In honor of the US-Iran war that never actually started, which for some reason was predicted to have the status of a world war, I am publishing an extraordinary translation of two chapters from David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, dedicated to the problem of the army and defense in a stateless society.

National Defense: A Serious Problem. In this chapter, written shortly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops, national defense is considered from the perspective of the economics of public goods; much attention is paid to why the free-rider effect is so pronounced in this sector, and the conclusion is drawn that although there are some prerequisites for a stateless society to be able to defend itself, if it turns out in practice that this is impossible without some minimal state concerned exclusively with defense issues, the “witcher” is ready to accept this lesser evil.

A Serious Problem, Part II. Forty years later, Friedman returned to this topic, and this time he is far more optimistic. The chapter advocates for the “haven’t served, aren’t a man” approach (which girls should also exhibit) and other totalitarian trinkets, because totalitarianism is when everything is done voluntarily, for free, and with songs. At the curtain, the author also skeptically smirked regarding Iran’s military potential, which formally aligns the topic with the agenda of early 2020.