"The Private Production of Defense"

"The Private Production of Defense"
by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"Among the most popular and consequential beliefs of our age
is the belief in collective security. Nothing less significant than
the legitimacy of the modern state rests on this belief.
I will demonstrate that the idea of collective security is a
myth that provides no justification for the modern state, and
that all security is and must be private. Yet, before coming to the
conclusion let me begin with the problem. First, I will present a
two-step reconstruction of the myth of collective security, and at
each step raise a few theoretical concerns."

"Never during its entire history has the continental U.S.
been territorially attacked by any foreign army. (Pearl Harbor
was the result of a preceding U.S. provocation.) Yet the U.S. has
the distinction of having possessed a government that declared
war against a large part of its own population and engaged in the
wanton murder of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. Moreover,
while the relations between American citizens and foreigners do not appear to be unusually contentious, almost from its very
beginnings the U.S. government pursued relentless aggressive expansionism.
Beginning with the Spanish–American War, culminating
in World War I and World War II, and continuing to the
present, the U.S. government has become entangled in hundreds
of foreign conflicts and risen to the rank of the world’s dominant
imperialist power. Thus, nearly every president since the turn of
this century also has been responsible for the murder, killing, or
starvation of countless innocent foreigners all over the world. In
short, while we have become more helpless, impoverished,
threatened, and insecure, the U.S. government has become ever
more brazen and aggressive. In the name of national security, it
defends us, equipped with enormous stockpiles of weapons of aggression
and mass destruction, by bullying ever new “Hitlers,” big
or small, and all suspected Hitlerite sympathizers anywhere
and everywhere outside of the territory of the U.S."