattery to the side, I agree with Brad that we will always have a State. Human nature being what it is, there will always be some people who lust after power, and others (the large majority) who are natural followers, happy to be lead by someone as long as the rule isn’t unbearably oppressive. That’s why we organize ourselves into tribes with chiefs; thus it has ever been and always will be. The question is how to control the power of the chief.
The US Constitution (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the British unwritten constitution) was an attempt to do just that. Ultimately both have failed, as those with their hands on the levers of power learned how to weaken, circumvent and eventually eliminate the controls. I suspect that was inevitable, and that no external check on power can be sustained perpetually. The best we can do, as Brad (and Jefferson before him) suggested, is to have an occasional revolution and hope for a better outcome.
Unfortunately, history suggests that the natural state of human affairs is some form of dictatorship, ultimately devolving into despotism. Over the last few centuries we in the West have had a good run of relative freedom, but I think that’s coming to an end and we are reverting to the historical norm. It was nice while it lasted.
Rothbard’s argument seems to only apply to absolute monarchism. Making a similar argument using a democratic rationale is, while not necessarily correct, at least quite arguable. There is no reason why saying “Let’s delegate protection against force and fraud to someone we can generally agree on, and let them bankroll it by us deciding on a fee we all have to pay for the service” would get laughed out of the room.
So? What does that have to do with Rothbard’s absurd contentions that the Soviet Union should have just been ignored? Xenophobia was never the issue here.
To be dismissive of the *vastly* worse threat posed by a totalitarian communist super-state in occupation of half of Europe and with at one point something in the order of 50,000 tanks pointed west, the man had to be either a fool, deeply dishonest or parochially fixated on the wickedness of the United States to the point of psychosis.
Anyone dismissing the Soviets as an illusion of the welfare-warfare US state is not someone to be taken all too seriously as a thinker.
Laird, I’m increasingly wondering if the error that allows states to become dictatorships is a simple one- that of granting the state the legislative power. If we consider again the “landed on a planet” scenario, and that the colonists will want some form of common rules, the error is in saying, “let us appoint some good men to make the rules for us”. No meta-ruleset (such as a Bill Of RIghts) can successfully restrain a legislature. The answer would thus seem to be to not create a legislature. The erroneous presumption is that a State is that which legislates.
Ian, perhaps that’s true, but I don’t see any cure. We don’t grant the State legislative power; it takes it, and we acquiesce.
Humans are herd animals. We form communities, and we follow leaders. There will always be those among us who crave power over others. Put this all together and, whether we landed in spaceships or arose from the mud, the end result will always be a government. Eliminate a formal “legislative branch” and those functions will be usurped by another one, and you wind up with a dictatorship, a theocracy, a kritocracy, or some such. As far as I am aware, nowhere in human history has any large group of people created a truly libertarian society, let alone a functioning anarchy (it always deteriorates into rule by a “strong man” or competing gangs).
The US Constitution was the planet’s last, best hope for a sustainable limited government, and while it worked for a while it is now collapsing. Requiescat in pace. We are witnessing the inevitable regression to the mean.
Really? I thought he spent an entire chapter on how crime could be dealt with by the private sector.
Yes, and there has been lots written about anarcho-capitalist private law enforcement.The problem is, the systems suggested by Rothbard et al won’t actually work, for all sorts of reasons, not least the inherent inconsistency that they constitute a system which must be collectively agreed by the mass of the populace in themselves!
On a more specific level; what is generally proposed is that people will subcontract their defence to private “defence agencies”. A moment’s reflection reveals that now the majority of the ability to use violent force is now concentrated in these defence agencies. How many nanoseconds is it going to take for the guys with the private armies to realise they now have the coercive power in society and switch from being contractors to being mafiosi? What’s that? It’s a breach of contract? Tough titties mate, we’ve got the guns!
Anarchism naturally devolves into gang warfare; the most successful gangs ultimately dominating territory and become chiefs, kings and then states. E.g. when Rome abandoned Britain, it didn’t become a stable anarchy; it rapidly collapsed into violence, from which chieftains emerged.
Where I live we have maybe less than 3000 people, a total all shifts of police assigned to our area of 1 at any given time, they can call neighboring districts for backup assuming there is someone and they are available. So with government policing, armed (some very armed) citizens outnumber police probably a thousand to one.
