Coming in Monday’s Mises Daily, Patrick Barron will explore the moral hazard that often plagues collective security organizations like NATO. Why be careful, responsible, and restrained with your own defense when you can get the taxpayers in a foreign country to pay for it?
Today, the news from Europe illustrates this well. From today’s Open Europe news summary:
Die Welt reports that “Poland is worried about the weakness of the German army”, citing Polish Defence Minister Tomasz Siemoniak, during a meeting with his German counterpart in Berlin yesterday, as saying that, “We need a strong German army which does not shy away from the responsibility of defending their allies.”
Now, I can certainly understand that old nationalistic tensions mean that many Poles may still feel that Germany owes them something big time. But every German who actually invaded Poland is either dead or will soon be dead. And they’re certainly not paying much in the way of taxes. That burden falls to much younger workers, and it’s unclear how a foreign government’s demands for more loot will help German-Polish relations in the long run. Meanwhile, NATO is simply providing the means to further stoke such tensions.
