Defeating Hussein Without Government:

The aftermath of 9/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist.

For many years before the WTC came down I believed that America could be better defended by have no government than by the system we have now, I imagined a nation of heavily armed militias, without the power-projection capabilities of a conventional military but with the capability to inflict a world of grief on an invader -- and with nobody having the authority to tell them to surrender. We could have a home defense better than Switzerland's, our larger population and longer distances doing for us what mountainous terrain does for the Swiss.

There would still be a place in an anarchist America for professional soldiers -- not many, but a few heavy troop formations would be kept on retainer by consortia of insurance companies. Yes, I said insurance companies, that's because how free markets socialize shared risks. Normal law enforcement would be funded by pools set up by vendors of crime insurance looking to reduce their payouts; national defense and overseas power projection (to the extent the term still had meaning in a stateless society) would be funded by people who bought war insurance (say, businesses with overseas assets to protect).

These measures, I was and am convinced, would stop conventional wars of conquest dead in their tracks. Invade a nation of 350,000,000 libertarians, most of them routinely armed? Yeah. Right. Any War-College-trained military officer will tell you that urban warfare against guerrillas on their home ground chews up armies faster than anything else. Witness Stalingrad.

Without a government, many of the reasons people might go to war against America would also vanish. No entangling alliances, no foreign policy to object to. Conventional terrorism would become a lot dicier proposition in a libertarian anarchy, too -- as in Israel, where armed civilians have on numerous occasions thwarted attempted massacres by shooting back. And, of course, the WTC would probably still be standing if the passengers had been armed...

I grew up in the shadow of the Soviet threat. Theirs was an evil, evil system, but they were at bottom geopolitically rational. They calculated their chances very cold-bloodedly, and never pushed the big red button. An ungoverned America would have stood them off, I believe, long enough for the inevitable Hayekian collapse to remove the problem.

But now we face the prospect of weapons of mass destruction dropping into the hands of people who are behaviorally indistinguishable from stone psychotics. That prospect poses problems of a different nature than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did. Because what Al-Qaeda wants is not driven or constrained by geopolitics, by pragmatism, by a rational estimation of risk and reward. They have no population to answer to even in the limited sense that Hitler and Stalin did. They were madmen, but they were constrained by the necessities of leading a country.

Under the present system, I see no alternative to state action as a way to suppress this threat, up to and including conventional warfare and the proconsular occupation of significant parts of the Arab world. I am not happy with this evaluation; war is the health of the State, and statism is the most lethal enemy humanity will ever know short of a giant meteor strike (those who think this statement hyperbolic are recommended to read Robert Conquest's "The Great Terror"). The question that drives this essay is whether, supposing the U.S. were to become a market anarchy, there would be other means to the same end.

It's a tough case. Al-Qaeda would not hate us any less; it is not, at bottom, U.S. policy that enrages them, it is the fact of our wealth and freedom and refusal to submit to the One True Way of Allah. An ungoverned America, more wealthy and more free by the exact measure that its productive capacity is spent efficiently on a network of security agencies and judicial associations rather than being wasted on the support of parasitic government, would hardly enrage them less.

Al-Qaeda in itself is not an exceptional threat; in a properly armed society the 9/11 hijackers would never even have tried their stunt, because they would known that the certain outcome was death in a hail of civilian bullets. It is the combination of Al-Qaeda-like suicidal fanaticism with state sponsorship (specifically the ability to produce chemical/biological/nuclear weapons) that strains the anarcho-libertarian theory of national self-defense, It does so by dramatically lowering the cost of aggression for both sets of bad guys; the fanatics get the capability to strike a hammer-blow at the Great Satan, and their state sponsors get deniable cat's paws.

It is worth pointing out, however, that it strains the statist theory of self-defense almost as badly. A governed U.S. has the neo-imperialist option (conquer Iraq, install Colin Powell as miltary governor, and try to transform the place as we transformed Japan), and that may even appear to be the option with the lowest odds of catastrophic failure, but we don't actually have any clue whether this will actually work -- Al-Qaeda might well be able to get their bombs from the failing states of former-Soviet Central Asia, or from North Korea. The historical situation is truly unprecedented.

Harder than the theoretical problem, perhaps, is the practical one. How to oppose that expansion of state power without acting as an unwilling enabler for the terrorists? In some ways that's easy; pushing to abolish all the police-state bullshit at airports is a no-brainer, since tiger-team tests of the system consistently show that none of it has made smuggling weapons on board more difficult (now, as before 9/11, approximately 30% of attempts succeed).

In a wider sense, though, it's a very difficult question. One I will be thinking about -- and possibly writing about -- in the coming months.

Imperialists by necessity?

So, Howell Raines Isn't a complete waste of air:

The NYT ran a pro-Linux editorial today.

That's good. They had to slip their "communitarian" spin in there, though, as if Linux hackers are all a bunch of PBS-worshiping Mother Jones readers and natural suckers for the fuzzy-sweater cause of the week.

Hah. If they only knew. I'm not going to say my gun-toting red-meat libertarianism is typical, because it isn't. Actually the mass centroid of hackers' politics is a lot like the blogosphere's, a sort of soft-libertarianism-leaning-towards-conservatism or vice-versa (the centroid used to be further left but a lot has changed in the last decade). Much less radical than me, but still enough to give the likes of Raines a bad case of the vapors.

But let's keep that our little secret, OK? If Raines wants to believe that open-source people are some kind of cross between Greenpeace and the Ethical Culture Society, that's just fine. We'll take the Gray Lady's backing. It's another small step on the road to world domination.

The day will come when we will be the guys running the world's entire digital infrastructure (not such a stretch; we already run the Internet). Our example will teach Howell's kids stuff about the power of decentralization and voluntary cooperation, all the things leftists pay lip-service to until the last second before they'd have to actually apply them. And the world will change out from under him. Subtly. Powerfully. And in ways he can't guess at yet.

It should be a fun ride.

Living With Microsoft:

In today's episode of the Microsoft follies, we learned that Media Player 9 is un-uninstallable. Deliberately.

A Microsoft spokesthing confirmed that Media Player 9 is so deeply integrated into the operating system that it cannot be removed without doing a `system restore'. Which, incidentally, will wipe out your Office installation.

It's at times like this that, contemplating Microsoft users, one feels as though one is wandering among people lashing themselves with stinging nettles until blood runs off them in rivulets. One wants to know why they don't just stop. One is told "But it's the standard!"

One shakes one's head bemusedly.

They pay heavily for the privilege of lashing themselves, too. Except for those blessed, blissful occasions on which they pay still more, grease themselves, bend over, and prepare to be buggered by a chainsaw. That's called a "System Upgrade".

One contemplates the uptime figures on one's Linux box and feels — admit it! — a bit smug.