And yet somehow you think that if that policing is privatized, “the majority of the ability to use violent force is now concentrated in” . . . him? All one of him? Even if we combine the on and off duty policing officers of all of the law enforcement agencies in the county I doubt we break 300. That is for total gun toting staff on all shifts and all ranks. This in county of over 150,000 of which almost certainly a minimum of 30,000 are well armed. So many of these people are white-tail deer
snipershunters that entire businesses find it easier to close down during gun deer season than to try to find staff.The cops, even under our heavily unionized, taxpayer funded (and funded and funded) system, are out gunned by more than 300 to one and you are worried that somehow, instead of finding efficiencies and downsizing in a privatized system, private police contractors will be financed well enough to out gun all of those citizens? Really?
I believe a strong case can be made, especially in light of things like property and revenue confiscations from persons accused of drug crimes going into government police department coffers without a trial, that we may have more to fear from government police departments and less to fear from private police contractors.
You’re missing the point Mid; the state has the threat of (effectively) infinite escalation to back up its law enforcers. If somebody with more guns arises locally, the police and state can just keep piling on the force. The state has daisycutter bombs and nukes, ultimately. It’s too strong a power for militias to challenge, so things never get to that stage. No armed militia can take on the US government and win, we all know that (which is part of the reason I find the commonplace american “we’ve got guns if Obama goes too far” braggadocio somewhat tiresome. The US gov would crush them like bugs).
As to private militias outgunning “all those citizens” in the absence of government; yes indeed that is what would happen. That is how governments arise in the first place. As I said, without some (unadmitted by anarcho-capitalists) “higher power” to ensure that contractors remain contractors, they just become armies who will fight for power until one wins and declares itself the new government.
It’s the major weakness of this Rothbardian approach. Whenever i read it, it has this unspoken subtext that everyone is a nice citizen in a trilby hat toddling along to court and paying their insurance. The whole problem of “crime” is people who step outside the system and won’t play ball. Anarcho capitalism inherently degenerates to gang warfare, a tribal struggle and then a new government.
The other clarifying point here regarding anarcho-capitalism and monopolisation of force is this: the a-c system relies on these private mafiosi, oops “defence contractors” having enough force with which to enforce the law; that is if somebody has broken your law, that they can apply sufficient force to bring them to justice. So either they have that much strength- in which case the force in the society is indeed concentrated in their hands, as I asserted, or else they don’t have that much strength- in which case your defence contractor is as much use as a screen door on a submarine and the system doesn’t work.
Take your pick.
Perry de Havilland:
On the other hand, anyone who looks at the relationship between the U.S. government and the USSR as one of uniform unfriendliness, even if we consider only the period after 1945, is also, in my opinion, not to be taken all too seriously. The Soviet regime was at various times both opposed and supported, and both attacked and nurtured by the USG — in fact, often all that at the same time, by various competing factions and interests within the USG.
This was nothing new, historically. After all, it was also the USG that provided critical aid that helped Lenin’s regime survive in the early 1920s, while it was busy crushing anti-Bolshevik uprisings in the countryside — this right after making some feeble and unwilling attempts to destroy it. This effectively foreshadowed the love-hate relationship of the USG with the USSR that was to last for the next 70 years. Of course, the official Soviet history mentioned only the anti-Soviet hostility of the U.S. in that period, and their propaganda painted a similar picture during the Cold War. Yet, if we ask ourselves if the collapse of the USSR was hastened by the anti-Soviet aspects of the American foreign policy, or if it was in fact delayed by the pro-Soviet activism in the same period by and within the U.S., I think the answer is unclear.
Certainly, it’s very naive to interpret the Cold War simply as a conflict between the U.S. and the USSR, rather than a complicated love-hate relationship that it really was. Rothbard and similar authors might have been moonbats with regards to the final conclusions they reached, but they were right to ask some unpleasant questions about this.
I do think the USSR was more of a threat than Rothbard thought. However, Rothbard did say that in the long run, the Mensheviks (ie the social democrats, ‘liberals’, Trotskyists, labour parties, fabians, etc) were more of a threat than the Bolsheviks. Considering the fact that the Soviet Empire has been gone nearly twenty years, but America and much of Europe are under effective occupation by ‘Mensheviks’ (Obama, New Labour, EU), I think Rothbard had a point. Khrushchev and Brezhnev didn’t impose socialism on America, but Barack Obama has been doing precisely that. And Pravda now prints opinion pieces attacking America for going socialist. And it’s interesting how America spent hundreds of billions of dollars and sacrificed thousands of lives battling Communism across the globe, but much of its population whoops up and acquiesces in its own descent into socialism.
