Private Defense: Now More Than Ever

0:00I want to address the topic of how we produce security as private individuals and how the state destroys our security. We are born weak and without any arms and without any instincts that guide us. The only The only thing that we have available to us is our reason and our hands guided by a reason. And a reason guides us first of all, of course, to engage in various productive efforts that are necessary in order to sustain our life.

0:58But it is also our reason that guides us in protecting those things that we have produced and those things that we regard as our property from attacks against it. And I just want to go through a few examples of what reason has taught us how we go about about defending ourselves and what mankind through all of its history has basically done. The first thing to mention is of course that we produce security by providing ourselves with what we lack by nature, that is with arms. Arms are not only instruments that help to help us to hunt down wild animals and so forth and feed us. Arms are also the very first and in some ways the most effective means of self-defense, just witness the so-called wild west, which as most of you know was not quite as wild as it is sometimes depicted in movies.

2:26And in order to illustrate that briefly, let me give you a quote from a guy named Mac Grass, who described the effectiveness of self-defense in the Wild West, before I then continue on with other defense mechanisms. He looked at two frontier towns, mining camps, Bodie and Aurora in California and Nevada, and writes about these places. These towns actually suffered rarely from robbery. Today's cities, such as Detroit, New York, Miami, have 20 times as much robbery per capita.

3:17The United States as a whole averages three times as much robbery as these frontier towns did. Burglary and theft were also of infrequent occurrence in these mining towns. Most American cities today average 30 or 40 times as much burglary and theft per capita as these frontier towns did. The national rate is ten times higher. There were no reported cases of rape in either one of these towns. Today, rape occurs every five minutes. Violence, including homicide, was infrequent in both towns, but the men involved were both young. Violence, including homicide, was frequent in these towns, but the men involved were both young, healthy, armed and willing.

4:13and some women went about armed and male combatants killed each other mostly in fights where there were somewhat even chances. On the other hand, the young, the old, the female, and those who chose not to drink in saloons and display reckless bravado were rarely the victims of crime or violence. Moreover, dirty, low-down scoundrels got their just dessert. That is a description of the Wild West and obviously in many ways one could just hope that one would get this state of affairs back. Now in addition to defending ourselves in this way, mankind has also learned to produce security by associating themselves with others for protection purposes.

5:09and associating in particular, of course, with homogeneous fellows, people who are similar to themselves, people from the same family, from the same clan, and from the same tribe, because the more homogeneous people are, the more alike they are to each other, the lower are the insurance and protection cost, and the higher the is in a way also the social control, the controlling of one person by another one that he doesn't engage in illegitimate activities. Then we have developed a mechanism of protecting our property by forming and becoming integrated in a multiplicity of intermediating institutions such as families and communities and trade associations and professional associations in churches and in guilds, all of which constrain in a way our individual behavior, but all of which also protect us from aggression from the part of others and serve as arbitration agencies in cases of conflicts that arise among various people, frequently even balancing each other, that is making it impossible that one of these can gain monopoly powers.

6:57We have learned to protect ourselves and our property by forming protective covenants, which have predictable and stable internal law codes on which we can rely. We have learned to produce security for us and our property by selecting as locations where we reside safe and defensible places. Just think of places like Venice, which was established in some sort of marshland, which was very difficult for invaders to occupy and conquer.

7:47Just think of places like the low countries, what is nowadays the Netherlands, where people learned how to flood large areas in order to make it impossible for invading armies to take them over. Just think of places like San Marino, which is located on top of a very high mountain. Just a few hundred people were capable for hundreds of years to defend themselves in such a location against the onslaught of various enemies. Or just think of a place like Switzerland, where people have learned to defend themselves because of the special mountainous location where you can withdraw up high into the mountains and are difficult to reach for your enemies.

8:52Please just think about how difficult it was even for an overwhelming mighty enemy such as Germany to even think of attacking a place such as Switzerland because they knew that it would have been an enormously costly venture to do such a thing because of the safe location. Then we produce security by means of ostracism, a very important means of keeping peace and quiet and protecting our property from enemies and protecting ourselves from unwanted forms of behavior.

