Chad Seagren on Service in a Free Society

I for one do not celebrate the extra-legal state-sanctioned assassination of anyone. Other than that....i agree with you wholeheartedly..

I spend a chunk of time pointing out this to people, that in a well-functioning market society people working in market-driven jobs are typically providing more to their fellow citizens than they get paid. It's in response to the common argument that society has the right to tax people as much as the government of the day chooses, because we all gain so much from being in society.
(Of course, it is possible for a society to have rules that financially reward something that is actually bad for society overall, eg open-access fisheries encourage over-fishing, but in that case the logical response is to change the rules, not to tax people who happen to earn a lot of money that way).

Thanks, chris and Tracy W.
chris, I understand your viewpoint and I'm sympathetic to it. What makes me sympathetic, though, is that I would have wanted Osama bin Laden to be taken alive and put on trial. The problem is that had he been taken alive, the U.S. government probably would have tortured him. All along, I advocated, not a war on Afghanistan, but an international focused manhunt. I spoke about that on the BBC last night. It would have been much cheaper and would have saved thousands of lives.

Excellent essay by Chad.

Congratulations to Chad, whom I knew when he took my Economic Philosophy course and critically examined property as a "bundle of rights."

Chad, if you're out there, a "bundle of rights" symposium is coming in Econ Journal Watch in September.

Thanks, Dan. As you can see, your class certainly had a positive impact on my thinking.

Public signalling of the mythology of the brave & righteous warrior is part of the military pay package, especially during times of conscription. Otherwise we would need to pay them more.

I am not sure that EVERYONE who "participates in the market" necessarily "serves his or her countrymen." Suppose, for example, someone lobbies the government to create some burdensome regulation, then "participates in the market" by offering services to make compliance with that regulation less costly than it would be without those services.

While this sort of thing certainly involves a minority of market participants, it's not exactly negligible.