Just to be clear, I’m referring here to the American soldiers killed in conflicts such as Korea, Vietnam, and Grenada.
M:
That’s an excellent point. Do you maybe know the exact source of the quote you’re paraphrasing here?
By the way, it’s definitely wrong to classify Trotsky among the “Mensheviks” in this regard. He was not only a Bolshevik, but in fact the greatest extremist among the Bolshevik leadership. He and his fans have spun an elaborate legend about how he was supposedly a voice of rationality and justice ruthlessly suppressed by Stalin, but in reality, Stalin was the comparably moderate and sane side in this conflict. (I mean this in the same sense that Stalinism was a comparably moderate and sane offshoot of Marxism relative to Pol Pot.)
Sure but these questions are axiomatic for us as we do not see the USA as the fount of all goodness… it is taking those questions to where Rothbard did and thereby actually discrediting a very profitable line of enquiry that makes me so very very very negative about Rothbard.
This is only true if the Bolsheviks are not permitted to win in the first place. I suspect you would have found selling the notion to a Pole or Hungarian that the Mensheviks were what they should fretting about in 1970 somewhat challenging. And had Rothbard been listened to seriously in 1970, the Red Army would probably have been in occupation of the radioactive remains of France and Britain too, so likewise I doubt Mensheviks would be the real issue there either.
He only ‘had a’point’ because the Bolsheviks were not allowed to take control of all of Europe, no thanks to Rothbard. That is hardly a minor niggle.
Ian wrote,
This is a possible scenario, sure. David Friedman also admitted it is a very real possibility, in [i]The Machinery of Freedom[/i]. However, he also pointed out that it is only likely if there only a small number of very large firms. There are more than 200 security firms in the London Metropolitan area alone, so I am not sure how realistic it would be: Cartels are usually very hard to maintain without state violence as it is.
Bryan Caplan recently suggested “that anarcho-capitalism is a plausible Nash equilibrium. If a free market in police, courts, and law were established and expected to continue, then Rothbard persuasively argues that no major actor would have a strong incentive to undermine it.”
Isn’t this the period that Benson used as a model in [i]The Enterprise of Law[/i]? Ah, no that was the Anglo-saxon legal system. Still, I imagine that the celtic system would have been much like that in Ireland.
“Human depravity being what it is, there will always be some people who lust after power, and others (the large majority) who are natural followers, happy to be lead by someone as long as the rule isn’t unbearably oppressive.”
Tidied.
Ian wrote,
This is a bit of a strawman. Are the security guards in your local mall or supermarket or nightclub “mafiosi”? In reality it is statists who seem to be advocating mafiosi, since they advocate organisations that force people to pay for “protection” whether they want it or not.
This is only slightly accurate, so far as I can tell. A-C relies on firms incentives more than strength. The cost of conflict, in a competitive market, creates the incentive to take disputes to court. Essentially, taking the Friedman model, a person pays an agency to pay another agency to accept particular agreements that the second agency should backdown when confronted by the first and refuse to protect a final person against the first agency, acting on the instructions of the first person It doesn’t matter if the second agency is stronger than the first if it has an incentive to accept the “payoff.” Beyond this, we can simply ask what types of laws are there most likely to be demand for rather than demand against.
M, thank you for that link to the Pravda article. Quite remarkable!
“How many nanoseconds is it going to take for the guys with the private armies to realise they now have the coercive power in society and switch from being contractors to being mafiosi? What’s that? It’s a breach of contract? Tough titties mate, we’ve got the guns!”
How would they have gotten those ‘private armies’ in the first place Ian? Since they would not have started with an unlimited stream of taxpayer funds, they could only have arrived at a ‘private army’ by being a well-run business which might include, for example, keeping costs down by resolving disputes by means other than expensive weapons.
“…the a-c system relies on these private mafiosi, oops “defence contractors” having enough force with which to enforce the law; that is if somebody has broken your law, that they can apply sufficient force to bring them to justice. So either they have that much strength- in which case the force in the society is indeed concentrated in their hands, as I asserted, or else they don’t have that much strength- in which case your defence contractor is as much use as a screen door on a submarine and the system doesn’t work.”
