Today some guy who heads the Israel Defense Forces, I forgot his name and I don’t care to look it up, had the great idea (really great idea, no sarcasm) of getting rid of Army Radio.  It’s causing a stir here because people here think it’s normal for an army to control the media. Literally. The army has its own radio station. On it, idiots blather about all the dumb nonsense that all the politicians say all the time.

Now, that an army should not manage a radio station is shooting fish in a barrel. It’s mainly there to stick unwilling draftees who don’t want to do anything so they sit at Galatz and doodle pictures of fish or something.

The harder thing is to argue for a private army. Some guy commented on a post I wrote a long time ago on why the IDF should be privatized. He said the following:

I thought you were cool.  A private army would make a lot more money just confiscating people’s houses than on the people’s generous donations.  That’s why there is an elected civilian making these decisions.

This is how I responded.

It’s hard to confiscate houses when there are competing companies that are equally armed, protecting their clients’ houses. It would start a war, and that would deplete capital, wouldn’t work. What could work though if they wanted to confiscate houses is they could all work together and form a single army and then there would be no competition. They could just take the houses then, but it would be more efficient if they just took a cut of everyone’s salary in a giant protection racket, letting them keep their houses so as to live off the production.

They could even rename the protection racket a “social contract” and call the theft “taxes” and everyone would cheer them and thank them too.

Gosh that sounds familiar.

Let’s all realize that we already are conquered by our own governments. The only way competing private armies could possibly take over your property is if they teamed up together as a monopoly. And the only way private armies would team up in a cartel is if a government forced it. They can and often do take your property, especially in Israel. Consider 2005 Gush Katif and the northern Shomron where the army destroyed an entire city and left 10,000 people homeless.

They can do it. They can do it with impunity. Because it is a cartel. They can do it because there is no competition. Just wholesale destruction and suicide.

If Gaza’s Jews had their own private army to protect them against the government’s IDF, the IDF would have backed down. They would not have risked a civil war with Gaza’s Jewish community. The vast majority of Jews would not have stood for it, and the invading IDF would have laid down its own weapons rather than slaughter Gaza’s Jews. In the end, nothing would have happened. It would have been a standoff, and then it would have been over, and Gush Katif and the North Shomron would still be standing.

Except in the current scenario, where the government has a monopoly on the army supply, the entire community has been destroyed.

So if you want the army to be able to just take your property and destroy it, make sure it is a monopoly army controlled by an elected official. Otherwise, go private.