I've met plenty. There are those who relish the opportunity for free market alternatives to public police forces.
You've met them for police forces. But have you met any that are against all taxpayer supported services?
The big one being: No military?
Other than that: No transportation services (road maintenance, etc). I've met people who quickly say they want that privatized and voluntarily paid for, but when I really make them think about it, they change their mind quickly. There are always places they want to drive to that they do not want to pay for.
And even if you have met such a person, they really are a minority of people in the group who are against wealth redistribution.
No, it wasn't. A minimal peacetime army and, for most of its history, a substantial navy -- with reliance on that navy, the oceans, sheer size to provide depth, and the fact that only a small number of countries had land borders to provide mobilization time for the army in time of need was a thing for the US prior to WWII.
> See any good bio. of Eisenhower for details
Any bio of Eisenhower (or any non-fiction work more generally) that claims the US had no military prior to WWII is, ipso facto, not a good one.
I would have thought the reference to Eisenhower's bio. would be enough to show that there was some army.
The Navy varied dependent on who was in charge.
Sure, but its not even approximately the same as no military (and its much more true of the Army than the Navy, except, IIRC, for two periods -- from the end of the revolution to 1794 when there was little (and, from 1785, no) Navy, and about a decade somewhere around 1870-1880 when there was a very small Navy.
From just before the turn of the 20th Century onward, the US at no point didn't have a world class Navy.
That's the tradition, but its not entirely true; the Continental Navy was formed in 1775, but disbanded 10 years later in 1785, and it was nearly another decade before the US Navy was formed in 1794.
In any case, anything in the 18th century is well before Eisenhower... ;)
I didn't mean literally "no military" but we've had extreme drawdowns after every conflict . By "no military" in scare quotes I mean that there was an aversion to a standing army dating back to the Revolution. I was ( apparently overly simplistically) identifying that as a principle. The Legislature literally did not want the Executive to use the standing army as a political tool.
Obviously, the inventory ... lag of ships means that we'd have larger navies in some peacetime intervals than others. We only had permanent forces after the advent of the Cold War.
First of all, he uses this as a thought experiment and a sort of alternate method of constructing a model.
Second, it sort of assumes a frictionless universe in which there is much weaker national/tribal/city-state affiliation.
It's a good thing to know about, but I'm skeptical that actual humans as they currently are can handle it.