What exactly do libertarians have against military intervention?

Why is this? A rational view on libertarianism would be a political or economic view rather than a total Laissez-faire philosophy- helping a foreign people or our allies can be compared to arresting a murderer or a corrupt businessman. It doesn't necessarily have to involve states; I think of military intervention as simply being one group of people getting helping another group by utilizing force. I'm not asking for common arguments against military interventionism, I just want to know why libertarians seem to be so against it and include that belief in their philosophy.

In the current environment it pretty much always does involve states, and all the specific interventions that libertarians have been opposed to have indeed involved states.  Maybe you could start there.

War

 

What if a nation offers to pay back all cost of foreign military intervention like in Libya? I think that cost only around a billion.

Because it involves extortion, rapine, and murder in the best case scenario, and usually its even worse than that. People get mauled and paralyzed, entire families are destroyed. Ask yourself is you want someone in the military to intervene in your home and life by ransacking your private property and obstructing your travel with various missiles, some lethal and some simply injurious and frightening. Thats why.

How do you tell if that "nation" is sincere, or even actually wants military "intervention"? What if the two parties have a misunderstanding on what, exactly, "intervention" entails?

The Rothbard article deplores and despises nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. Without such things, how do you disincentivize an actual state who has such weapons from attacking? Did Rothbard comment on Mutually-Assured Destruction?

Malachi:

Because it involves extortion, rapine, and murder in the best case scenario, and usually its even worse than that. People get mauled and paralyzed, entire families are destroyed. Ask yourself is you want someone in the military to intervene in your home and life by ransacking your private property and obstructing your travel with various missiles, some lethal and some simply injurious and frightening. Thats why.

There can only be one side that can be acting justly in a war, and as you have pointed out, when does that ever happen? I disagree with you that it must necessarily be the case that both sides must be aggressive, but in the real world, that it how it ends up. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter.

"The Rothbard article deplores and despises nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. Without such things, how do you disincentivize an actual state who has such weapons from attacking? Did Rothbard comment on Mutually-Assured Destruction?"

He did somewhat on his chapter of War and Foreign Policy in The Libertarian Manifesto. Give it a read. It's pretty good.

It doesn't necessarily have to involve states; I think of military intervention as simply being one group of people getting helping another group by utilizing force.

 

Even if something like this happened, wouldn't all the governments in the world call you terrorists? After all you would be acting without the consent of the government. Also who would want to spend their own money to go around helping people?

 

Edit: lol look at the signature I have, all wars since ancient Rome were paid for by inflation. Mabye I can print a bunch of useless dollars in my garage and use that to fund an army to liberate North Korea

Gotlucky:

There can only be one side that can be acting justly in a war, and as you have pointed out, when does that ever happen?

There are definitely examples of this, but you're right they appear to be few and far in between--I can only think of a few off the top of my head, all of which involve the former Soviet Union--but there must be more(?): the Winter War (Finno-Soviet War 1939-40) and to a lesser extent the Continuation War (the Finns and Soviets again...a fascinating case study), the Baltic annexations (which were "voluntary" a la: "invite us in to annex your country or we crush you then ship you en masse to the gulag"), maybe Hungary 1956, etc. If we stick to a strict caveat that it must actually be a war rather than blackmailing with war to carry out conquest, then I think only the Finnish cases of these examples actually apply.

If libertarians took power of our country then we would be pretty much the worse country on Earth!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They would let genocide like in Rwanda and Bosnia happen because preventing thousands to hundreds of thousands of people getting slaughtered is 'obviously' none of our problem!

South Korea would be screwed over by us getting our military out of the country and at the mercy of the nuclear strapped NK!

The Phillipines, Australia, and Vietnam would be bullied by the communist Chinese!

We wouldn't intervene in Libya, an act which has (because of Obama) won the hearts of the population there. Arabs would still hate us because WE HAD THE POWER TO ACT AND DIDN'T!

Thank God, Syria will soon be freed by NATO and will prove once and for all that as long as a Democrat is in power, our military ventures are 100% successful!

 

And lol at libertarians using Russia Today as a source nearly 50% of the time when it's a state run propaganda machine that is run by ex-KGB. If they looked at stuff that didn't come from there or Infowars, they would all be sane and 100% support these crucial military endevours.

 

Troll, be gone!

[view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_09eMHzTnHg]

 

IT'S NOT MY PROBLEM

There can only be one side that can be acting justly in a war, and as you have pointed out, when does that ever happen? I disagree with you that it must necessarily be the case that both sides must be aggressive, but in the real world, that it how it ends up. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter.

Would you have examples for a side acting "justly" in a war? How I see war is usually the result of conflicts of interest between several parties. When they don't get settle diplomatically, the guns start talking. So I think there are justification for war possible assuming the principle of souvereignity that may have to be defended or have an obligation to act. 

A libertarian solution to military ntervention would be quite easy I think. Those that think military intervention has to take place will simply have to assemble THEIR OWN resources and use that to intervene somewhere. 

 

 

Does anybody here equate intelligence gathering to military intervention, and on what level? Ron Paul has argued in favor of shifting the focus of US overseas foreign policy to intelligence gathering effectiveness, since poor coordination led to the WTC bombings. 

