@thesotiris 5 July 2025 more from that month

The dumbest objections against statelessness #12: "But what if we're attacked!"

The idea that “we need government” to protect us from attackers is ludicrous, when it’s government itself that provokes, invites, and incentivises war by making it profitable. The state has all the incentive in the world to make war. It solidifies its hold on its people by keeping them terrorised and thus always looking to a nanny state to protect them. This is textbook racketeering, as the state creates the problems it then presumes to try to solve, and never does. And then there’s corruption: when you’re in charge of a monopoly of violence, you are corruptible, thus open to be bribed by military industrialists. A war here and there keeps all participants fed, with even more hold over their people. Expendable males are at no cost at all; it’s just a culling of the population. It’s only when females (the bottleneck of reproduction) start dying en mass that wars magically end. The more money a state spends on war, the more it secures its existence. The people who run your government are open for hire to the highest-bidding military industrialist, and none of them care about you. Your government is a single centralised “authority” with consolidated means of violence in its hands. This makes war an inalienable characteristic of the state, and a grave inevitability of government. Free stateless societies have zero interest in war — only trade. There is no central “authority” to make alliances with states and be drawn into war to secure petty political interests. Because that’s what war boils down to: bullshit interests of people who’ll never get even close to a front line. Stateless societies reserve the right to protect themselves, and there will always be a market for weapons and security. But there’s a difference between securing your home and drone-striking someone else’s home far away just because your “god” or your government told you to. And for most, their government is their god, as they follow its commandments religiously. Preemptive wars and foreign interventions are impossible in a truly free, stateless, and voluntaryist society. Why? Because there is no profit in war in a free competitive market. Profit in war comes exclusively under **monopolies and oligopolies, which can only emerge through government corruption — bribing to pass favourable laws that empower the already powerful while crushing smaller competitors**. This is why monopolies and oligopolies exist. **Under a free market, the great equaliser of relentless competition does not allow anyone to get “too big to fail”**. Besides, without a government to bribe and control, there is no way for any weapons manufacturer to incite full-scale war. Whom are they going to bribe to escalate into a needless war? Now, you might imagine that a free stateless society would be attacked by a neighbouring state. Fair enough. But this shows how government is the enemy, as it is always aggressive and expansionist. **A free society would never band together to attack and conquer a society under a state. This tells you all you need to know about at least the moral superiority of statelessness**. To assume you need government to protect you from government, just because “your” government speaks your own language is the deception you keep falling for. And in many historical instances, foreign rulers were not as bad as local ones, so it doesn’t really matter that much who rules over you if the main problem is that you are ruled. ***“But how can you protect yourself without government?”*** That’s like asking how can you protect yourself without your mommy. A society that wishes to protect itself does not need a centralised authority to tell it who the enemy is and to then force unwilling individuals to go kill and die half the planet away for nonsense political interests. **Voluntary militia is how you protect yourself without government.** If you must be forced to fight for your community (if you don’t feel the need to voluntarily take up arms against a common foe unless you are forced to via threat of violence by your own government), then **your community is not worth fighting for, let alone dying for**. And this is **the test of a society**: if not enough people are willing to fight for it voluntarily, then there’s something off about it — it’s not a society. It isn’t a community with enough solidarity or common values. It’s not worth keeping. You might as well move or submit to your attacker who can’t be much worse than your current rulers. And if you have rulers, it doesn’t matter which language they speak. In many cases in history, foreign rulers are far better than local ones (I grew up in a former British colony and I can attest to that — people still admit that it wasn’t as bad under British rule as it was under native rule). Voluntary militia is what you do if and when you’re attacked. If your society is worth a damn, then people will voluntarily pay and serve to protect it — unlike today’s faux societies which can only be protected through enforced conscription or enforced taxation under threat of violence. I wonder… what do you do when you are attacked daily by your own government? Answer this before asking me what I’d do “if we were attacked”. If enough people aren’t willing to fight voluntarily for your country, then you don’t have a country to protect. Your country is already lost. So the fact that your government has to enforce conscription or taxes to pay mercenaries is telling. Right about now, I hear the convenient question: “*How would you defeat the Nazis without government?