Chapter 12 The Public Sector 3 Police, Law and the Courts
Police Protection The market and private enterprise do exist,
and so most people can readily envision a free market in most goods and services.
Probably the most difficult single area to grasp, however, is the abolition of government
Operations in the Service of Protection, Police, the Courts, etc., the area encompassing defense
of person and property against attack or invasion.
How could private enterprise and the free market possibly provide such service?
How could police, legal systems, judicial services, law enforcement, prisons, how could
these be provided in a free market?
We have already seen how a great deal of police protection, at the least, could be supplied
by the various owners of streets and land areas.
But we now need to examine this entire area systematically.
In the first place, there is a common fallacy, held even by most advocates of laissez-faire,
that the government must supply police protection, as if police protection were a single, absolute
is an absolute entity, a fixed quantity of something which the government supplies to all.
But in actual fact, there is no absolute commodity called police protection any more than there is an absolute single commodity called food or shelter.
It is true that everyone pays taxes for a seemingly fixed quantity of protection, but this is a myth.
In actual fact, there are almost infinite degrees of all sorts of protection.
For any given person or business, the police can provide everything from a policeman on
the beat, who patrols once a night, to two policemen patrolling constantly on each block,
to cruising patrol cars, to one or even several round-the-clock personal bodyguards.
Furthermore, there are many other decisions the police must make, the complexity of which
Which becomes evident as soon as we look beneath the veil of the myth of absolute protection.
How shall the police allocate their funds, which are, of course, always limited, as are
the funds of all other individuals, organizations and agencies?
How much shall the police invest in electronic equipment, fingerprinting equipment, detectives
as against uniformed police, patrol cars as against foot police, etc.
The point is that government has no rational way to make these allocations.
The government only knows that it has a limited budget.
Its allocations of funds are then subject to the full play of politics, boondoggling
and bureaucratic inefficiency, with no indication at all as to whether the police department
is serving the consumers in a way responsive to their desires, or whether it is doing so
efficiently.
The situation would be different if police services were supplied on a free competitive
market.
In that case, consumers would pay for whatever degree of protection they wished to purchase.
The consumers who just want to see a policeman once in a while would pay less than those
For those who want continuous patrolling, and far less than those who demand 24-hour bodyguard service.
On the free market, protection would be supplied in proportion and in whatever way that the consumers wish to pay for it.
A drive for efficiency would be insured, as it always is on the market, by the compulsion to make profits and avoid losses,
and thereby to keep costs low and to serve the highest demands of the consumers.
Any police firm that suffers from gross inefficiency would soon go bankrupt and disappear.
One big problem a government police force must always face is what laws really to enforce.
Police departments are theoretically faced with the absolute injunction enforce all laws,
But in practice, a limited budget forces them to allocate their personnel and equipment to
the most urgent crimes.
But the absolute dictum pursues them and works against a rational allocation of resources.
On the free market, what would be enforced is whatever the customers are willing to pay
for.
Suppose, for example, that Mr. Jones has a precious gem he believes might soon be stolen.
He can ask and pay for round-the-clock police protection at whatever strength he may wish
to work out with the police company.
He might, on the other hand, also have a private road on his estate he doesn't want many people
to travel on, but he might not care very much about trespassers on that road.
In that case, he won't devote any police resources to protecting the road.
As on the market in general, it is up to the consumer.
And since all of us are consumers, this means each person individually decides how much
and what kind of protection he wants and is willing to buy.
All that we have said about landowners' police applies to private police in general.
Free market police would not only be efficient, they would have a strong incentive to be courteous
and to refrain from brutality against either their clients or their clients' friends
or customers.
A private central park would be guarded efficiently in order to maximize park revenue rather than
have a prohibitive curfew imposed on innocent and paying customers.
A free market in police would reward efficient and courteous police protection to customers
and penalize any falling off from this standard.
No longer would there be the current disjunction between service and payment inherent in all
government operations.
A disjunction which means that police, like all other government agencies, acquire their
revenue not voluntarily and competitively from consumers, but from the taxpayers, coercively.
In fact, as government police have become increasingly inefficient, consumers have been
in turning more and more to private forms of protection.
We have already mentioned block or neighborhood protection.
There are also private guards, insurance companies, private detectives and such increasingly sophisticated
equipment as safes, locks and closed circuit TV and burglar alarms.
The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice estimated
in 1969 that government police cost the American public $2.8 billion a year, while it spends
$1.35 billion on private protection service and another $200 million on equipment, so
that private protection expenses amounted to over half the outlay on government police.
These figures should give pause to those credulous folk who believe that police protection is
is somehow, by some mystic right or power, necessarily and forevermore an attribute of state sovereignty.
Every reader of detective fiction knows that private insurance detectives are far more efficient than the police in recovering stolen property.
Not only is the insurance company impelled by economics to serve the consumer and thereby try to avoid paying benefits,
But the major focus of the insurance company is very different from that of the police.
The police, standing as they do for a mythical society, are primarily interested in catching
and punishing the criminal.
Restoring the stolen loot to the victim is strictly secondary.
To the insurance company and its detectives, on the other hand, the prime concern is recovery
of the Loot, and apprehension and punishment of the criminal is secondary to the prime
purpose of aiding the victim of crime.
Here we see again the difference between a private firm impelled to serve the customer,
victim of crime, and the public police, which is under no such economic compulsion.
We cannot blueprint a market that exists only as an hypothesis, but it is reasonable to
to believe that police service in the libertarian society would be supplied by the landowners
or by insurance companies.
Since insurance companies would be paying benefits to victims of crime, it is highly
likely that they would supply police service as a means of keeping down crime and hence
their payment of benefits.
It is certainly likely in any case that police service would be paid for in regular monthly
Premiums with the police agency, whether insurance company or not, called on whenever needed.
This supplies what should be the first simple answer to a typical nightmare question of
people who first hear about the idea of a totally private police.
Why, that means that if you're attacked or robbed, you have to rush over to a policeman
and start dickering on how much it will cost to defend you.
A moment's reflection should show that no service is supplied in this way on the free
market.
Obviously, the person who wants to be protected by Agency A or Insurance Company B will pay
regular premiums rather than wait to be attacked before buying protection.
But suppose an emergency occurs and a Company A policeman sees someone being mugged.
Will he stop to ask if the victim has bought insurance from Company A?
In the first place, this sort of street crime will be taken care of, as we noted above,
by the police hired by whoever owns the street in question.
