Decentralize for Peace

The United States military is a ferocious beast. It has a budget of $441 billion each year, as much as the rest of the world combined, greater than the entire annual income of all but 15 countries.

Such a mighty force is not meant for defense. It is meant for eternal war.

There cannot be peace where such a beast exists. Many deluded people think that if we change who is in control then we can modify the beast's behavior. However the power to crush any other armed force in the world is a temptation that few men can resist.

The only way to eliminate the beast is to take away its sustenance. It dines upon the world's largest tax base and takes a firmly entrenched part of the US government's annual budget. If the United States were fragmented into smaller units, the taxing power of the US government would die and with it would go the great beast of war.

Centralization is the problem. The larger a share of global income that a government is allowed to tax, the more pressure it has to engage in bully tactics to achieve its foreign policy aims. Decentralization is the answer. Splitting the world's income among the nations in smaller slices criples any one country's ability to make war.

I'd rather see boys hitting each other with sticks than adults shooting each other with guns. The decentralization solution is analogous.

If supposed bastions of opposition to the current administration such as California, Massachusets, New York, and New Jersey left the union, that would take away %27 of the US government's ability to make war. If anti-war citizens want to make a real difference they can simply stop paying for causes they do not believe in.

There is another solution: eliminate the agressive instincts of mankind. This has been the position advocated by utopians such as the Marxists.

Libertarians, working with the world as it is and not as they wish it were, do not allow themselves such fanciful solutions.