“If cooperation tends to be a stable equilibrium, why is interstate conflict so frequent? The answer, I suggest, is that the nature of the state ordinarily allows it to reap the benefits of warfare while socialising the costs. Since the state acquires its war revenues by compulsion (via taxation), and its soldiers too (via indentured-servitude contracts at best and conscription at worst), while the electoral means for providing negative feedback are too occasional and indiscriminate to be terribly effective, the state is able to shift the costs of war onto its own populace. (Thus Bentham well described war as a crime “committed by the ruling few in the conquering nation, on the subject many in both nations.”)”

Read more at The Art of the Possible.

War is as natural to government as cheap slogans are.

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