The word on the “civilian contractors” who were murdered and hung for display in Iraq is that they worked for Blackwater USA, which (MSNBC) “supplies security guards to the Coalition Provisional Authority and has provided protection for Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer, among other coalition officials.”
Interesting that when the government needs protection, it too turns to private sources. The chilling photo to the right is cropped from the website of Blackwater. Here is the full image.
And yet this is surely not the sort of privatization that Murray Rothbard had in mind. In fact, Rothbard distinguished two kinds of government operations: a) “where government is trying, albeit in a highly inefficient and botched manner, to provide private consumers and producers with goods and services; and (b) where government is being directly coercive against private citizens, and therefore being counter-productive.”
In category B, we might add directly coercive against foreign citizens. For the activities in Group B, “what we want is not privatization but abolition.”