But what of the unlikely case that a neighborhood does not have street police, and a policeman
of Company A happens to see someone being attacked?
Will he rush to the victim's defense?
That of course would be up to Company A. But it is scarcely conceivable that private police
Police companies would not cultivate goodwill by making it a policy to give free aid to
victims in emergency situations, and perhaps ask the rescued victim for a voluntary donation
afterward.
In the case of a homeowner being robbed or attacked, then of course he will call on whatever
police company he has been using.
He will call police company A, rather than the police he calls upon now.
Man ensures efficiency, low price, and high quality.
And there is no reason to assume a priori, as many people do, that there is something
divinely ordained about having only one police agency in a given geographical area.
Economists have often claimed that the production of certain goods or services is a natural
monopoly, so that more than one private agency could not long survive in a given area.
Perhaps, although only a totally free market could decide the matter once and for all,
only the market can decide what and how many firms and of what size and quality can survive in active competition.
But there is no reason to suppose in advance that police protection is a natural monopoly.
After all, insurance companies are not, and if we can have metropolitan, equitable, prudential, etc.,
Insurance Companies Coexisting Side-by-Side? Why Not Metropolitan, Equitable and Prudential
Police Protection Companies? Gustave de Molinari, the 19th century French
free-market economist, was the first person in history to contemplate and advocate a free
market for police protection. Molinari estimated that there would eventually
turn out to be several private police agencies side-by-side in the cities, and one private
Agency in Each Rural Area Perhaps, but we must realize that modern technology
makes much more feasible branch offices of large urban firms in even the most remote
rural areas.
A person living in a small village in Wyoming, therefore, could employ the services of a
local protection company, or he might use a nearby branch office of the Metropolitan
Protection Company.
But how could a poor person afford private protection he would have to pay for instead
of getting free protection as he does now?
There are several answers to this question, one of the most common criticisms of the idea
of totally private police protection.
One is that this problem of course applies to any commodity or service in the libertarian
society, not just the police.
It isn't protection necessary, perhaps, but then so is food of many different kinds, clothing,
shelter, etc.
Surely these are at least as vital, if not more so, than police protection, and yet almost
nobody says that therefore the government must nationalize food, clothing, shelter,
etc. and supply these free as a compulsory monopoly.
Only poor people would be supplied in general by private charity, as we saw in our chapter
on welfare.
Furthermore, in the specific case of police, there would undoubtedly be ways of voluntarily
supplying free police protection to the indigent, either by the police companies themselves
for goodwill, as hospitals and doctors do now, or by special police aid societies that
would do work similar to legal aid societies today. Legal aid societies voluntarily supply
free legal counsel to the indigent in trouble with the authorities.
There are important supplementary considerations. As we have seen, police service is not free.
It is paid for by the taxpayer, and the taxpayer is very often the poor person himself. He
He may very well be paying more in taxes for police now than he would in fees to private
and far more efficient police companies. Furthermore, the police companies would be tapping a mass
market. With the economies of such a large-scale market, police protection would undoubtedly
be much cheaper. No police company would wish to price itself out of a large chunk of its
and the cost of protection would be no more prohibitively expensive than, say, the cost of insurance today.
In fact, it would tend to be much cheaper than current insurance, because the insurance industry today is heavily regulated by government to keep out low-cost competition.
There is a final nightmare which most people who have contemplated private protection agencies consider to be decisive in rejecting such a concept.
Wouldn't the agencies always be clashing? Wouldn't anarchy break out with perpetual
conflicts between police forces as one person calls in his police while a rival calls in
his? There are several levels of answers to this
crucial question. In the first place, since there would be no overall state, no central
or even single local government, we would at least be spared the horror of interstate wars
with their plethora of massive super destructive and now nuclear weapons. As we look back through
history isn't it painfully clear that the number of people killed in isolated neighborhood rumbles
or conflicts is as nothing to the total mass devastation of interstate wars? There are good
reasons for this.
To avoid emotionalism, let us take two hypothetical countries, Ruritania and Walldavia.
If both Ruritania and Walldavia were dissolved into a libertarian society, with no government
and innumerable private individuals, firms and police agencies, the only clashes that
could break out would be local, and the weaponry would necessarily be strictly limited in scope
Hope and Devastation Suppose that in a Ruritanian city, two police
agencies clash and start shooting it out.
At worst, they could not use mass bombing or nuclear destruction or germ warfare, since
they themselves would be blown up in the Holocaust.
It is the slicing off of territorial areas into single governmental monopolies that leads
to mass destruction.
For then, if the single monopoly government of Walldavia confronts its ancient rival,
the government of Ruritania, each can wield weapons of mass destruction and even nuclear
warfare, because it will be the other guy and the other country they will hurt.
Furthermore, now that every person is a subject of a monopoly government, in the eyes of every
other government, he becomes irretrievably identified with his government.
The Citizen of France is identified with his government, and therefore, if another government
attacks France, it will attack the citizenry, as well as the government of France.
But if Company A battles with Company B, the most that can happen is that the respective
customers of each company may be dragged into the battle, but no one else.
It should be evident, then, that even if the worst happened, and a libertarian world would
Should indeed become a world of anarchy, we would still be much better off than we
are now, at the mercy of rampant anarchic nation-states, each possessing a fearsome
monopoly of weapons of mass destruction.
We must never forget that we are all living and always have lived in a world of international
anarchy, in a world of coercive nation-states unchecked by any overall world government,
and there is no prospect of this situation changing.
A libertarian world then, even if anarchic, would still not suffer the brutal wars, the
mass devastation, the A-bombing that our state-ridden world has suffered for centuries.
Even if local police clash continually, there would be no more Dresdens, no more Hiroshimas.
But there is far more to be said.
We should never concede that this local anarchy would be likely to occur.
Let us separate the problem of police clashes into distinct and different parts, honest
disagreements and the attempt of one or more police forces to become outlaws and to extract
funds or impose their rule by coercion.
Let us assume for a moment that the police forces will be honest and that they are only
Surely riven by honest clashes of opinion, we will set aside for a while the problem
of outlaw police.
Surely one of the very important aspects of protection service the police can offer their
respective customers is quiet protection.
Every consumer, every buyer of police protection would wish above all for protection that is
efficient and quiet, with no conflicts or disturbances.
Every police agency would be fully aware of this vital fact.
To assume that police would continually clash and battle with each other is absurd, for
it ignores the devastating effect that this chaotic anarchy would have on the business
of all the police companies.