9:47In every civilized society the ultimate price for ill behavior is expulsion and all around ill behaved or rotten characters, even if they don't commit any crimes, will find themselves quickly expelled from everywhere and by everyone and become outcasts and are physically removed from civilization. And this is a very stiff price to pay. And because of this, as long as the right to ostracize, to expel, to discriminate against, as long as this right is in existence, the frequency of ill-behaved people is quite low.

10:37Then we produce security by engaging in free trade, even in free trade with distant places and with people that we might not want to choose to have as our immediate neighbors. But nonetheless we realize that free trade makes us strong and being financially, economically is of course one of the basic requirements for being successful in any type of defensive endeavor and in addition free trade will also gradually develop feelings of sympathy towards strangers because you realize that these strangers actually contribute to your own wellbeing.

11:36We produce then security in commercial societies in taking full advantage of the division of labor, in particular by associating ourselves with insurance companies. We know that insurance companies, competing insurance companies, will bring about a tendency to lower the prices that we need to pay in the form of premiums in order to be protected. We know that insurance companies actually indemnify us in case something happens to us for our property.

12:26We know that insurance companies have a financial incentive to be effective in the prevention of crime, because every crime that they can prevent, they do not have to pay up. We know that insurance companies have a financial incentive in being good at recovering stolen loot, because whatever they can recover, they don't need to pay up. And we know that insurance companies have a financial incentive in being effective when it comes to apprehending the criminals and punishing the criminal in such a way that it is a criminal who is forced to compensate the victim, that is to make the victim whole again to the extent that such a thing is actually possible.

13:25We know that insurance companies will abstain from legislation, making laws. Instead they offer us stable contracts. Nobody would insure himself with an insurance company that would say, look, this is what we promise you, but in the course of the game we might change our rules and we will not let you know in advance what the rules will be tomorrow or in two months from now. So we have a contract with them. We know that insurance companies would actually encourage the ownership of weapons among its clients for the same reason that insurance companies encourage us to own a vault.

14:18to have a vault at home by lowering the premiums, if we do have that. So they would likely lower the premiums if we could show them, if we could demonstrate to them that we are capable of safely handling weapons to be used with self-defensive purposes. We know that insurance companies would not engage in redistribution of income and thereby cause hostility and animosity among various people and we know in general that insurance companies are by nature defensive organizations.

15:10They will not cover in their insurance policies those people who engage in provocative and aggressive behavior. They would bind us all to adhere to conduct that is peaceful and accommodating with regard to our neighbors. And most of all we have learned to produce security in recognizing the overwhelming importance of wealth and especially the technique of protecting us and our property by having a multiplicity of homes and locations and locations where we have our We know how to diversify ourselves and our assets and choose different locations in order to protect us from the possibility that we will be conquered or mistreated at one place. We also have several places.

16:37Now let me come to what has become of all of this once the state gets involved in producing security. That is to the question, how does a state destroy all of this that men, using their reason, have accomplished in order to produce security? By the very definition of a state, the state being a territorial monopolist of ultimate decision making and having the right to tax, we can immediately make some predictions of what to expect of such an institution.

17:22Such an institution will first of all of course try to maximize its taxes and thereby of course attacking our property and property rights. Secondly, it has, because it can finance itself through taxes, practically no interest in actually doing what it promises to do, that is to protect us. not to work and nonetheless to have a great income, that's of course everybody's dream. And certainly we can predict that a state, because it is the ultimate arbitrator in any case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself, will of course tend to pervert law, will actually cause conflicts and then decide the conflicts in its own favor. It hits you on the Head and then you have to come to it and say, I don't think this was right, but they are the ultimate judge. They of course say, yes of course it was right and now you have to pay for this insult that they did to you. Accordingly, states have disarmed its population. Wherever you look, even in the United States there is certainly a tendency

18:42is under way in this direction, and it has armed itself. The defense expenditures currently of the federal government are in the neighborhood of $750 billion per year, that is somewhat less than $3,000 per year. You can imagine how much defense you could get for this alone. Most of it, however, not to protect you, but to provoke, to bully, to attack others, mostly outside of the United States, or to defend itself, rather than to protect its citizens. And while the government has certainly been successful in creating enemies all over the and also successful in creating some unreliable because bribed friends all over the world, they are unable to protect its own population against provoked terrorists equipped with no more than box cutters and typically for the inefficiency of tax funded agencies, they can't even defend their own headquarters of aggression that is a pentagon from a tax cutters.

