Theme: Governance

COULD THE PRIVATE SECTOR PRODUCE A MILITARY SUFFICIENT TO POLICE IT’S TRADE OR WORLD TRADE?
While in the Roman era, any number of families could afford to fund the legions for a year, there is no equivalent today, by an individual or a corporation. Apple is the wealthiest company and it only produces 100B.
The US military budget alone is 850B this year, and while I cannot find any semblance of accurate figures, it’s existing assets that those figures support is on the order of 6+ Trillion at a minimum. And that’s before the costs of training, policies, procedures and off-book production that’s required. The private sector could not possibly fund an expeditionary military, even if it could form a domestic militia. But assuming a domestic militia is necessary, it is unlikely that the top one hundred profitable companies would maintain their revenues and profit.
And it’s not as though we’re in the age of sail and nations protected their merchant fleets collecting resources, transforming them at home, and then shipping the finished products for sale. Instead parts are built by specialty businesses and shipped on containers between countries in a sequence of complex steps. In other words the “I, Pencil” problem applies not just to the knowledge of production, but to the knowledge of transporting the components of production,
So, the problem of ‘being everywhere all the time’ is much more complex than previous eras of being just on the major resource and distribution routes you had to police.
And we have seen recently how easy it is for pirates today (Ukrainian defenders just blew up a houthi suicide pirate recently) vs the past.
No one wants the international system that the USA put into place to end – especially the smaller countries. What the big countries want is the capacity to conduct policy against their people and their neighbors (war) without losing the protection of the world patterns of finance and trade.
The problem is, at least while energy is so critical, anything that affects food or energy supplies does affect the rest of the world and often dramatically and painfully.

Cheers
CD