To put it bluntly, such wars and conflicts would be bad, very bad, for business.
Therefore, on the free market, the police agencies would all see to it that there would
would be no clashes between them, and that all conflicts of opinion would be ironed out
in private courts, decided by private judges or arbitrators.
To get more specific, in the first place, as we have said, clashes would be minimal
because the street owner would have his guards, the storekeeper his, the landlord his, and
the homeowner his own police company.
Realistically, in the everyday world, there would be little room for direct clashes between police agencies.
But suppose, as will sometimes occur, two neighboring homeowners get into a fight.
Each accuses the other of initiating assault or violence, and each calls on his own police company.
Should they happen to subscribe to different companies? What then?
Again, it would be pointless and economically as well as physically self-destructive for
the two police companies to start shooting it out.
Instead, every police company, to remain in business at all, would announce as a vital
part of its service the use of private courts or arbitrators to decide who is in the wrong.
The Courts
It is then that the judge or arbitrator decides Smith was in the wrong in a dispute and that
he aggressed against Jones.
If Smith accepts the verdict, then whatever damages or punishment is levied, there is
no problem for the theory of libertarian protection.
But what if he does not accept it?
Or suppose another example.
Jones is robbed.
He sets his police company to do detective work in trying to track down the criminal.
The company decides that a certain Brown is the criminal.
Then what?
If Brown acknowledges his guilt, then again there is no problem and judicial punishment
proceeds, centering on forcing the criminal to make restitution to the victim.
But again, what if Brown denies his guilt?
These cases take us out of the realm of police protection and into another vital area of
of Protection, judicial service, that is, the provision in accordance with generally
accepted procedures of a method of trying as best as one can to determine who is the
criminal or who is the breaker of contracts in any sort of crime or dispute.
Many people, even those who acknowledge that there could be privately competitive police
service supplied on a free market, balk at the idea of totally private courts.
How in the world could courts be private?
How would courts employ force in a world without government?
Wouldn't eternal conflicts and anarchy then ensue?
In the first place, the monopoly courts of government are subject to the same grievous
problems, inefficiencies, and contempt for the consumer as any other government operation.
We all know that judges, for example, are not selected according to their wisdom, probity,
for efficiency in serving the consumer, but are political hacks chosen by the political
process. Furthermore, the courts are monopolies. If, for example, the courts in some town or
city should become corrupt, venal, oppressive, or inefficient, the citizen at present has
no recourse. The aggrieved citizen of Deep Falls, Wyoming must be governed by the local
In a libertarian society, there would be many courts, many judges to whom he could turn.
Again, there is no reason to assume a natural monopoly of judicial wisdom.
The Deep Falls citizen could, for example, call upon the local branch of the Prudential Judicial Company.
How would courts be financed in a free society?
There are many possibilities.
Possibly, each individual would subscribe to a court service, paying a monthly premium and then calling upon the court if he is in need.
Or, since courts will probably be needed much less frequently than policemen, he may pay a fee whenever he chooses to use the court,
with the criminal or contract breaker eventually recompensing the victim or plaintiff.
Or, in still a third possibility, the courts may be hired by the police agencies to settle
disputes.
Or, there may even be vertically integrated firms supplying both police and judicial service.
The Prudential Judicial Company might have a police and a judicial division.
Only the market will be able to decide which of these methods will be most appropriate.
We should all be more familiar with the increasing use of private arbitration even in our present
society.
The government courts have become so clogged, inefficient and wasteful that more and more
parties to disputes are turning to private arbitrators as a cheaper and far less time-consuming
way of settling their disputes.
In recent years, private arbitration has become a growing and highly successful profession.
Being voluntary, furthermore, the rules of arbitration can be decided rapidly by the
parties themselves, without the need for a ponderous complex legal framework applicable
to all citizens.
Arbitration therefore permits judgments to be made by people expert in the trade or occupation
concerned.
Currently, the American Arbitration Association, whose motto is, the hand clasp is mightier
has 25 regional offices throughout the country with 23,000 arbitrators.
In 1969, the association conducted over 22,000 arbitrations.
In addition, the insurance companies adjust over 50,000 claims a year through voluntary arbitration.
There is also a growing and successful use of private arbitrators in automobile accident claim cases.
It might be protested that while performing an ever greater proportion of judicial functions,
the private arbitrator's decisions are still enforced by the courts, so that once the disputing
parties agree on an arbitrator, his decision becomes legally binding.
This is true, but it was not the case before 1920, and the arbitration profession grew
grew at as rapid a rate from 1900 to 1920 as it has since.
In fact, the modern arbitration movement began in full force in England during the time of
the American Civil War, with merchants increasingly using the private courts provided by voluntary
arbitrators, even though the decisions were not legally binding.
By 1900, voluntary arbitration began to take hold in the United States.
In fact, in medieval England, the entire structure of merchant law, which was handled clumsily
and inefficiently by the government's courts, grew up in private merchants' courts.
The merchants' courts were purely voluntary arbitrators, and the decisions were not legally
binding.
How then were they successful?
The answer is that the merchants, in the Middle Ages and down to 1920, relied solely on ostracism
Merchants made their courts work simply by agreeing to abide by the results.
The merchant who broke the understanding would not be able to make a decision on their own.
In other words, should a merchant refuse to submit to arbitration or ignore a decision,
the other merchants would publish this fact in the trade and would refuse to deal with
the recalcitrant merchant, bringing him quickly to heel.
Woldridge mentions one medieval example.
by the Results.
The merchant who broke the understanding would not be sent to jail, to be sure, but neither
would he long continue to be a merchant, for the compliance exacted by his fellows and
their power over his goods proved, if anything, more effective than physical coercion.
Take John of Homing, who made his living marketing wholesale quantities of fish.
When John sold a lot of herring on the representation that it conformed to a three-barrel sample,
In modern times, ostracism became even more effective, and it included the knowledge that anyone who ignored an arbitrator's award could never again avail himself of an arbitrator's services.
Industrialist Owen D. Young, head of General Electric, concluded that the moral censure of other businessmen was a far more effective sanction than legal enforcement.
Nowadays, modern technology, computers and credit ratings would make such nationwide ostracism even more effective than it has ever been in the past.
Even if purely voluntary arbitration is sufficient for commercial disputes, however, what of frankly criminal activities?
The mugger, the rapist, the bank robber.
In these cases, it must be admitted that ostracism would probably not be sufficient,
even though it would also include, we must remember, refusal of private street owners to allow such criminals in their areas.
