One of the major sticking points with statists considering agorism, or any form of anarchy really, is the idea of national defense. They take this as a necessary element of life, despite even statist examples such as Costa Rica, that proves that a national defense or standing army is unneeded.

If we are going to bring those willing to listen around to the ideas of freedom, we must have some solutions or framework for solutions to show to them.

One Solution for All Problems

Those who support the state have one answer to all questions of how would “we” do X? The answer ultimately is “through force.” Sure, they will try to spin it as a positive, ignoring the negative elements, whether that be denied liberty, stolen property, missed opportunities, or other harms to innocent people.

Still, ultimately, their answer is “pass a law,” “create an agency,” “increase regulation,” or some other form of simply using state force. Even though that approach almost never actually solves the perceived problem, and by necessity creates other problems, the devout statist will offer it as a definitive solution that is supposed to silence all opposition.

Agorists (and anarchists in general) don’t have the luxury of pat and unconsidered answers. The statist can force you to agree, or seem to agree, but we as peaceful persons must convince people real solutions exist. This is made more difficult because there simply isn’t a one size fits all solution for each of the perceived problems. We know that individuals will create various solutions, some of which will be more popular and effective than others. Despite this fact, it behooves us to try to provide possible solutions to these perceived problems in our efforts to sway people to the idea of voluntary association and peaceful coexistence.

When it comes to answering many of the statists’ questions about how agorism would solve this problem or that, we often respond with various possibilities, because though the statist wants the one definitive answer, all forms of anarchy allow for various solutions. There simply is no one absolute answer. Many methods and approaches will be adopted, with the best for each situation winning out in that situation.

That said, this should not prevent us from suggesting possible solutions. Even if we are not convincing the particular statist who asks the question, we are laying the groundwork for those in the future to try our approaches or dismiss them as unworkable. When the time comes that we need to protect ourselves and those near us, we will be far better off if the ideas have been carefully thought through (and maybe even trial tested) in advance.

Roads and other Services

“Who will build the roads?” is almost always the top of the list of imagined refutations regarding the idea of living peacefully.

However, we have clear examples of roads being built by private contractors and even an uptick in new private toll roads that function superbly. For many of the other issues raised, we can again see clear examples already working today as well as dismal failures of the current way of doing things. We have seen the current highly regulated medical system growing out of control to the point of making basic health care out of the reach of the poor to middle class. At the same time, we have seen clinics crop up that work as alternatives to the standard system, offering up front prices that are but a tiny fraction of the cost of the HMO’s and protected hospital corporations. We see both real world solutions that need not involve the state, as well as real world failures of the state “solutions.”

Still one major area that is often on the minds of people in our contemporary world given the endless wars, police actions, and military spending that knows no limit is that of “national defense.” Many statists will hold onto the idea of a need for “national defense,” far past the point of reason. It is our job then to convince them that not only has the current approach of massive military spending and ever growing armies, navies, and air forces a dismal failure, but moreover, that there are alternatives to deal with the perceived threats.

National defense versus Mutual Defense

To that end, let’s look at one possibility for mutual defense. One of the issues that has not been sufficiently addressed by anarchist and agorist thinkers is that of “national defense.” While we could just dismiss this as trivial since there would be no state, and therefore no nation to defend, we need to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The statists’ concerns are not trivial and certainly are not alleviated by simply telling him that there is no nation to defend.

At the bedrock, the concern of the statist is defense of his or her home and area around it, as well as the areas with which he identifies. The more someone identifies with a label or an area, the larger the area of concern. We see this as every nationalist is concerned with his own nation. A few venture beyond that to labels like “the western world” or “the free world,*” or even to geographic references like “the Americas” or “Europe” or “Asia.”

In a truly free world, the identification would likely be much more local. Chances are, there would be a hierarchy with the home/homestead at the top, the community next, followed by the town, area, geographical region, and perhaps beyond, that something based on shared values or language, though this last connection would be quite weak in most cases. We naturally care more for and are more concerned about our family first, then our neighbor, then our town, on up the ladder. The further away from ourselves we get, the less we naturally identify.

With regard to matters of safety, our concerns are naturally geographically-based. We want our homes and our people safe. We want our neighbors to be safe, and they want this for us as well, as a threat to us could well become a threat to them. For this reason, rather than calling this national defense, we should be calling it “mutual defense.”

Threats

Individual and immediate threats:

The first line of defense is simply normal precautions. Locks keep honest men honest, the saying goes. You are responsible for your immediate safety, so we take precautions, from locks on the doors to perhaps physical training, such as in martial arts or weapons training. We each decide what is needed in our individual situation.

