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That is a good, thought-provoking response. My primary concept of libertarianism is pursuit of a smaller state which just does less in all domains generally. The Britain of 1900 vs the Britain of 1950 for instance. One of the most important liberties strikes me as not getting dragged away by draft officers, heading off to fight and possibly die in a trench somewhere. Or having to pay high taxes (which are needed for powerful armies). Reason-magazine libertarianism might be seen as inauthentic by other schools of thought I guess but it does seem like libertarianism.
With regards to state-capacity libertarianism, I have fewer complaints. It does lead to an increasingly expansive definition of military capacity though. You obviously want to have state arsenals and dockyards, that expands out into investments in steel and chemicals, support for heavy industry and power plants, technical education in schools... At some point it merges with a nationalist state's military-industrial complex. It's a basically continuous spectrum. But at the far end you end up with China's five year plans to develop strategic industries and huge state investments to reorient the economy on autarchic lines, inculcate patriotism and nationalism into the youth and it can hardly be called libertarian. They've clearly passed some key threshold a long time ago.
Was the Anglo-Scottish border really that bad? It was bad by British standards. Most of Britain was pretty peaceful. There was long-term low intensity violence. Likewise with the American westwards expansion.
But it was not extremely severe violence. The Native Americans could not produce 80,000 troops seemingly out of nowhere and ride up to besiege Boston like the average steppe horde circa 500 AD. Cities weren't being razed to the ground. It was not the kind of violence that threatens national extermination if you lose - it was that for the natives, not the Europeans. In Eastern Europe you had cities getting razed and countries getting wiped off the map all the time. In Asia you had steppe nomads showing up and exterminating whole countries. Or they'd install themselves as the leaders and conduct humiliation rituals. Small kin groups and decentralized defence works against a small tribe of natives but will not hold back the Mongols, Goths or Manchu.
I think there's a certain kind of sympathy Anglos think we have with the Eurasian powers. In Australia we have ANZAC Day and bands playing The Last Post, there's a lot of mythologizing. In the US there's supporting the troops and so on. But our wars are nearly always fought overseas and/or against much weaker opponents. In WW2 we lost 0.5% for Australia and 0.3% for the US. Not 17% like Poland or 13% like the Soviet Union. That is a totally different kind of warfare.
Doing what the US did in WW1/2 and switching from huge civilian industry to wartime industry when war arrives is a privilege of geography and size. In 1941 the US Army was smaller than the Portuguese army, that just wouldn't work in Eurasia. The most important thing for winning a huge struggle like WW2 is being big, industrialized and resource-rich, military efficiency and ideology is secondary. If the US had to cope with having negligible oil production like Germany, a population 50% lower, shortages of iron, nickel, chromium and just about everything except coal... German victory in Europe would be hard to avoid.
Germany is also the home of Prussian enlightened absolutism and militarism, von Schleicher's Military State, Marxism and national socialism itself, I don't think it can necessarily be claimed as a bastion of libertarianism. It's certainly not a very libertarian state today and wasn't historically, aside from the Holy Roman Empire period.
Thank you.
Libertarians often but not always coalesce around some form of the Non Aggression Principle, which is that you shouldn't initiate violence. This seems uncontroversial but libertarians try to apply it to the state, which is inevitably and frequently violent to varying degrees.
And this, I think, is interesting, because it explicitly was understood in the American conception of liberty that this was part of the bargain – you would pay for your freedom with blood. I think libertarians are divided on this today, but it's not inherently at odds with very libertarian ideas (not that I am claiming early America was libertarian per se, but it is common for libertarians to look up to it, I think).
Worth considering that the most powerful nation in the world, militarily, outsources the vast majority of its defense needs (perhaps too much for my personal liking) to private contractors (including "direct action" work). I don't think libertarianism is necessarily opposed to a state military-industrial complex, but I also suspect there are probably strange and radical uh "free market solutions" to defense that have not been tried, or not been tried for some time, for a variety of reasons. Maybe we'll get to see how letters of marque work soon...
