How would all of you go about privatizing the military? Would there have to be some kind of transitioning process from the current nationalized military to various privatized security firms?
I'd assume, if given the option, it wouldn't be smart to completely dissolve all of the existing tanks, helicopters, intelligence, etc. since it would take many months, if not longer, to gain them back.
I haven't yet read Hans-Hermann Hoppe's The Myth of National Defense, but I hope to get to it soon. I'm not sure if he describes what a transition would look like, so I figured I'd ask on here first for a few theoretical possibilities.
Also, any good recommendations regarding private militaries would be fantastic!
I would leave it all to the Swiss Reinsurance Company.
I and my neighbours may pool some money and give it to them, if we feel the odds of a terror attack or military invasion are likely, and we want to be insured against it.
The Swiss Reinsurance Company will then see how much money they will spend on giving us protection, in order that they not have to pay out insurance claims during an attack. You bet they will protect us.
When one earthquake happened in San Francisco, they gathered industrial equipment from all over the world to lead a rescue operation. They put government relief measures to shame. For future earthquakes, they refused to insure unless proper building techniques were implemented. And voila!
Man, that’d mess up Swiss Re’s actuarial uber-system
I’d say that the first step would be to vastly increase the share of the work done by PDAs. The second would be to decentralize the army, perhaps starting overseas, and instituting a system of payment that follows the insurance model: we pay the, say, platoon every moth and they must pay us back if what we told them to protect is destroyed. The commander would of course have much more leeway in selecting his man, sharing profits and turning down offers. Form than on, full privatization would be a piece of cake.
By a minimum of central planing. That means an immediate, rather than a gradual, transition. You have every brigade become a private business of its own. You print up 4,000 shares and distribute them among the members of the brigade. Then it is up to them to survive, reform, link-up, or break-down, increase their manpower, or decrease it, to worry about the finacing, to explain to people why they should fund them, etc, etc. At the end of the day, we know how a transition of a factory should look like, why be inventing hot water?