Whether or not you need help against any particular threat depends on the size and your own ability to handle it. If you knock a candle over on the stone counter-top, you don’t need to call in the volunteer fire department. You either let it go out, blow it out, or otherwise extinguish it and clean up. If you have a grease fire start in a pan on the stove, you simply cover it to smother the flames. Again, you don’t need to call in for help. Threats of property theft are addressed with locks, fences, and other individual security measures with which we are all already familiar. The coercive state system does not offer any protection in these cases so there is no need for a new way of thinking about such threats.

So, too, with other individual threats. If there is a rabid animal in the yard, you can return inside or dispatch it yourself. Perhaps you and your neighbor work together to dispatch it. If there is a bully threatening to harm you and your family, again, you can handle this yourself or with minimal help from those nearby, but as the threat increases, so does the response.  Your leaf fire that is starting to get away from you may require calling neighbors or the volunteer fire department. The gang of punks who are posing a real threat to property and lives of those in a neighborhood may require the neighborhood watch.

So for those threats that are outside of the realm of handling individually, imagine defense groups similar to voluntary fire departments. While you could call them for the smaller threats, they are there primarily to help with threats that no one individual can deal with. They are funded through individual contribution or perhaps contracts; though, as we have seen with fire departments, those which operate in a way to protect an area whether the person has paid in or not are far more popular with the populace.

Sadly, in the US, the term “militia” as taken on a negative connotation, particularly since the ATF/FBI debacles of Ruby Ridge, OKC bombing, and Branch Davidians. Despite this deliberate effort to demonize militias, formal or informal militias have for generations offered up protections. So much so, that the founders of the US relied upon them for national defense after independence going so far as to include militias in the most important documents of their country.

That said, some have tried to redefine militias for their own reasons. For this thought experiment, let us just think of them as individuals who are familiar with their tools used to protect themselves and others. A small militia may require the local defense cell to mobilize; as the size of the threat increases more cells can come together to protect their own areas. Most likely these folks will hold down other jobs just like those in voluntary fire departments do today.

Again, like voluntary fire departments, there can well be overlap. Given that security in general is a larger concern than just security in case of fire, it is almost certainly going to be the case that each security department, for our discussions let us call them “cells,” will overlap many others. It would not be hard to imagine a condo association or homeowners association having such protection as part of their contracts. Developers could very well build facilities for defense and training into new communities. The homeowners would also be free to join other cells, or pay for protection from other cells. In this way, each cell can act as a check on abuse by other cells since their areas can easily overlap. A single family or residence may be a part of many cells just to afford them security and peace of mind.

In this way, these cells would offer protection beyond what even the police offer today. Cells working together can ultimately cover any area, thus offering what would stand in place of a “national defense.”

Borders

Without the state who will guard the borders? Border security as national defense must also be addressed if we are to win over the minds of those who now believe in the effectiveness and legitimacy of the state.

The quick answer is that there would be no borders beyond that of private property. People would be free to move about as long as they remained peaceful. This model of mutual defense would negate any need for borders akin to national borders. There would not be a sharp line that is used to identify a nation. Instead, these cells would have areas of operation to protect those who are members and those peaceful persons within those areas.

What harm would come from Juan crossing the Rio Grande to work with Jimmy in the fields? Or to install tile in the new subdivision? As there would be no coercion-based welfare or other state offered services, the complaints we see today mostly disappear. The complaints that are left show the worst side of humanity. The complaints against skin tone and culture are beneath contempt. The complaints about taking “our jobs” are without merit as there can be no ownership claim upon a job. Those who want to hire Juan would not be prevented from doing so. No voluntary peaceful arrangement would be prohibited. Those using such complaints are the same ones calling for more of the same “solution” that has by their own admission already failed to protect them against these immigrants.

“But they are violent! Only criminals would come to our area!” This cry is almost always a thin veil for bigotry, but let us treat it as a serious concern. There are violent criminal persons in every society. Our agorist model does not assume anything different. We would have measures in place to address violent persons who are already here. Perhaps, this cell structure would work for what we could call policing as well. Whatever form the policing measures take, they will not be limited to only policing those who are from the area, any more than, say, the Boston Police Department only concerns itself with Bostonians. The issue isn’t one of nationality but of real crime, of harm to innocents. For this reason, the complaints that the violent and criminal will invade is a non-starter.

Either our systems in place are already sufficient to address all real crime, else they are not solutions at all.

Cost:

Given the enormous cost of a standing military, how the individual could afford the protection that this system provides is a very understandable question. To address it, let us look to some of the costs of the current system.

Existing costs for the Military bloated.