I'm really not sure how it stacked up to its peers. But let's just accept for the sake of argument that England was "fairly peaceful" albeit with long-term low intensity violence – we'll stipulate that the many campaigns in France, Scotland, Ireland, etc. count as closer to this than existential industrialized warfare. But I think that long term violence is better for creating martial peoples than short-term high intensity violence. I suspect it has some failure modes, but while I don't have a good grasp of Asian history I get the impression that in places like China and maybe at times India it tended more (especially on a per capita basis) towards short term high intensity violence with periods of stability in between, and the result was that smaller states with a history of constant, lower intensity warfare rode roughshod over them – not merely the Europeans, but also the Japanese and, as you mention, the Mongols. My understanding is that to this day in China and, e.g., Korea, the military is a low-status profession (whereas here in the United States it is extremely high status in some communities and high enough status generally that speaking of it as low status is to risk cancelation, although doubtless it is considered low status in some quarters).
However again I will cop to not having a good idea of Chinese history, so maybe I am wrong! But England's long-term low intensity violence certainly did not do it a disservice when it came to conflict; first Britain and then her culturally similar and (even more so) geographically privileged American offspring absolutely dominated the world, and this was not merely due to superior industry and firepower but also due, I think, to superior martial prowess.
The Comanche, as you say, were too low in numbers to seriously threaten the United States or the "Mexican nation" as a whole but they were a serious enough threat that they pushed back the border during the Civil War and used northern Mexico as a sort of loot farm for decades – and all of that with extremely low numbers. Probably fewer than 1,000 Comanche were part of the Great Raid of 1840 and they overran and burned two white settlements; Linnville was never rebuilt. The problem with the Comanche was simply that they didn't have the numbers, and they also seemed to suffer from what I think is a fairly common problem of premodern conflict, which is that they would bail on skirmishes that weren't inevitably going there way instead of risking taking casualties. Which meant, incidentally, that smaller groups of settlers could and did hold off larger groups of Comanche. I think that this plays into my general suggestion that libertarian "tendencies" arise among individualistic peoples, which often arise in relatively low-population-density high-conflict regions, although I suspect that's not all of the picture. Libertarianism itself as an ideology I think arises in part as a reaction to the atrocities perpetrated by high state capacity actors – it's not an inevitable outgrowth of libertarian tendencies, I don't think. But I'd suggest it's precisely the sort of people who have to fight a group of bandits coming over the hill that develop the individualized tendencies that can easily manifest as libertarianism or similar ideological leanings.
Didn't the Mongolians take over China and then peter out when facing the comparatively less populous and decentralized Eastern Europeans? I realize that wasn't the only factor there, but I'm not really sure that necessarily cuts in favor of large hierarchical states instead of numerous decentralized ones. If, as I suspect, long-term violence breeds killing machines, it would make sense that the Mongols (a people known for long-term low-intensity conflict) would run roughshod over the Chinese (who as I understand alternated between high-intensity warfare and periods of peace) but met their match against the fragmented Eastern European monarchies. However, I suspect that's at best a huge oversimplification of what actually happened.
Casualties in the American Civil War were very large. Sure, not einsatzgruppen-levels of ethnic cleansing kill-counts, but World War One levels of per capita casualties, especially for the South. (Incidentally, the South was the much more "libertarian" of the two polities if you don't count owning human beings and it caused them more than a little grief at managing the industrial war. However, they outperformed their larger counterpart as a fighting force, coming out of the war with a superior "k/d ratio" despite being the smaller force and losing the war).
To your point, the United States emerged from the conflict a much more centralized and less "libertarian" regime, which served it fairly well in cleaning up the frontier (what we might now refer to as "ethnic cleansing") and getting in conflicts overseas.
Yes, I agree with this, more or less. But Germany would have been better served by embracing libertarianism than fascism in the 1930s, so perhaps it's not as maladaptive in Central Europe as you think!
I certainly wouldn't claim it as a bastion for libertarianism today. But in antiquity my understanding was that it was "more libertarian" than, say, the Romans and I think some of those tendencies carried through to the Anglo-Saxons, then the British (and perhaps the Scots) with their conception of liberty and liberalism, and now with the American liberal, "conservative," or libertarian tendency – which in many ways is ascendent.
'twill be interesting to see what we do with it.
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