The strength of any one of your private mafiosi would in the first case depend upon their ability to satisfy customers and over time would depend upon the relative strength of their competitors being insufficient for any one of them to establish a monopoly. Obviously though, a large number of relatively small private defence agencies would present a lower risk of that happening than a small number of relatively large private defence agencies.
That doesn’t mean an anarchic society wouldn’t degenerate into gang warfare, but then, as Laird pointed out, neither is there any guarantee that a minarchic society wouldn’t degenerate into a cobwebbed hole of arbitrary legislation, which is arguably not a million miles away from what has happened with the United States, no?
I think your faith in the unlimited ability of Communism to produce prosperity is misplaced. The reality is that Communism doesn’t work very well. That is why the Soviet Union was incapable of resisting their next-door-neighbor, until FDR decided to give them a military.
The reality is that Communism doesn’t work, Empire doesn’t work and Big Government doesn’t work. Why do you think that we resist it?
If you are so convinced that Communism is more productive than capitalism — and that assumption *is* built into any argument that the Soviets were going to “take over the world” — than why would you resist it? It is clearly, in your estimation, the superior system!
I think that the Soviets were slightly more likely to take over the world than Pinky and the Brain, but that advantage owes only to the fact that neither Pinky nor the Brain actually exist.
I’m not an Anarchist, but there is one issue that should be considered.
Any anarchist society which was not an *armed* society would, I suspect, go as you described.
However, an anarchist society in which 80 or 90% of the people were armed might well survive. It’s quite possible.
Also, it is hardly germane to point out that when governments collapse the people rarely form an anarchist society. Until very recently, there existed little theory which could have given anybody a clue as to how to organize an anarchist society. Anarchy is not chaos. A society which lacks both government and a theory of organization which obviates the need for government, on the other hand, *is* chaos.
Rich, communism does not have to be a ‘superior system’ to win, if it is not being effectively resisted. If they build vast quantities of tanks whilst their enemies build vast quantities of shoes, in the long run the communist economy collapses, because tanks are lousy trade items compared to shoes. In the shorter run however, they can use those tanks to conquer their more economically enlightened foes because throwing shoes make lousy anti-tank weapons.
Ignoring the Soviets as Rothbard wanted would have been suicidal much like ignoring the Nazis was a rather poor idea too. The fact this even needs to be explained is remarkable.
Ian,
If of our attempts to spread democracy in Iraq have taught us anything, it’s that a small force can be quite efficient at fighting a larger, well armed, well organized force. Hell that’s how America was created. It’s not like militias would be gathering in fields waiting to be nuked by the USG.
If only one half of 1% of the US population was armed and took up the cause, that would be a force of 1500000, about the same as we currently have in active duty soilders, spread across the country side, cities, suburbs etc., taking pop shots at US forces — if the US forces even had the will to fight them.
I’m not saying that this could lead to a successful overthrow of the government or is desirable at all. But it’s not ridiculous.
Quite. Whereas Rand would have no truck with libertarians and consistently upheld the idea of a minarchistic minimum of state defence, police and judicial system.
It was not just the Communist threat – to Rothbard their was no world National Socialist threat either.
He believed that no war was justified till the United States itself was attacked (as if the United States could survive in a world controlled by the enemy).
He even believed that no government defence was needed if the United States itself was attacked – as voluntary defence could do the job.
The myth of the resistance fighter – as if (for example) American independence could have been won with neither domestic property violation (the Continental Congress violated the rights of property in all sorts of ways) or French government (and other government) assistance.
Murry Rothbard was a great economist, but yes he was indeed a “Moonbat” – and the man who taught him his economics, Ludwig Von Mises, pointed this out to him often enough (experience on the eastern front during WWI, gave Mises insights on a different level to Rothbard – but insights Rothbard choose to ignore).
This does not mean that in certain times and places it may not be possible to do without a government – but in war it is not possible (unless one is prepared to lose the war).
For example, the “National Liberation Front” in Vietnam were not a lot of noble resistance fighters opposing evil American Imperialism (as Rothbard fondly believed). In fact the Viet Cong (what the “National Liberation Front” actually was) were a bunch of scumbags – and most of the fighting against the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) was done by the regular N.V.A. (North Vietnamese Army) anyway.
Rothbard was not interested in the reality of war – fair enough I do not hold that everyone should have to be a military historian. However, Murry Rothbard insisted on writing about national security and warfare (and writing about it a lot) without making the slightest effort to understand real war.