One of the brilliant things about the Mises Institute is it's extensive online library. Within recent months, I have used this library to study revisionist history on nearly every war ever fought by the US government. Also, I looked for any rebuttals to the arguments presented. (one star reviews for Thomas Dilorenzo's works are great places to start, although there are endless threads on the subjects respectively (Including long discussions about "Hitler, Chruchhill, and the Unnecessary War" elsewhere, equally engaging.
I have been able to see the two sides to every war except for the campaign against the Barbary Pirates. I googled any possible alternative views on the subject, and couldn't find any (Note: I did this for a long time, asking the users of Mises.org is a last resort) . Robert Higgs mentioned the Barbary campaign once, claiming it was waged in the interest of certain merchants up north. Whether this is true or not, it isn't a perfect rebuttal to the alleged necessity of the engagement.
If America were a "free society" at the time, would it have to have been constantly subject to the depredations of the State sponsored thugs? Was there more to be gained from paying them off than engaging them?
Is there ANY literature on the subject in the Mises Library?
The Barbary campaign was simply a way for the merchant class to get its defense costs subsidized by American tax payers. It was the beginning of the long tradition of the American military advancing the interests of American businesses around the world.
If America had been a free society, American vessels would have paid to fly the flag of a foreign power that either a.) had relations with the Barbary States or b.) would provide protection from them. In the 12th Century the English navy did exactly that. It paid Genoa to allow its ships to sail under the protection of Genoa's flag, the St George's Cross, which eventually became the flag of England as well.
In the absence of State subsidized navies, private merchant defense navies would be created which merchants would hire.
Peace
Anyway, so your argument is that because the merchants knew (or expected) that they could rely on the government to negotiate release of ships/prisoners, pay tributes and eventually build a navy, they found it more economical for them to wait for the government to do that (it took a whole decade for the tribute to be paid, and 13 years for the navy to be built), rather than build/hire private protection ships?
Look, building their own fleet would've been incredibly costly and risky. The state claims the monopoly right as ultimate defender and the merchants were already paying for this “privilege” through tariffs and taxation. How would European naval powers respond to a mercenary fleet gallivanting around their backyard? I'm not sure if it would've been seen as legitimate or legal for merchant vessels to bear arms. It kind of mirrors the situation merchant ships face today in the Gulf of Aden.
I don't know a lot about this part of history, but I suspect the merchants may have been trying to use bribery as well, but the pirates realized they could potentially extract more by taking hostages and going straight to the government. The irony is that, In this instance, the state acting as "supreme defender" and "lender of last resort" ultimately can lead to more harm and extortion than in purely private circumstances.
So, arguably, let's say, citizens of Israel (or another such country — let's say, Taiwan; I don't want to get bogged down in a discussion of specific politics) face the same dilemma. Imagine they say: screw the government. It doesn't do such a good job at protecting us. We will hire a private army for protection.
Then, they hire a private army, but then what? If a belligerent neighbor attacks, the army cannot counter-attack, because it would have no status in the eyes of "international community". On the other hand, a state, even a bad one, is more recognized by "internaitonal community". Just look at Somalia.
I'm just speculating here but perhaps trading in pirate infested waters wasn't that lucrative. In other words, why pay for private naval defense when you can just do your trading elsewhere and make nearly the same profit?
Obviously some merchants thought it was worth the risk and went into dangerous waters, sometimes with bad outcomes.
Now when the government steps in and subsidizes your defense, all of it sudden it becomes profitable to sail into the Mediterranean.
Robert Higgs seems to agree:
Nobody "forced" Americans to begin to build a navy in the 1790s. Government officials and seafaring merchants decided to do so and to deploy this force against (among others) the pirates to whom the government had been paying protection money. They might instead have continued to pay off the Barbary raiders. Or they might have rested content to let the merchants of other nations, perhaps Great Britain, which already had a large navy, handle the shipping of American goods in the Mediterranean. The fact that U.S. leaders resorted to force does not demonstrate that they chose the best option. This option did, however, socialize the costs of engaging in the Mediterranean trade, spreading it across all American taxpayers largely for the sake of the traders who had an immediate interest in the matter.
There may also be some more information in "Reassessing The Presidency." It has been about 4 years since I read it and I do seem to recall some information on the Barbary Wars:
http://mises.org/resources/3358/Reassessing-the-Presidency-The-Rise-of-the-Executive-State-and-the-Decline-of-Freedom
Seems to me they wanted the American government to socialise the cost of doing buisness.
Now of course it's possible that without subsidy from the US government they would not be able to compete economically with the other socialised merchant fleets of Europe (a case of the bad driving out the good) - but so what? - the US merchants could sell their ships to the Europeans and direct their labour and capital to something else they have a comparative advantage over.
Several thoughts occur to me as I read this thread:
1. What of a view that nations have a kind of limited jurisdiction on the sea - that the sea, rather than being the domain of no nation, is instead the domain of all nations. In this view defending a very basic level of physical peace on the trade routes might be justified in the same way that preserving the peace in the town square is justified: if it is not our jurisdiction, whose is it? Who do we expect to bring peace there? Extending a limited jurisdiction to the sea seems, on the face of it, a reasonable proposition to my libertarian mind. Though an optional one, certainly, for a young nation.
2. Our nation at the time had a much more nationalistic way of looking at things than most of the people on this board, and also a defensiveness of their sea trade that we are probably ill-equipped to understand. We were not very far removed from England, where the health and pride of the nation depended upon defense of sea trade. It would have been much more natural for us to adopt a view of limited jurisdiction - we were primed for it.
3. Merchants always have choices: stay in port, trade somewhere else, buy mercenary protection, convoy with mercenary protection, convoy with protected foreign trade, ship goods on protected foriegn ships, sell ships to businessmen in protected nations and co-own the companies, use protected ships for only some portions of the route, utilize some overland routes, pay individual tributes, etc. etc. The motivators for changing the situation completely really come down to rising trade costs and the pervading sense of national jurisdiction/responsibility. I would not be surprised to find the former used as an excuse for what was largely the latter.
4. Did we have a national security interest? Hardly. Did we have a national economic interest? Here is the ideological divide: most of us say no - we're utterly content with trade finding its own path of least resistance. We may not think that markets are perfectly efficient or that their results are always universally desirable, but a say 30% cost spike in certain goods due to piracy (either via decreased supply or increased protection expenses) holds no fear for us. For another kind of person - the kind that looks at the nation as a big company, with growth to be carefully pursued - it is an abnormality to be "fixed". There is a devotion to the status quo - quick to spring up - that libertarians generally don't share, either personally or ideologically.
I think the U.S. interest in the sea as a territory of limited legal jurisdiction is defensible, though optional. Since it is optional for any one nation to take up, I would much prefer to see the funding be largley voluntary. This part is hugely important for reigning in the "service" that is being provided. What else would control its decisions and expenditures - it's ongoing scope - if not some forme of voluntary, market-based control of its purse-strings? Otherwise the very differences in operation and perspective that allowed government to plan and execute this approach, when the market could not, can just as easily cause the solution to be inefficient or mis-applied, or to overstay its welcome and its need. To suggest that the possibility of legislative action is sufficient here is to grossly underestimate the power of the status quo, and the preservation instincts of any institution, whatever its nature.