Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can
perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their
own citizens, which is the cause of wars.)   Men who are free to
produce, have no incentive to loot; they have nothing to gain
from war and a great deal to lose. Ideologically, the principle
of individual rights does not permit a man to seek his own
livelihood at the point of a gun, inside or outside his country.
Economically, wars cost money; in a free economy, where wealth
is privately owned, the costs of war come out of the income of
private citizens—there is no overblown public treasury to hide
that fact—and a citizen cannot hope to recoup his own financial
losses (such as taxes or business dislocations or property
destruction) by winning the war. Thus his own economic interests
are on the side of peace.  In a statist economy, where wealth is
“publicly owned,” a citizen has no economic interests to protect
by preserving peace—he is only a drop in the common bucket—while
war gives him