For the criminal cases, then, courts and legal enforcement become necessary.
How, then, would the courts operate in the libertarian society?
In particular, how could they enforce their decisions?
In all their operations, furthermore, they must observe the critical libertarian rule
that no physical force may be used against anyone who has not been convicted as a criminal.
Otherwise, the users of such force, whether police or courts, would be themselves liable to be convicted as aggressors if it turned out that the person they had used force against was innocent of crime.
In contrast to statist systems, no policeman or judge could be granted special immunity to use coercion beyond what anyone else in society could use.
Let us now take the case we mentioned before.
4. Mr. Jones is robbed. His hired detective agency decides that one, Brown, committed
the crime, and Brown refuses to concede his guilt. What then? In the first place, we must
recognize that there is, at present, no overall world court or world government enforcing
its decrees. Yet, while we live in a state of international anarchy, there is little
People are no problem in disputes between private citizens of two countries.
Suppose that right now, for example, a citizen of Uruguay claims that he has been swindled
by a citizen of Argentina.
Which court does he go to?
He goes to his own, that is, the victim's or the plaintiff's court.
The case proceeds in the Uruguayan court, and its decision is honored by the Argentinian
court.
The same is true if an American feels he has been swindled by a Canadian, and so on.
In Europe after the Roman Empire, when German tribes lived side by side and in the same
areas, if a Visigoth felt that he had been injured by a Frank, he took the case to his
own court, and the decision was generally accepted by the Franks.
Going to the plaintiff's court is the rational libertarian procedure as well, since the victim
Brown or plaintiff is the one who is aggrieved and who naturally takes the case to his own
court.
So, in our case, Jones would go to the Prudential Court Company to charge Brown with theft.
It is possible, of course, that Brown is also a client of the Prudential Court, in which
case there is no problem.
The Prudential's decision covers both parties and becomes binding.
But one important stipulation is that no coercive subpoena power can be used against Brown.
Brown, because he must be considered innocent until he is convicted.
But Brown would be served with a voluntary subpoena, a notice that he is being tried
on such and such a charge and inviting him or his legal representative to appear.
If he does not appear, then he will be tried in absentia, and this will obviously be less
favorable for Brown, since his side of the case will not be pleaded in court.
If Brown is declared guilty, then the court and its marshals will employ force to seize
Brown and exact whatever punishment is decided upon, a punishment which obviously will focus
first on restitution to the victim.
What however if Brown does not recognize the Prudential Court?
What if he is a client of the Metropolitan Court Company?
Here the case becomes more difficult.
What will happen then?
First, victim Jones pleads his case in the Prudential Court.
If Brown is found innocent, this ends the controversy.
Suppose, however, that defendant Brown is found guilty.
If he does nothing, the Court's judgment proceeds against him.
Suppose, however, Brown then takes the case to the Metropolitan Court Company, pleading
inefficiency or venality by Prudential.
The case will then be heard by Metropolitan.
If Metropolitan also finds Brown guilty, this too ends the controversy, and Prudential will
proceed against Brown with dispatch.
Suppose, however, that Metropolitan finds Brown innocent of the charge.
Then what?
Will the two courts and their arms-wielding marshals shoot it out in the streets?
Once again, this would clearly be irrational and self-destructive behavior on the part
of the Courts.
An essential part of their judicial service to their clients is the provision of just,
objective and peacefully functioning decisions, the best and most objective way of arriving
at the truth of who committed the crime.
Arriving at a decision and then allowing chaotic gunplay would scarcely be considered valuable
judicial service by their customers.
Thus, an essential part of any court's service to its clients would be an appeals procedure.
In short, every court would agree to abide by an appeals trial, as decided by a voluntary
arbitrator to whom metropolitan and prudential would now turn.
The appeals judge would make his decision, and the result of this third trial would be
treated as binding on the guilty.
The Prudential Court would then proceed to Enforcement.
An Appeals Court.
But isn't this setting up a compulsory monopoly government once again?
No, because there is nothing in the system that requires any one person or court to be
the Court of Appeal.
In short, in the United States at present, the Supreme Court is established as THE Court
of Final Appeal.
Also the Supreme Court judges become the final arbiters, regardless of the wishes of plaintiff
or defendant alike.
In contrast, in the libertarian society, the various competing private courts could go
to any appeals judge they think fair, expert and objective.
No single appeals judge or set of judges would be foisted upon society by coercion.
How would the appeals judges be financed?
There are many possible ways, but the most likely is that they will be paid by the various
original courts who would charge their customers for appeals services in their premiums or
fees.
But suppose Brown insists on another appeals judge, and yet another.
Couldn't he escape judgment by appealing ad infinitum?
Obviously, in any society, legal proceedings cannot continue indefinitely.
There must be some cut-off point.
In the present statist society, where government monopolizes the judicial function, the Supreme
Court is arbitrarily designated as the cut-off point.
In the libertarian society, there would also have to be an agreed-upon cut-off point.
And since there are only two parties to any crime or dispute, the plaintiff and the defendant,
It seems most sensible for the legal code to declare that a decision arrived at by any
two courts shall be binding.
This will cover the situation when both the plaintiffs and the defendants' courts come
to the same decision, as well as the situation when an appeals court decides on a disagreement
between the two original courts.
The Law and the Courts
It is now clear that there will have to be a legal code in the libertarian society.
How?
How can there be a legal code, a system of law, without a government to promulgate it?
An appointed system of judges or a legislature to vote on statutes?
To begin with, is a legal code consistent with libertarian principles?
To answer the last question first, it should be clear that a legal code is necessary to
lay down precise guidelines for the private courts.
If for example Court A decides that all redheads are inherently evil and must be punished,
it is clear that such decisions are the reverse of libertarian, that such a law would constitute
an invasion of the rights of redheads.
Hence any such decision would be illegal in terms of libertarian principle and could not
be upheld by the rest of society.
It then becomes necessary to have a legal code which would be generally accepted and
which the courts would pledge themselves to follow.
The legal code simply would insist on the libertarian principle of no aggression against
person or property, define property rights in accordance with libertarian principle,
set up rules of evidence such as currently apply in deciding who are the wrongdoers in
any dispute and set up a code of maximum punishment for any particular crime.
Within the framework of such a code, the particular courts would compete on the most efficient
procedures and the market would then decide whether judges, juries, etc. are the most
efficient methods of providing judicial services.
Are such stable and consistent law codes possible with only competing judges to develop and
apply them, and without government or legislature?
