Government Production of Security

Vedran Vuk’s article on “National Security” today reminded me of a passage from Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed:

Motivated (like everyone else) by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but with the unique power to tax, a government’s answer will invariably be the same: to maximize expenditures on protection —and almost all of a nation’s wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection—and at the same time to minimize the production of protection. [emphasis in original]

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9:02 am on June 19, 2009