[Stan mentioned warfare; here is a view from the right-wing Cato Institute, with war seen as a zero-sum game obeying market rules] Gary M. Anderson and Adam Gifford Jr. War is often assumed to be the paradigm of anarchy, the Hobbesian state of nature in practice. War, in that view, is merely the predictable violent breakdown of law and order that follows from the lack of a world government. However, that view ignores an interesting and important aspect of the ``anarchic'' international order. A complex system of norms, including both cultural and legal institutions, exists and functions to constrain warfare. In fact, the idea that the conduct of armed conflict is governed by rules appears to have been found in almost all societies, without geographical limitation (Roberts and Guelff 1982: 2).[1] These rules do not work perfectly. But they clearly restrain the behavior of nations at war, at the margin. The use of violence to transfer resources from one party to another--the central feature of war--is an externality. Because warfare destroys resources in the process of transferring them, it is also a negative-sum game. Historically, the purpose of the constraints on war was not to eliminate the basic externality resulting from the coercive transfer itself but, more modestly, to make the sum of the game less negative. The resources destroyed during war can be thought of as the transactions costs of war. The cultural and other constraints on war, including what we now call the laws of war, then, reduce the transactions costs. If the constraints worked perfectly, war would become a zero-sum game. The value of the resources destroyed in war (the transactions costs of the conflict) are a result of externalities caused by decisions made by individuals. Like all externalities, the decisions involve a divergence between private and social costs and benefits borne by the decisionmaker. The various formal and informal constraints on the practice of warfare function as a kind of constitution that reduces the various externalities. World society stands to benefit from any mechanisms, formal or informal, voluntary or enforced, that mitigate (if not actually eliminate) the transactions costs associated with violent quarrels between nations. The ``international constitution'' reflects the expression of a spontaneous order on the international scene, a product of human action but not of human design, comparable in many ways to the U.S. Constitution, at least in its basic functioning. Our intention here is to explore this international constitution. article continued at: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n1-2.html _______________________________________________ CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