Not only are they possible, but over the years, the best and most successful parts of our
legal system were developed precisely in this manner.
Legislatures, as well as kings, have been capricious, invasive, and inconsistent.
They have only introduced anomalies and despotism into the legal system.
In fact, the government is no more qualified to develop and apply law than it is to provide
any other service.
And just as religion has been separated from the state, and the economy can be separated
from the state, so can every other state function, including police, courts, and the law itself.
As indicated above, for example, the entire law merchant was developed not by the state
or in-state courts, but by private merchant courts.
It was only much later that government took over mercantile law from its development in
merchant's courts.
The same occurred with Admiralty Law, the entire structure of the law of the sea, shipping,
salvages, etc.
Here again, the state was not interested, and its jurisdiction did not apply to the
high seas.
So the shippers themselves took on the task of not only applying, but working out the
whole structure of Admiralty Law in their own private courts.
Again, it was only later that the government appropriated Admiralty Law into its own courts.
Finally, the major body of Anglo-Saxon law, the justly celebrated Common Law, was developed
was developed over the centuries by competing judges applying time-honored principles rather than the shifting decrees of the state.
These principles were not decided upon arbitrarily by any king or legislature.
They grew up over centuries by applying rational and very often libertarian principles to the cases before them.
The idea of following precedent was developed not as a blind service to the past,
in the past, but because all the judges of the past had made their decisions in applying
the generally accepted common law principles to specific cases and problems.
For it was universally held that the judge did not make law as he often does today.
The judge's task, his expertise, was in finding the law in accepted common law principles
and then applying that law to specific cases or to new technological or institutional conditions.
The glory of the centuries-long development of the common law is testimony to their success.
The common law judges, furthermore, functioned very much like private arbitrators, as experts
in the law to whom private parties went with their disputes.
There was no arbitrarily imposed Supreme Court whose decision would be binding, nor was
precedent, though honored, considered as automatically binding either.
Thus the libertarian Italian jurist Bruno Leone has written,
Courts of judicature could not easily enact arbitrary rules of their own in England, as they were never in a position to do so directly, that is to say, in the usual, sudden, widely ranging and imperious manner of legislators.
Moreover, there were so many courts of justice in England, and they were so jealous of one another, that even the famous principle of the binding precedent was not openly recognized as valid by them until comparatively recent times.
Besides, they could never decide anything that had not been previously brought before them by private persons.
Finally, comparatively few people used to go before the courts to ask from them the
rules deciding their cases.
And on the absence of supreme courts, it cannot be denied that the lawyer's law or the judiciary
law may tend to acquire the characteristics of legislation, including its undesirable
ones, whenever jurists or judges are entitled to decide ultimately on a case.
In our time, the mechanism of the judiciary in certain countries where supreme courts
are established results in the imposition of the personal views of the members of these
courts, or of a majority of them, on all the other people concerned, whenever there is
a great deal of disagreement between the opinion of the former and the convictions of the latter.
But this possibility, far from being necessarily implied in the nature of lawyer's law or
of Judiciary Law is rather a deviation from it.
Apart from such aberrations, the imposed personal views of the judges were kept to a minimum,
a, by the fact that judges could only make decisions when private citizens brought cases
to them, b, each judge's decisions applied only to the particular case, and c, because
Because the decisions of the common law judges and lawyers always considered the precedence
of the centuries.
Furthermore, as Leoni points out, in contrast to legislatures or the executive, where dominant
majorities or pressure groups ride roughshod over minorities, judges, by their very position,
are constrained to hear and weigh the arguments of the two contending parties in each dispute.
These are equal as regards the judge, in the sense that they are free to produce arguments
and evidence.
They do not constitute a group in which dissenting minorities give way to triumphant majorities.
And Leone points out the analogy between this process and the free market economy.
Of course, arguments may be stronger or weaker, but the fact that every party can produce
Professor Leoni found that in the private law area, the ancient Roman judges operated
in the same way as the English common law courts.
The Roman jurist was a sort of scientist.
The objects of his research were the solutions to cases that citizens submitted to him for
just as industrialists might today submit to a physicist or to an engineer a
technical problem concerning their plants or their production. Hence private
Roman law was something to be described or to be discovered, not something to be
enacted. A world of things that were there forming part of the common
heritage of all Roman citizens. Nobody enacted that law. Nobody could change it
by any exercise of his personal will. This is the long-run concept, or if you prefer,
the Roman concept, of the certainty of the law.
Finally, Professor Leone was able to use his knowledge of the operations of ancient and
common law to answer the vital question, in a libertarian society, who will appoint the
judges to let them perform the task of defining the law?
His answer is the people themselves, people who would go to the judges with the greatest
reputation of expertise and wisdom in knowing and applying the basic common legal principles
of the society.
In fact, it is rather immaterial to establish in advance who will appoint the judges, for
in a sense everybody could do so, as happens to a certain extent when people resort to
private arbiters to settle their own quarrels.
For the appointment of judges is not such a special problem as would be, for example,
that of appointing physicists or doctors or other kinds of learned and experienced people.
The emergence of good professional people in any society is only apparently due to official
appointments, if any.
It is in fact based on a widespread consent on the part of clients, colleagues and the
and the public at large, a consent without which no appointment is really effective.
Of course, people can be wrong about the true value chosen as being worthy, but these difficulties
in their choice are inescapable in any kind of choice.
Of course, in the future libertarian society, the basic legal code would not rely on blind
custom, much of which could well be anti-libertarian.
The Code would have to be established on the basis of acknowledged libertarian principle
of non-aggression against the person or property of others, in short, on the basis of reason
rather than on mere tradition, however sound its general outlines.
Since we have a body of common law principles to draw on, however, the task of reason in
correcting and amending the common law would be far easier than trying to construct a body
Society of Systematic Legal Principles, de novo, out of the thin air.
The most remarkable historical example of a society of libertarian law and courts, however,
has been neglected by historians until very recently.
And this was also a society where not only the courts and the law were largely libertarian,
but where they operated within a purely stateless and libertarian society.
This was ancient Ireland, an Ireland which persisted in this libertarian path for roughly
a thousand years until its brutal conquest by England in the seventeenth century.
And in contrast to many similarly functioning primitive tribes such as the Igbos in West
Africa and many European tribes, pre-conquest Ireland was not in any sense a primitive society.
It was a highly complex society that was, for centuries, the most advanced, most scholarly
and most civilized in all of Western Europe.