While nobody in government could quite 'streamline' the efficacy of intel gathering, since it is always proportionate to the ends the military want met (in civilian terms the gov't and military all too often make the intel "fit their thesis" to say what they want it to say), would not an intelligence community, part of State military or part of a PDA, be crucial to deterring and apprehending possible threats?

Does anybody here equate intelligence gathering to military intervention, and on what level? Ron Paul has argued in favor of shifting the focus of US overseas foreign policy to intelligence gathering effectiveness, since poor coordination led to the WTC bombings. 

If that "intelligence gathering" equates to espionage, stealing confidential information, then that for sure will be equated to aggression by the foreigners. 

With respect to Paul, the problem isnt gathering intel so much as analyzing the intel we already have access to. However, as addressed above, many espionage tasks are performed in a de facto aggressive manner. Many are not.

However, as addressed above, many espionage tasks are performed in a de facto aggressive manner. Many are not.

Care to explain where you'd draw the line with examples? What is non-aggressive espionage as opposed to one that is not?

There can only be one side that can be acting justly in a war, and as you have pointed out, when does that ever happen? I disagree with you that it must necessarily be the case that both sides must be aggressive, but in the real world, that it how it ends up.

Personally I think we would do well to try to move away from thinking about war as something that involves two sides and nobody else. For diehard anti-collectivists our analysis of various wars is often quite rough around the edges. For example we have the classic Rothbard Two Just Wars lecture that he concluded by saying the American Revolution and the War of Souther Secession were examples of two just wars (for the American and the Southern sides). And then we have the younger thinkers who are interested in this theme, Kinsella and Gregory who write that no actually not even the American Revolution was really a just war (I do not know what they say about ACW). But actually I think we should recognize that wars are not truly just for one side or the other side (which are never homegenous, but are always coalitions even just by social structure eg of officers and soldiers, or of planters and small farmers, or of aristocrats and serfs) but for every individual combatant separately. I think we should move down our analysis to the level of individuals or even just actions. Is this specific action just? Is this specific cause just?

Marko:

I think we should move down our analysis to the level of individuals or even just actions. Is this specific action just? Is this specific cause just?

That would be ideal.

Marko:

Personally I think we would do well to try to move away from thinking about war as something that involves two sides and nobody else.

Let me clarify what I mean:

For any given conflict (specifically a violent conflict), there must be an aggressor. Unfortunately, if I go into all the possibilities of aggression and proportionality regarding two sides (it only gets worse if there are 3!), I will just make things more confusing. So, I will only look at the basic principle involved. When a nation invades another nation (note that I am using nation in the sense of a group of people, not a nation-state), it must be aggressing against the invaded nation. And the aggression used against the invaded nation includes acts such as trespass and murder and, of course, the threat of murder. So we know that the people of the defending nation can kill the invaders legitimately. Only the defenders could be acting justly, as the invaders have already murdered and threatened to murder, and people may defend against these types of aggression.

As long as the people of the defending nation only use violence against the aggressors, then they are acting justly. The problem is when the defenders start using violence against people who have not aggressed against them. Then no side can be acting justly. But, you are right, that it really makes far more sense to look at the conflict and crimes on an individual level. I was making a generalized statement that it is possible for the entire defending force to be acting justly. But that rarely happens in war, if ever.

The revolting sensation that would overcome my body for being a chickenhawk

Agents with official cover conduct authorized meetings with agents from hostile intelligence services regularly. They engage in subtle games of exchanging calculated pieces of information, some true and many false or misleading. Then they analyze the information they received to try and figure out what the enemy wants them to believe, then they backtrack from that and combine it with other forms of intel to arrive at an estimate of the truth. Signals intelligence and sensor intelligence are both passive and therefore non-aggressive. Open source intel is non aggressive. An agent with non-official cover is a criminal, in the country he works in, but not everything he does is an aggressive act. Sometimes he or she just gets the right people drunk and listens to them.

OK, the open source information gathering is for sure not aggression, even, if it is undesired by other parties. 
Breaking into something to gain access to information is of course another matter. Something that is reasonably seen as aggression (by any organisation either private or governmental )

@Torsten, seems to me this is another ethical dilemma a la 24.

 

Say you have a PDA who believes he has sufficient cause to break into government/private property to obtain evidence to prevent an attack on innocents. 

He is aggressing on what is presumably an aggressor's property. Yet if this is for just purposes, would it be a risk worth taking, and would it still be ethical to reimburse the damages done?

"Sorry we broke your safe and broke all your windows, Fidel. But, ya know, you were holding this nuke that we heard you were about to ship to that suspicious Chinese tanker off the coast of LA. Seriously, cut that shit out."

Thats actually pretty easy. They (the PDA) are only justified if the accused is actually guilty. If they dont find the weapons, then they are in fact negligent, and must make the victim whole in the victim's eyes.

Ye're right. The problem with "just causes" is that you actually can use them to justify almost anything. And that includes all kind of atrocities. And that's what has also been done pretty often in the past.