Private defense agency

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A private defense agency (PDA) is a hypothetical agency that provides defense voluntarily through the free market. A PDA is not a private contractor of the state and is not subsidised in any way through taxation. It also does not rely on conscription and other intrusive means of support. Proposals for private defense agencies and similar bodies have been made by Anarcho-capitalists and other libertarians. Within economics, discussion of the concept has largely been confined to the Austrian School.

PDAs work in concert with other agencies such as insurance companies and arbitration agencies, and would have a different set of motives than standard statist defense agencies. Their survival depends on the quality of service leading to a wide customer base, rather than the ability to extract funds via the force of law.

Anarcho-capitalists see the state as illegitimate and therefore consider defense as something that individuals should have the ability to provide or decide for themselves. The Mises Institute published a book of essays with the title The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production. The Mises Review (Vol. 10, No. 1; Spring 2004). A summary is given in a review by David Gordon, [1].

As a private firm offering individually determined defense, the PDA provides an anarcho-capitalist model for how an entirely private defense would work in practice. But many anarcho-capitalists believe that PDAs are not required for private defense - or are less necessary - in a stateless society. Since the greater number of proprietors makes surrender more costly to an aggressor, and since individuals minding their own business pose little threat to neighboring regions, vulnerability to attack is seen as less likely.

National defense is the function from which statists are customarily least willing to part, so the establishment of PDAs as replacements for state or other regional defense mechanisms meet substantial resistance in both theory and practice. Anarcho-capitalists consider the privatization and decentralization of defense (as well as of law) as central to the establishment of stateless societies, since such would essentially eliminate the credibility of (and thus popular support for) the state.