War makes wealth go kaboom

War is the antithesis to the free-market. It summarily violates the non-aggression axiom, a main principle of libertarian philosophy. The non-aggression axiom states that anyone can do what they like, provided they do not initiate or threaten violence against somebody else’s person or legitimate property.

It is the principle that allows a person to acquire a commodity, to alter it in a way he sees fit, and to exchange it with another for whatever he demands as the seller. It is the principle that lets the person keep the fruits of his labour, without being forced to hand a portion of this over to someone else or face criminal prosecution. It is the principle that states that nobody, whether a government or individual, may under the banner of anything, kill someone else, steal or destroy someone else’s legitimate property.

The war waged by the Western powers in the Middle East therefore is completely against the libertarian philosophy. 

No matter what your personal views on the Middle East are, the people of the Middle East should be left to their own devices.  They in turn should leave everyone else to their own devises.

The argument is often touted that as a citizen of the West, it is preferable to have the Middle East controlled by the West, rather than leave the Middle East to rule themselves, as the extremist forces will inevitably garner enough force to take over the entire region. This, it is claimed, would mean that the entire world will be conquered and the world will someday be one Arabic state.  Why?  Because this is apparently what those folks strive toward.

But goals do not always translate to achievements. It is one thing to dream and preach about having something, it is another to make it happen. Getting the population of the entire world to buy into your philosophy will certainly not be done by force, as it will elicit resistance. The hearts and minds of people must be won if you have any dream of taking over the world. 

Is it not interesting that – as Murray Rothbard noted in his great book “For a New Liberty” – Ireland, which was a libertarian society that lasted for a thousand years, “was able to resist English conquest for hundreds of years because of the absence of a State which could be conquered easily and then used by the conquerors to rule over the native population”?

In other words, without a centralised state apperatus of government, there is no way the world can be taken over by a malicious and evil force. There would be no centralised control of militaries, police forces, or judicial systems to take over and control the wider public.

So good luck to you grand-scheming conquistadors in a free world!

Anyways, back to the economics of war. A colleague of mine said the other day that these Middle Eastern economies are in any case such a mess, we need the West to go in there and resurrect the place.

Which brings me to the point of the post. I came across this video by Shannon Larratt who has taken the Wikileaked documents from the US government which shows the frequency of bombs and death counts in Afghanistan from 2004-2009. Larratt describes the data as follows:

I made this animated map showing IEDs as documented in the recent major data leak facilitated by Wikileaks (overlaid on a NATO map of the area). It starts off slow, but the longer you wait, the more furious the attacks seem to get.

The green explosions are ones in which no one was hurt, yellow ones are injuries only, and red ones are fatal IEDs. On the death and injury tallies, the left column is friendlies (including both allied forces and civilians), and the right column is so-called “enemies”. Everything else should be obvious.

I created this with some quick one-off custom software written late at night to do the required animation (loosely inspired by a tool I built in the 90s to animate web server log files, but only very loosely since I no longer have the source code). The reason I mention this is to apologize in advance for any errors.

FINALLY, please do feel free to repost this anywhere you would like. If you need raw video, or want my cleaned CSV files of the IED data, or want a different rendering, feel free to drop me a line at snowrail@gmail.com or at my zentastic.com website.

If you were an Afghan, living in any of these bombed areas, how would this invasion impact your daily life? Would your business thrive under such conditions? Would there even be businesses except for being a street merchant, part of the war machine supply chain, or a terrorist?  What would this do to formal sector employment? Would you let your kids go to school? Would your kids even have a school? What does this do to your standard of living? Does it make you vengeful, and want to get back at the ‘allieds’ who are supposedly fighting for your freedom? How would you deal with it?

War is no way to prosperity. The sooner the Middle East is left alone by the Western Powers, the sooner people can get back to school, back to work, back to life, and the sooner terrorism would disappear without a trace, letting the productive people of the Middle East focus on supplying consumers with cheaper and quality goods and services to earn a decent living.

The wars for resources in the Middle East are the biggest con-job in history.  Oil is happily sold in free markets without nations having to go to war over it.  Leaders need to read Adam Smith once in a while.  As for the US, it is quickly running out of choices on its war path anyway: the debt spiral will force the troops back home, not the generals.