For a thousand years then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no state or anything like it.
As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has written, there was no legislature,
no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice.
There was no trace of state-administered justice.
How then was justice secured?
The basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the Tuath.
All freemen who owned land, all professionals and all craftsmen, were entitled to become
members of a Tuath.
Each Tuath's members formed an annual assembly, which decided all common policies, declared
War or Peace on Other Tuatha and Elected or Deposed Their Kings.
An important point is that in contrast to primitive tribes, no one was stuck or bound
to a given tuath, either because of kinship or of geographical location.
Individual members were free to, and often did, secede from a tuath and join a competing
tuath.
Often, two or more tuatha decided to merge into a single, more efficient unit.
As Professor Joe Peden states, the tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united
for socially beneficial purposes, and the sum total of the landed properties of its
members constituted its territorial dimension.
In short, they did not have the modern state, with its claim to sovereignty over a given,
Usually Expanding Territorial Area, Divorced from the Landed Property Rights of its Subjects.
On the contrary, Tuatha were voluntary associations, which only comprised the landed properties
of its voluntary members.
Historically, about 80 to 100 Tuatha coexisted at any time throughout Ireland.
But what of the elected king?
Did he constitute a form of state ruler?
Chiefly, the king functioned as a religious high priest presiding over the worship rights
of the Tuath, which functioned as a voluntary religious as well as a social and political
organization.
As in pagan pre-Christian priesthoods, the kingly function was hereditary, this practice
carrying over to Christian times.
The King was elected by the Tuath from within a royal kin group, which carried the hereditary
priestly function.
Politically, however, the King had strictly limited functions.
He was the military leader of the Tuath, and he presided over the Tuath assemblies.
But he could only conduct war or peace negotiations as agent of the assemblies, and he was in
in no sense sovereign and had no rights of administering justice over Tuath members.
He could not legislate, and when he himself was party to a lawsuit, he had to submit his
case to an independent judicial arbiter.
Again, how then was law developed and justice maintained?
In the first place, the law itself was based on a body of ancient and immemorial custom,
passed down as oral and then written tradition through a class of professional jurists called the Brijans.
The Brijans were in no sense public or governmental officials.
They were simply selected by parties to disputes on the basis of their reputations for wisdom,
knowledge of the customary law, and the integrity of their decisions.
As Professor Peden states, the professional jurists were consulted by parties to disputes
For advice as to what the law was in particular cases, and these same men often acted as arbitrators
between suitors.
They remained at all times private persons, not public officials.
Their functioning depended upon their knowledge of the law and the integrity of their judicial
reputations.
Furthermore, the Brehans had no connection whatsoever with the individual tuatha or with
their kings.
They were completely private, national in scope, and were used by disputants throughout
Ireland.
Moreover, and this is a vital point, in contrast to the system of private Roman lawyers, the
Brijan was all there was.
There were no other judges, no public judges of any kind in ancient Ireland.
It was the Brijans who were schooled in the law, and who added glosses and applications
to the law to fit changing conditions.
Furthermore, there was no monopoly, in any sense, of the Brehan jurists.
Instead, several competing schools of jurisprudence existed and competed for the custom of the
Irish people.
How were the decisions of the Brehans enforced?
Through an elaborate, voluntarily developed system of insurance, or sureties.
Men were linked together by a variety of surety relationships, by which they guaranteed one
another for the righting of wrongs and for the enforcement of justice and the decisions
of the brihands.
In short, the brihands themselves were not involved in the enforcement of decisions,
which rested again with private individuals linked through sureties.
There were various types of surety.
For example, the surety would guarantee with his own property the payment of a debt, and
then join the plaintiff in enforcing a debt judgment if the debtor refused to pay.
In that case, the debtor would have to pay double damages, one to the original creditor
and another as compensation to his surety.
And this system applied to all offenses, aggressions and assaults, as well as commercial contracts.
In short, it applied to all cases of what we would call civil and criminal law.
All criminals were considered to be debtors who owed restitution and compensation to their
victims, who thus became their creditors.
The victim would gather his sureties around him and proceed to apprehend the criminal
or to proclaim his suit publicly and demand that the defendant submit to adjudication
of their dispute with the brihans.
The criminal might then send his own sureties to negotiate a settlement or agree to submit
the dispute to the Brihands.
If he did not do so, he was considered an outlaw by the entire community.
He could no longer enforce any claim of his own in the courts, and he was treated to the
opprobrium of the entire community.
There were occasional wars, to be sure, in the thousand years of Celtic Ireland, but
But they were minor brawls, negligible compared to the devastating wars that racked the rest
of Europe.
As Professor Peden points out, without the coercive apparatus of the state, which can,
through taxation and conscription, mobilize large amounts of arms and manpower, the Irish
were unable to sustain any large-scale military force in the field for any length of time.
Irish wars were pitiful brawls and cattle raids by European standards.
Thus we have indicated that it is perfectly possible, in theory and historically, to have
efficient and courteous police, competent and learned judges, and a body of systematic
and socially accepted law, and none of these things being furnished by a coercive government.
Government, claiming a compulsory monopoly of protection over a geographical area and
extracting its revenues by force, can be separated from the entire field of protection.
Government is no more necessary for providing vital protection service than it is necessary
for providing anything else.
And we have not stressed a crucial fact about government, that its compulsory monopoly over
for the Weapons of Coercion has led it over the centuries to infinitely more butcheries
and infinitely greater tyranny and oppression than any decentralized private agencies could
possibly have done.
If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation and tyranny levied on society
by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan state and
and Tri-Freedom, Outlaw Protectors.
We have saved for the last this problem.
What if police or judges and courts should be venal and biased?
What if they should bias their decisions, for example, in favor of particularly wealthy
clients?
We have shown how a libertarian legal and judicial system could work on the purely free
Free Market, Assuming Honest Differences of Opinion.
But what if one or more police or courts should become, in effect, outlaws?
What then?
In the first place, libertarians do not flinch from such a question.
In contrast to such utopians as Marxists or left-wing anarchists, anarcho-communists or
anarcho-syndicalists, libertarians do not assume that the ushering in of the purely
We do not assume that the lion will lie down with the lamb, or that no one will have criminal
or fraudulent designs upon his neighbor.
The better that people will be, of course, the better any social system will work.
In particular, the less work any police or courts will have to do.
But no such assumption is made by libertarians.
What we assert is that given any particular degree of goodness or badness among men, the
purely libertarian society will be at once the most moral and the most efficient, the
least criminal, and the most secure of person or property.