19:59Tax by Foreigners. This morning I listened to TV. There was a hilarious little report given that Kerry and Bush had appeared in the same town. And during this appearance in the town, three bank robberies occurred. That tells you roughly what their priorities To protect them or to protect you? In addition, all levels of governments, and again recall how important wealth is in order to protect ourselves, all governments further impoverish us by taking nearly another $10,000 per person per year away from us.

20:50What some net would be to defend yourself. But then some people might say, but we get something for it, don't we? Yes. But what is it that we get? Now, what we get in addition is we get government and gendered inflation which makes us still poorer. We get thousands of New Laws and Regulations Annually, which create permanent legal uncertainty and moral hazard and drives many people, millions of people into bankruptcy and economic despair. We get government supervision of all our major financial transactions and must declare all of our incomes wherever we earn them and from whatever source in order to prevent us from seeking safety from confiscation elsewhere in other jurisdictions.

21:50We have our government using our own confiscated money, compelling other governments to deliver us and our money back into its protective hands, if they so desire. We have our government arrest more than one million citizens annually for committing victimless crimes and cease such offenders property even before they are convicted of anything, thus robbing them of all the means to engage even in defensive measures against such attacks against them. We have our government in the name of patriotism, of course, tap our telephones and read our We have our government through its Food and Drug Administration kill or cause pain and suffering to countless innocent citizens year after year.

22:51We have our government provide us and surround us with public goods such as roads and parks which are unsafe at all times, ill-maintained and the breeding ground of crime. We have our government cause or contribute even to natural disasters. Walter Block recently wrote an article on this subject. Just think about the wildfires that break out occasionally and which are caused, of course, by improperly maintained public forests where environmentalists prevent that the underbrush is cut appropriately so that these fires can be prevented.

23:39We have our government cause or contribute the flooding of rivers. Just think of the Mississippi by incorrectly correcting the natural flow of rivers. We have our government, through its public utility monopolies, fail again and again, in every case of a hurricane, to provide us with electricity and clean water, as if that were a difficult engineering test, you just put the electricity lines underground. I have seen that in other places, but if of course you have these teeny poles there and the wind blows a little bit, of course, You will be without electricity. I don't think it requires an engineering wonder to prevent something like this from ever occurring again. We have our government also create unsafe locations by establishing public housing in various districts, importing crime into crime-free and subsidizing the habitation of dangerous locations such as flood zones by bailing out, of course with taxpayer money, those people who have no insurance and nonetheless located at places such as this. In addition, we have our government strip us of the right of exclusion

25:20and Discrimination which is inherent in the concept of private property and thus render us increasingly helpless and defenseless. Employers cannot hire and fire who they want. Landlords cannot rent to whom they want. Groups of private owners cannot enter whatever restricted covenant they believe to be mutually beneficial. We must accept immigrants that cannot be considered to be invited by any stretch of the imagination. We have banks and insurance companies that are not allowed to avoid bad risks. Bars and restaurants must accommodate unwelcome customers. Private clubs and associations must accept members and actions that act in violation and the creation of their very own rules and restrictions. And all of this, of course, breeds uncivilized behavior all around us.

26:25And finally and lastly, we have our government forcing us for some ten years, and sometimes far longer than ten years, and during our most impressionable years to attend state schools or state licensed schools in order to be indoctrinated by state licensed teachers to learn that we live in the best possible world with liberty for all where we rule ourselves all on our own and above all where it is our government that allows us to sleep safe and sound while otherwise Thank you very much and thanks to the Mises Institute that it is cutting through this fog of lies and fraud and crime. Thank you.