How could they afford what is essentially private military security? This is a reasonable concern, but one that must be understood in context. As most readers are familiar with the US military given its presence and actions around the globe, I will use it as our example. Currently, the US military is funded via taxation and debt; the direct cost of government at all levels runs about 50% of your income. So, the first response to these concerns about cost are to simply point out the dramatic increase in personal wealth and income that happens when taxation has been ended. You can at that point choose to invest that extra income however you want.

Secondly, the costs are still going to be spread across many people. It isn’t as though you and your one neighbor will be funding battalions of infantrymen, nor will many of those who serve in these defensive forces be full time. Here again, the analogy to the volunteer fire departments helps. Few such departments have full time employees. Many have but one if they have any at all. The rest of the personnel have regular jobs. This means that the costs we see for the maintaining the current military forces are greatly reduced. Housing, food, and the other elements of life need not be covered by the customers. Equipment will still need to be paid for, but that isn’t a recurring daily cost such as food and shelter.

The defensive nature of such approaches as this vastly reduces the cost. While its proponents try desperately to claim otherwise, the current US military is an aggressive not defensive military. There is no need for the estimated 750 US military bases around the world that are still in operation after the “ending” of the occupation of Afghanistan. Just the cost of these bases are in the billions of dollars. Even if these cells decided that some bases were needed domestically, ALL of the bases around the world could be eliminated dramatically decreasing the costs. Ultimately. the costs would be largely limited to equipment, training, and a tiny bit of day-to-day functioning. There is no reason to believe that these costs would even add up to 1% of the current cost of a massive national military. The costs then fall to a point that should be easily affordable for almost every family.

A final word about state military programs. In most cases, they do not actually offer defense. As was noted above, the US military is a great example of this. There is no war in which the standing military of the US has acted to defend any threat to the US and its citizens. All actions by the US military have been those of aggression, very often on the flimsiest of excuses. Even after those excuses are shown to be fabricated, the wars continue. These wars create enemies who want to kill the innocent people in the US. So, at best, the standing military creates a more dangerous situation than would exist otherwise. While we must admit that in theory it is possible to have a defensive state military, the very founders of the US opposed standing armies because they knew that such armies would be used aggressively. History has proved their predictions 100 percent accurate.

Free riders

What about free riders? Free riders are not a problem for such a system, any more than you repainting your house to make it nicer creates a free rider problem. You make your house nicer and that has a positive impact on the value of your neighbors’ houses as well. Hopefully none of us would demand that our neighbors all pay us to renovate or maintain our property.

You choose to pay for your own security. That security may allow others to refrain from paying, but you are still getting what you paid for. There is no coercion. You are not harmed in any way by another benefiting from your choice to pay for security. Since no harm to you is happening, the matter is settled. There simply isn’t a problem. Some may argue the standard free rider argument that no one will pay then, but honestly, we all pay for the locks on our doors because we value the security that they offer, and we can look again to the volunteer fire departments to see that individuals are in fact willing to pay for security against the threats that matter to them. There really is no reason to believe that no one would be willing to pay or work for their own security and that of their own family and friends.

A final and seldom considered advantage: The decentralized nature of this also provides protection unavailable to the state. There is no capital or central location to capture. Instead of being able to capture a flag or a capitol building, any invader would have to take cell by cell, area by area, house by house. This poses a vast disadvantage to the would-be invader. The proof of the importance and effectiveness of this can be seen in the dismal failures of the wars against Afghanistan. This decentralized nature also provides some protection against the nuclear threat. Without a centralized authority to attack, to use nukes as a tool of conquest is absurd. The land is left useless for generations. Rather than increasing the threat of nuclear war, our approach reduces the threat of nuclear attacks.

Conclusion

Ultimately, this is just one of many possible means of mutual defense. There will always be areas that enjoy natural defenses, as well as those who will build up personal defenses sufficiently to make attacking them not worth the while of others. These defenses need not be for the wealthy either, as much of what I have imagined here was inspired by the people of Zomia, who employed similar approaches to mutual defense but also made it difficult for the state or others who may pose a threat, to find what they wanted. The Zomians used root crops that could be harvested as needed to make it impossible for the state to simply come at harvest time and take all of the food. The food was hidden from sight, much like crypto-currency today can hide wealth from prying eyes.

Regardless of the system in place, in the end there, will still be threats. Supporters of the state-based “solution” are by and large unwilling to admit that a threat still exists with the state existing, much less that it is increased through government aggression abroad; but the truth is that if someone or a group of people are determined enough, people can be harmed. There simply is no guaranteed protection possible.

We must admit that at least as far as we know now, though possible voluntary solutions are not perfect, they are clearly far more effective and morally justified than the state “solution.”