What at first appeared to be a hoax is all-too real: the Pentagon really did have a plan to establish a website to permit futures trading in terror attacks. Responding to public outcry, the Pentagon pulled back, which makes you wonder what else a public outcry might accomplish. Perhaps there ought to be a public outcry against 7,000 civilian deaths in Iraq? In any case, the story is now being spun to make a case against the market economy itself: “The plan is also the latest and loopiest manifestation of a near-religious belief within the Bush administration in the power of markets to solve all problems,” says Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post. And yet it is not entirely outrageous that such a thing might exist in a market economy in which private enterprise were responsible for homeland security; in any case, either such markets would provide valuable information or not, and the success or failure of the institution would be determined on that basis. Lacking such market feedback mechanisms, the geniuses at the Pentagon attempted to establish them artificially, “playing market,” as Mises might say.
Meanwhile, the latest consequence of nationalized security and just what the terrorists wanted to hear: Air Marshals Pulled from Key Flights (MSNBC). Thank goodness for Hans Hoppe’s (ed.) collection of articles on the topic, due out from the Mises Institute later this year: The Myth of National Defense.