Let us first consider the problem of the venal or crooked judge or court.
What of the court which favors its own wealthy client in trouble?
In the first place, any such favoritism will be highly unlikely, given the rewards and
sanctions of the free market economy.
The very life of the court, the very livelihood of a judge, will depend on his reputation
for integrity, fair-mindedness, objectivity, and the quest for truth in every case.
This is his brand name.
If a good word of any venality leak out, he will immediately lose clients, and the courts will no longer have customers.
For even those clients who may be criminally inclined will scarcely sponsor a court whose decisions are no longer taken seriously by the rest of society,
or who themselves may well be in jail for dishonest and fraudulent dealings.
If, for example, Joe Zilch is accused of a crime or breach of contract, and he goes to
a court headed by his brother-in-law, no one, least of all other honest courts, will take
this court's decision seriously.
It will no longer be considered a court in the eyes of anyone but Joe Zilch and his family.
Contrast this built-in corrective mechanism to the present-day government courts.
Judges are appointed or elected for long terms, up to life, and they are accorded a monopoly
of decision-making in their particular area.
It is almost impossible, except in cases of gross corruption, to do anything about venal
decisions of judges.
Their power to make and to enforce their decisions continues unchecked, year after year.
Their salaries continue to be paid, furnished under coercion by the hapless taxpayer.
But in the totally free society, any suspicion of a judge or court will cause their customers
to melt away and their decisions to be ignored.
This is a far more efficient system of keeping judges honest than the mechanism of government.
Furthermore, the temptation for venality and bias would be far less for another reason.
Business firms in the free market earn their keep, not from wealthy customers, but from
from a Mass Market by Consumers. Mises earns its income from the mass of the population,
not from a few wealthy customers. The same is true of metropolitan life insurance today,
and the same would be true of any metropolitan court system tomorrow. It would be folly indeed
for the courts to risk the loss of favor by the bulk of its customers, for the favors
of a few wealthy clients. But contrast the present system, where judges, like all other
Other politicians may be beholden to wealthy contributors who finance the campaigns of
their political parties.
There is a myth that the American system provides a superb set of checks and balances, with
the executive, the legislature and the courts all balancing and checking one against the
other so that power cannot unduly accumulate in one set of hands.
But the American checks and balances system is largely a fraud.
For each one of these institutions is a coercive monopoly in its area, and all of them are
part of one government, headed by one political party at any given time.
Furthermore, at best, there are only two parties, each one close to the other in ideology and
personnel, often colluding, and the actual day-to-day business of government is headed
by a civil service bureaucracy that cannot be displaced by the voters.
In contrast to these mythical checks and balances, the real checks and balances provided by the free market economy, what keeps A&P honest is the competition, actual and potential, of Safeway, Pioneer and countless other grocery stores.
What keeps them honest is the ability of the consumers to cut off their patronage.
What would keep the free market judges and courts honest is the lively possibility of heading down the block or down the road to another judge or court, if suspicion should descend on any particular one.
What would keep them honest is the lively possibility of their customers cutting off their business.
These are the real, active checks and balances of the free market economy and the free society.
The same analysis applies to the possibility of a private police force becoming outlaw,
of using their coercive powers to exact tribute, set up a protection racket to shake down their victims, etc.
Of course, such a thing could happen.
But in contrast to present-day society, there would be immediate checks and balances available.
There would be other police forces who could use their weapons to band together to put down the aggressors against their clientele.
If the metropolitan police force should become gangsters and exact tribute, then the rest of society could flock to the prudential, equitable, etc. police forces, who could band together to put them down.
And this contrasts vividly with the state. If a group of gangsters should capture the state apparatus with its monopoly of coercive weapons, there is nothing, at present, that can stop them, short of the immensely difficult process of revolution.
In a libertarian society, there would be no need for a massive revolution to stop the
depredation of gangster states.
There would be a swift turning to the honest police forces to check and put down the force
that had turned bandit.
And indeed, what is the state anyway but organized banditry?
What is taxation but theft on a gigantic unchecked scale?
What is war but mass murder on a scale impossible by private police forces?
What is conscription but mass enslavement?
Can anyone envision a private police force getting away with a tiny fraction of what
states get away with, and do habitually, year after year, century after century?
There is another vital consideration that would make it almost impossible for an outlaw
Law Police Force to commit anything like the banditry that modern governments practice.
One of the crucial factors that permits governments to do the monstrous things they habitually
do is the sense of legitimacy on the part of the stupefied public.
The average citizen may not like, may even strongly object to, the policies and exactions
of his government, but he has been imbued with the idea, carefully indoctrinated by
by centuries of governmental propaganda that the government is his legitimate sovereign
and that it would be wicked or mad to refuse to obey its dictates.
It is this sense of legitimacy that the state's intellectuals have fostered over the ages,
aided and abetted by all the trappings of legitimacy, flags, rituals, ceremonies, awards,
constitutions, etc.
A bandit gang, even if all the police forces conspired together into one vast gang, could
never command such legitimacy.
The public would consider them purely bandits.
Their extortions and tributes would never be considered legitimate though onerous taxes
to be paid automatically.
The public would quickly resist these illegitimate demands, and the bandits would be resisted
and overthrown.
Once the public had tasted the joys, prosperity, freedom and efficiency of a libertarian, stateless
society, it would be almost impossible for a state to fasten itself upon them once again.
Once freedom has been fully enjoyed, it is no easy task to force people to give it up.
But suppose, just suppose, that despite all these handicaps and obstacles, despite the
What if the love for their newfound freedom, despite the inherent checks and balances of the free market,
suppose any way that the state manages to re-establish itself? What then?
Well, then, all that would have happened is that we would have a state once again.
We would be no worse off than we are now with our current state.
And, as one libertarian philosopher has put it, at least the world will have had a glorious holiday.
Karl Marx's ringing promise applies far more to a libertarian society than to communism.
In trying freedom, in abolishing the state, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
National Defense
We come now to what is usually the final argument against the libertarian position.
Every libertarian has heard a sympathetic but critical listener say,
All right, I see how this system could be applied successfully to local police and courts.
But how could a libertarian society defend us against the Russians?
There are, of course, several dubious assumptions implied in such a question.
There is the assumption that the Russians are bent upon military invasion of the United
States, a doubtful assumption at best.
There is the assumption that any such desire would still remain after the United States
had become a purely libertarian society.
