This has been a tumultuous year for the world as we faced multiple armed struggles at different fronts around the world. Russia and Ukraine have been struggling against each other since February 2014 and in February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and began occupying more of the country. The Israel-Palestinian conflict began in 1947 and currently, there is an ongoing war between the nations. The issues between Armenia and Azerbaijan continue growing while Taiwan seems like a boiling pot. While the US and NATO armies left Afghanistan, the area is hardly at peace as Pakistan continues to face insurgencies by terrorist groups like TTP. India continues to struggle against the infiltrators through its borders. Yemen, Congo, Sudan, and many other zones are still suffering the war cries. The second world war ended in 1945 but the war continued. It appears that we live in a perpetual war ground. Common sense suggests that war brings destruction, war hampers progress, productivity, and prosperity and it brings loss, sorrow, and death. Yet, the war continues, it never stops. However, man is a selfish animal, we always strive for self-interest, progress, and prosperity. So why does war continue? Why does it appear as if men are acting against their self-interest? After all, wars are not in our interest.
Reasons Behind the Perpetuality of Wars:
Wars are fought between Armies. Common citizens often remain away from the active areas of wars, battles, and insurgencies. However, more than often, common citizens especially women do become casualties of wars. But the moderator that controls armies, the machines of wars is the state government.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his essay ‘On Centralization, Decentralization, and Self-Defense’ explains the government as, “States, regardless of their constitution, are not economic enterprises. In contrast to the latter, states do not finance themselves by selling products and services to customers who voluntarily pay, but by compulsory levies: taxes collected through the threat and use of violence (and through the paper money they literally create out of thin air). Significantly, economists have therefore referred to governments—i.e., the holders of state power—as stationary bandits. Governments and everyone on their payroll live off the loot stolen from other people. They lead a parasitic existence at the expense of a subdued “host population.”
The government is a legal stationary Bandit that considers it is their right to rob citizens through levies, taxes, inflation (the hidden tax), and other means. Being stationary or permanent, the government intends to increase the base of its loot and always try to increase its tax revenue and further increase its spending by issuing more paper money. The larger the loot, the more favors they can do for themselves, their employees, and their supporters through freebies like free electricity, free ration, subsidized LPG, houses, toilets, and so on. However, there is a limit to increasing the taxes. The government has to be careful not to burden the “hosts” whose work and performance make their parasitic existence possible so much that the latter stop working. On the other hand, they have to fear that their “hosts”—and especially the most productive among them—will migrate from their dominion (territory) and settle elsewhere.
This gives birth to the tendency towards territorial expansion and political centralization: with this, states succeed in bringing more and more “hosts” under their control and making it more difficult for them to emigrate to foreign territories. This is expected to result in a larger amount of loot. And it becomes clear why the end point of this process, the establishment of a world state, while certainly desirable from the standpoint of the ruling gang, would by no means be a blessing for all of mankind, as is often claimed. Because one cannot emigrate from a world state, and hence, there exists no possibility of escaping state looting by emigration. It is, therefore, to be expected that with the establishment of a world state, the scope and extent of state exploitation—indicated, among other things, by the level of state income and expenditure, by monetary inflation, the number, and volume of so-called public goods and persons employed in the “public service”—will continue to increase beyond any previously known level. And that is certainly not a blessing for the “host population” that has to fund this state superstructure!
This is the reason why various centralized groups, including the European Union, BRICS, NATO, UNO, World Bank, and their counterparts come into existence. Every superpower tends to increase its base and the whole world under a single power structure appears to be the goal. This is the reason for the conflict between the EU, the USA, Russia, and China. The same is the case with the Israel-Palestine struggles as the Western powers continue to support Israel in the hope of having a controlling hand in the Middle East. This is the reason why in 1948, the state of Palestine was divided in such a haphazard manner, and the same was done in the Indian sub-continent that resulted in East and West Pakistan and India. The West hoped to have an invisible command over the Indian sub-continent, which it has to some extent. The West (the US, Britain, Germany, and other Governments) continue to interfere, hamper, and topple governments worldwide in the name of the War on Terror, or the spread of democracy and others. It is worth noticing that these Western governments are excessively liberal to their own citizens.
Why the Foreign Policy of the West is so Aggressive? Supremacy of Dollar
Territorial expansion requires war – wars between rival gangs of stationary bandits. But the conduct of war requires means (economic resources), and bandits do not produce anything. They parasitically draw on the means produced and provided by others. They can influence the overall volume of production and the size of their own loot indirectly, however, through the treatment of their “host population.” Other things being equal, the more “liberal” – the less exploitative – the ruling gang, the more productive will be the host population; and parasitically drawing on a more productive host population, then, it is internally “liberal” gangs that tend to win out in war and drive the centralization process. This is the paradox of imperialism: internally liberal regimes tend to conduct a more aggressive foreign policy and are the central promoters of imperialism.
These imperialist ventures may initially have liberating effects: a relatively more liberal – less exploitative or more capitalist – regime may be exported to a comparatively less liberal society. However, the further the process of imperial expansion and political centralization advances, i.e., the closer one gets to the ultimate goal of a one-world government with a global central bank issuing a single universal fiat currency, the less pressure there is on the ruling gang to continue in its former internal liberalism. Internal exploitation, taxation, inflation, and regulation will increase and economic crises, stagnation impoverishment, and decline will result. With the economic failure of political centralization becoming increasingly dramatic, then, the opposite tendency toward de-centralization gains in strength.
The states tend to create and support conflicts and wars because the governments believe in Military Keynesianism. John Meynard Keynes proposed that government should raise military spending to boost economic growth. Despite the common belief that wars bring destruction, despondency, death, poverty, impoverishment, and overall ruin, the state, and the government know that wars are the only means for them to increase their territorial influence, their tax bases, and they will help in boosting the economic growth at the expense of common men. That is why the governments continue to develop and buy lethal weapons and there remains a race among countries to own the most lethal weapons.
About 3% of Indian GDP is spent on the education sector. The percentage of ‘education expenditure’ over ‘total government expenditure’ indicates the importance of education in the scheme of things before the government. The percentage of ‘education expenditure of GDP’ expresses how much of people’s income is being committed to the development of education in India. In 2023, India’s Defense Budget was around 13%-15% of Indian GDP which expresses the importance of spending on wars. This shows that under the current system of democratic governments, legal robbers controlling the citizens, the game of wars and defense will continue and prosper. Such armed conflicts are obvious and imminent.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the Ethics of Liberty. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards.
No comments:
Post a Comment