*” Ah, yes, **the Nazis, the state’s favourite boogeyman**. Or is it the Russians? Or Muslim terrorists? I’m confused. People forget that all these threats were/are states, and their targets have always been other states. The state is the root cause here, and it’s insane that we see the state — the problem — as the solution. If a cancer cluster eats up another type of cancer, this doesn’t mean that cancer is good. To crayon-draw it, cancer in his analogy is the state. Government is what invites war because systems of governance are tempting to take over. It’s hard to take over a population that doesn’t have systems of governance already in place. This is why, for example, every single empire in history, even after brutally conquering a foreign region, allowed the local political structures to remain intact: that’s how they own, manage, and subvert the people. Free markets have the best chance of avoiding war because, first, it’s hard to submit people who aren’t submissive, and two, **when goods cross borders, soldiers don’t** (see Bastiat). This last part means that, if you have an incentive to be more valuable to others as a trading partner than as a submitted slave, you’ll find a way to make **trading deals so lucrative for both parties that even a victorious war would be less beneficial to the victor**. This is why China can’t invade Taiwan, or the US can’t start a war with China — their trade deals render them reliant upon each other, and that’s what brings peace. For example, you wouldn’t want to violently take over your local McDonald’s. What would you do with it? You wouldn’t be able to manage it, and you’d end up losing your favourite junk food at an affordable price. It’s not in your best interest to take it over, even if you have superiority in violence. At the end of the day, if you submit to your government’s mandatory draft and the blind obedience it represents, then your own government’s military eventually becomes the attackers, firstly, attackers against your individual sovereignty, and second, attackers of other societies, simply because a consolidated force by which those making decisions never do the fighting is tempting to abuse. “*What will you do without government in case of invaders?*” is not the right question. It’s a loaded question. The right question is “*What will you do when your government becomes the invaders?*” What safeguards are there to make sure that atrocities don’t occur under statist militarism? Lastly, you might claim that a voluntary militia could never match the centrally organised powerhouse of a state military. While Vietcong and Afghani militia might disagree, you could be right: that a state military could be stronger. Violence could be the only thing that the state is more efficient at than the free market. This is an anti-state argument. So, to use this as a justification for government is like shooting yourself in the foot to avoid being shot in the foot. **The dumbest objections against statelessness** https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-objections-against-statelessness-series **Sotiris Rex** https://substack.com/profile/58797461-sotiris-rex · **Feb 3** A collection of straw men, non-sequiturs, false dichotomies, false equivalents, false attributions, appeals to tradition, appeals to emotion, appeals to incredulity, and simple odes to sheer stupidity. **Read full story** https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-objections-against-statelessness-series **Recommended reading** ‘Chaos Theory: Two Essays on Market Anarchy’ by Robert P. Murphy https://mises.org/library/book/chaos-theory-two-essays-market-anarchy ‘The Market for Liberty’ by Morris and Linda Tannehill https://mises.org/library/book/market-liberty ‘Democracy: The God That Failed’ by Hans Hermann Hoppe https://mises.org/library/book/democracy-god-failed ‘The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production’ by Hans-Hermann Hoppe https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production ‘The Private Production of Defense’ by Hans-Hermann Hoppe https://mises.org/library/book/private-production-defense ‘The Privatization of Roads and Highways’ by Walter Block https://mises.org/library/book/privatization-roads-and-highways ‘Defending the Undefendable I & II’ by Walter Block https://mises.org/library/book/defending-undefendable ‘No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority’ by Lysander Spooner https://libertyunderattack.com/no-treason-the-constitution-of-no-authority-by-lysander-spooner/ ‘Let’s Abolish Government’ by Lysander Spooner https://mises.org/library/book/lets-abolish-government ‘Anatomy of the State’ by Murray N. Rothbard https://mises.org/podcasts/anatomy-state ‘For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto’ by Murray N. Rothbard https://mises.org/library/book/new-liberty-libertarian-manifesto ‘Power and Market: Government and the Economy’ by Murray N. Rothbard https://mises.org/library/book/power-and-market-government-and-economy ‘Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market’ by Murray N. Rothbard https://mises.org/library/book/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market ‘The Ethics of Liberty’ by Murray N. Rothbard https://mises.org/library/book/ethics-liberty ‘Human Action’ by Ludwig von Mises https://mises.org/library/book/human-action ‘The Enterprise Of Law: Justice Without The State’ by Bruce L. Benson https://archive.org/details/the-enterprise-of-law-justice-without-the-state ‘The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism’ by David Friedman http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery%203rd%20Edn.pdf ‘The Most Dangerous Superstition’ by Larken Rose https://www.amazon.com/Larken-Rose-Most-Dangerous-Superstition/dp/B00N4EGD8C Essays on voluntaryism by Sotiris Rex https://sotiris.substack.com/t/voluntaryism