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Concept
Private defense agency
Summary
A private defense agency (PDA) is a theoretical enterprise which would provide personal protection and military defense services to individuals who would pay for its services. PDAs are advocated in anarcho-capitalism as a way of enforcing the system of private property.
A PDA is distinguished from a private contractor employed by a state which is usually subsidized. Instead, such agencies would in theory be voluntarily financed primarily by competing insurance and security companies.
Benjamin Tucker and Gustave de Molinari first explicitly proposed private defense agencies. The concept later was advanced and expanded upon by anarcho-capitalists who consider the state to be illegitimate and therefore believe defense is something that should be provided or determined privately by individuals and firms competing in a free market. The Mises Institute published a book of essays entitled The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production. Murray Rothbard in For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto and David D. Friedman in The Machinery of Freedom expand substantially on the idea. Both hold that a PDA would be part of a privatized system of law, police, courts, insurance companies and arbitration agencies who are responsible for preventing and dealing with aggression. In this environment, victimless crimes and "crimes against the state" would be rendered moot, and the legal realm would be limited to contractual disputes and tort damages, as from assault, burglary, pollution, and all other forms of aggression. This concept is similar to polycentric law. Within economics, discussion of the concept largely has been confined to the Austrian School, as in Hans Hoppe's article "The Private Production of Defense" published by the Mises Institute.
Accord to these authors, PDAs have different motives from existing statist defense agencies: they believe that their survival depends on quality of service leading to a wide customer base, rather than "the ability to extract funds via the force of law", and that customers and markets would thus dictate that PDAs minimize offensive tendencies and militarization in favor of a pure defense.
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