This notion overlooks the lesson of history that wars result from conflicts between nation-states,
each armed to the teeth, each direly suspicious of attack by the other.
But a libertarian America would clearly not be a threat to anyone, not because it had
no arms, but because it would be dedicated to no aggression against anyone or against
any country.
Having no longer a nation state, which is inherently threatening, there would be little
chance of any country attacking us.
One of the great evils of the nation state is that each state is able to identify all
of its subjects with itself.
Hence, in any interstate war, the innocent civilians, the subjects of each country, are
subject to aggression from the enemy state.
But in a libertarian society there would be no such identification and hence very little
chance of such a devastating war.
Suppose for example that our outlaw metropolitan police force has initiated aggression not
only against Americans but also against Mexicans.
If Mexico had a government then clearly the Mexican government would know full well that
Americans in general were not implicated in the metropolitan's crimes and had no symbiotic
relationship with it. If the Mexican police engaged in a punitive expedition to punish the
metropolitan force, they would not be at war with Americans in general as they would be now.
In fact, it is highly likely that other American forces would join the Mexicans in putting down
the aggressor. Hence, the idea of interstate war against a libertarian country or geographical area
would most likely disappear.
There is, furthermore, a grave philosophical error in the very posing of this sort of question
about the Russians.
When we contemplate any sort of new system, whatever it may be, we must first decide whether
we want to see it brought about.
In order to decide whether we want libertarianism or communism or left-wing anarchism or theocracy
or any other system, we must first assume that it has been established, and then consider
whether the system could work, whether it could remain in existence, and just how efficient
such a system would be.
We have shown, I believe, that a libertarian system, once instituted, could work, be viable,
and be at once far more efficient, prosperous, moral, and free than any other social system.
But we have said nothing about how to get from the present system to the ideal.
For these are two totally separate questions, the question of what is our ideal goal and
of the strategy and tactics of how to get from the present system to that goal.
The Russian question mixes these two levels of discourse.
It assumes not that libertarianism has been established everywhere throughout the globe,
but that for some reason it has been established only in America and nowhere else.
But why assume this?
Why not first assume that it has been established everywhere and see whether we like it?
After all, the libertarian philosophy is an eternal one, not bound to time or place.
We advocate liberty for everyone, everywhere, not just in the United States.
If someone agrees that a world libertarian society once established is the best that
he can conceive, that it would be workable, efficient, and moral, then let him become
a libertarian.
Let him join us in accepting liberty as our ideal goal, and then join us further in the
separate and obviously difficult task of figuring out how to bring this ideal about.
If we do move on to strategy, it is obvious that the larger an area in which liberty is
first established, the better its chances for survival, and the better its chance to
resist any violent overthrow that may be attempted.
If liberty is established instantaneously throughout the world, then there will of course
be no problem of national defense.
All problems will be local police problems.
If, however, only Deep Falls, Wyoming becomes libertarian, while the rest of America and
the world remain statist, its chances for survival will be very slim.
If Deep Falls, Wyoming declares its secession from the United States government and establishes
a free society, the chances are great that the United States, given its historical ferocity
towards secessionists, would quickly invade and crush the new free society, and there
There is little that any Deep Falls police force could do about it.
Between these two polar cases, there is an infinite continuum of degrees, and obviously
the larger the area of freedom, the better it could withstand any outside threat.
The Russian question is therefore a matter of strategy rather than a matter of deciding
on basic principles and on the goal toward which we wish to direct our efforts.
But after all this is said and done, let us take up the Russian question anyway.
Let us assume that the Soviet Union would really be hell-bent on attacking a libertarian
population within the present boundaries of the United States.
Clearly, there would no longer be a United States government to form a single nation-state.
In the first place, the form and quantity of defense expenditures would be decided upon
by the American consumers themselves.
Those Americans who favor Polaris submarines and fear a Soviet threat would subscribe toward
the financing of such vessels.
Those who prefer an ABM system would invest in such defensive missiles.
Those who laugh at such a threat or those who are committed pacifists would not contribute
to any national defense service at all.
Different defense theories would be applied in proportion to those who agree with and
support the various theories being offered.
Given the enormous waste in all wars and defense preparations in all countries throughout history,
it is certainly not beyond the bounds of reason to propose that private voluntary defense
efforts would be far more efficient than government boondoggles.
Certainly these efforts would be infinitely more moral.
But let us assume the worst.
Let us assume the Soviet Union at last invades and conquers the territory of America.
What then?
We have to realize that the Soviet Union's difficulties will have only just begun.
The main reason a conquering country can rule a defeated country is that the latter has
an existing state apparatus to transmit and enforce the victor's orders onto a subject
population.
Britain, though far smaller in area and population, was able to rule India for centuries because
Because it could transmit British orders to the ruling Indian princes, who in turn could
enforce them on the subject population.
But in those cases in history where the conquered had no government, the conquerors found rule
over the conquered extremely difficult.
When the British conquered West Africa, for example, they found it extremely difficult
to govern the Igbo tribe, later to form Biafra, because that tribe was essentially libertarian
and had no ruling government of tribal chiefs to transmit orders to the natives.
And perhaps the major reason it took the English centuries to conquer ancient Ireland is that
the Irish had no state and that there was, therefore, no ruling governmental structure
to keep treaties, transmit orders, etc.
It is for this reason that the English kept denouncing the wild and uncivilized Irish
English as faithless, because they would not keep treaties with the English conquerors.
The English could never understand that, lacking any sort of state, the Irish warriors who
concluded treaties with the English could only speak for themselves.
They could never commit any other group of the Irish population.
Furthermore, the occupying Russians' lives would be made even more difficult by the inevitable
Eruption of Guerrilla Warfare by the American Population.
It is surely a lesson of the 20th century, a lesson first driven home by the successful
American revolutionaries against the mighty British Empire, that no occupying force can
long keep down a native population determined to resist.
If the giant United States, armed with far greater productivity and firepower, could
would not succeed against a tiny and relatively unarmed Vietnamese population.
How in the world could the Soviet Union succeed in keeping down the American people?
No Russian occupation soldier's life would be safe from the wrath of a resisting American
populace.
Guerrilla warfare has proved to be an irresistible force precisely because it stems not from
a dictatorial central government, but from the people themselves, fighting for their
and their liberty and independence against a foreign state.
And surely the anticipation of this sea of troubles, of the enormous costs and losses that would inevitably follow,
would stop well in advance even a hypothetical Soviet government bent on military conquest.