On Privatizing West Point, etc.

I have been wondering—do libertarians favor the privatization of West Point? It sounded like a silly idea to me when I first thought of it, but if all we are doing is training people for their real careers at Blackwater, It seems to me that it is worth considering.

One difficulty is that it would limit education to the rich, and we know the rich aren’t really interested in getting shot at. But I think I may have thought up a way around that. The thing is, the military may have become too workmanlike and bureaucratic—too much like, say, accounting.

The point that libertarians may miss here is that men aren’t really motivated all that much by wealth per se. They’re much more concerned with status. They’ll take a job like, say, drug runner, even though it pays less than MacDonald’s because it is so much more cool than McDonald’s. This trait seems to be hard-wired. Anthropologists say that in primitive societies, men would go hunting even though it yielded less food than hoeing the beans, because hoeing the beans was the iron age version of McDonalds. No matter that it cost you more energy than it yielded; think how nifty it would be to tell the chicks you took down a wooly mammoth.

And think of status relationships in ancient societies. In Greece, you wanted to be a hipparch; in Rome, an equestrian. In each case, note the root “horse.” In each case, you were a special kind of guy guy if you could had enough money to fit out your own battle horse. People clawed each other's face off for the opportunity. A status game.

It might be starting already. My friend Scott tells me he knows a guy who claims title to the world’s largest privately-owned collection of surplus Army tanks. Just today, I saw that Hummer is already advertising that you ought to buy one of their urban attack vehicles so you can help rescue people next time there is a hurricane. With your own time. And risk and money. A status thing again. Like I say, wiring.

Ought to be even easier with airplanes. What if the young George Bush, instead of being forced into a plane owned by the state of Texas (or Alabama) had had to show up with his own equipment--with, I assume, his own name festooned on the side (and, I suppose, his own crew, chosen from out of his posse) You wouldn’t have been able to pry him out of the cockpit. And just think how different our history might have been. No, on second thought, don’t. Bad idea. Sorry.