The Private Production of Defense

This page presents some comments on Hans-Hermann Hoppe's paper on the Private produciton of defense. This is one of the best papers written on the real functioning of an anarcho-capitalist society, and how it would produce and maintain its own defense force. It is a good resource to point people toward who wonder how such a society would work. Hoppe gets right to the point and still thoroughly covers all the main arguments. He does a better job in 26 pages than some have done with whole books on this subject.

Personally, I would probably be classified as a minarchist libertarian, at least in the short term. I believe, as Ayn Rand argues, that a just state can exist if it is the extension of the free will of the people that create it.

As an extropian I realize that its likely some time in the future that governmental influence will decrease in the daily aspects of our lives as the more and more self-empowering technology becomes ever cheaper and more available.

These are the best and most complete arguments I've seen for private defense:

The Private Production of Defense
by Prof. Hans-Hermann Hoppe
http://www.libertarianstudies.org/journals/jls/pdfs/14_1/12hoppe.pdf
http://www.mises.net/journals/scholar/Hoppe.pdf

The Ludwig von Mises Institute has another version of this paper on their website which includes an excellent bibliography--it is double-columned, so I wouldn't recomend it for reading on the computer but works much better if you intend to print it as it comes in at only 17 pages:

After reading that, recomended continual readings:

Fallacies of the Public Goods Theory and the Production of Security
by Prof. Hans-Hermann Hoppe
http://www.libertarianstudies.org/journals/jls/pdfs/9_1/9_1_2.pdf

Power and Market1970) by Murray N. Rothbard
http://www.mises.org/power&market/power&market.pdf