National defence is a private good and not a public good!

National defence is a private good and not a public good*.


Why would individuals, in a pure free market, want to spend money on national defence?

As people in a free market would want to protect themselves (life and property) against aggression (physical violence and theft), for example, through insurers (or other protection agencies), risks against warfare would, also, be included in the insurance premium.

Warfare is only aggression or physical violence of a greater magnitude, but is still the implementation of physical violence.

Aggressors prefer to aggress against people in densely populated and market valuable areas than unpopulated and worthless areas**.

The more heavily populated an area is, the more valuable properties are and the more threatened people are in a certain area, the more incentive they will have to protect themselves against aggressions and therefore, also, the more recourses would they allocate to fulfil that need.

As named areas are risky places, property values are therefore also lower than what they would be if those risks did not exist. People have an incentive to invest and live in other, less risky areas.

Insurers and protection agencies have incentives to cooperate against the intruder and pinpoint retaliation against them. That would reduce risks and increase property values, wages and prosperity.

The government apparatus is clumsy machinery against free market institutions. Producing consumer goods and services by government owned organizations and through taxation, does not stand a chance in their effectiveness of the utilization of resources and in their quality of output compared to free market institutions.

Thanks to Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a so called typical public good has been instead concluded to be a private good.

Because of this, consumers and the free market, have every incentive to spend and invest in a national defence.

As teaching of economics in our universities are objective and true, this will be common knowledge among economists in a few years time. Honesty and truthfulness are teacher’s lodestars (joke).



* A quote on public goods from an interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

“The mistake of public goods theory is to presume that economists can detect that something that is needed but is not being provided by markets, either at all or in sufficient quantity. But this is just an observation that we don't live in a Garden of Eden. At all times, people want goods and services that do not exist or are unaffordable. But just because we want something to be made available does not mean that it should be made available.

If we have to consult with economists to discover whether there are not enough lakes and roads, shouldn't we also check with them to see if are too many tennis shoes and toothpaste brands on the market? Ultimately, public goods theory is a rationale for central planning and an attack on the market itself. The real question is whether it is economically beneficial and economically justified to override voluntary transactions and market verdicts, and forcibly transfer property from private owners to the state. I don't think it ever can be justified.”

http://www.mises.org/journals/aen/aen198.asp

** To occupy unpopulated and worthless land would be aggressions against people wanting, in the future, to visit or to make use of those areas.



Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden