Meh, I’m sick of the Swiss.
Seriously, what about the corporations? Will someone think of the corporations?
Because honestly, citizens with proper training may be allowed to own heavy ordnance, but practically speaking, the only people who will be able to *afford *heavy ordinance will be the very rich, or the corporate.
Now tell me this - what’ll happen when a multi-billion dollar mega-corporation, armed with tanks and helicopter gunships, decides that it doesn’t feel like paying taxes? Who’ll make them?
The merits of an armed citizenry to one side, there is no way a bunch of guys with guns and maybe a few field pieces can take over the role of a modern military.
They’ll take out P.O. boxes in the Cayman Islands, same as they do now.
No one. Same as now.
And what if they feel like polluting as much as they want?
“What if”? I do not understand. Corporations don’t need to resort to violence to get their way from your government. Their method of dealing with those who protest their actions might get interesting, though. And since the dirty hippies probably won’t have the firepower of Monsanto or Wal-Mart, they’d retaliate through guerrilla actions. Security guards don’t make much so bribing one to gain access to a building’s boiler room or AC system wouldn’t be too hard. And if they’re really clever, the guard will be a Man on the Inside anyway.
I’ve read too much science fiction to be cool with the idea of corporations having an army at their command, even if it’s just a little one.
Of course they pay taxes now; not as much as I think that they should, but they pay. They’d pay nothing in this scenario. In fact, I’d expect them to demand taxes rather than pay them. Rendering the government helpless will inevitably cause other groups to move into the power vacuum. Any organization with the money for it’s own army will turn itself into the local warlord, and the government won’t be able to stop them. Whether or not the organization in question really wants to, since some organizations will, and others would be forced to divert money into their own army in self defense.
I think the end result would be a collapse into warlordism, and a near total collapse of the economy and social order.
What problems is the OP looking to solve?
That there aren’t enough guns in America, apparently.
Or asking “What would be the result if the gun worshippers got what they wanted”. Like MrDibble points out a “gun republic” isn’t a new idea.
Possibly, but I didn’t have the end results in mind.
Actually, they pay more in this scenario – private armies are more expensive than coin-operated politicians. That’s why megacorps prefer big government: it gives them an easy and cheap one-stop-shopping control mechanism.
No; that’s paying for their own army, not paying taxes. And megacorps prefer government because without it the stable environment they need to survive wouldn’t exist; they typically prefer small not big government because they are easier to dominate, which is a major reason why the Right is so hot for state’s rights.
And at any rate, in this “private army with a weak government” scenario, how long would it be before the chief thug offs the CEO and Board of Directors and declares himself Maximum Leader?
Bring it on. That’s just the sort of scenario I’ve been training for on my Xbox.
So…that would be 100%?
Maybe it might help if you stated what the values and objectives of such a society would be, besides “guns are cool”.
How do the Swiss or the Israelis handle universal military training with regards to sophisticated weapons systems like armor, modern artillery, aircraft, and missiles? How do they (as they used to say of navies) “man the arms” rather than “arm the man”? Are all trainees required to have a secondary specialty in some weapon system besides the basic infantry training? Or are specialty weapon systems handled entirely by regulars, with the reservists solely as basic infantry?
My purpose in proposing universal military training wasn’t to advocate the regimentation of society under a militaristic government. That proposal was one part of a paragraph, the rest of which was devoted to safeguards against the misuse of such a requirement. It was a concession to what some have pointed out, that a mob of poorly trained and armed civilians cannot function as a modern military. Heck, we’ve known since the Civil War that to be militarily effective, a citizen army has to be armed, trained and supplied by a national government. And if a high-grade military is a necessity of national survival today, then that’s the only alternative I see to having a militarily irrelevent population dependent upon a professional army. The situation we’re in today, which offers frightening parallels to the devolution of the Roman republic into the Roman empire.
And I concede that I have no idea how to handle the idea of corporations being able to afford weapons that individuals never could.
The objective is to avoid a situation in which the government has the power, and increasingly the motivation, to say to the populace at large “shut up and do what you’re told, you goddamn peasants”. Whether most people realize it or not, we’re still a democracy on inertia; and we may be as little as 30-50 years away from some latter-day Sulla deciding that what a bunch of civies say doesn’t matter anymore.
The problem is that arming the population and weakening the military won’t do much to stop that. If the population is heavily armed and society turns against democracy, you can just rally the armed populace to kill who you want killed. No need to use the military for it. The idea of an armed population preventing tyranny presupposes that the armed citizens will overwhelmingly be against the tyranny; not the ones who are fighting to impose it. And I think the latter to be a much more likely scenario.
That doesn’t work.
Parallels to the Roman Republic? Hard to see. What pray tell are they?
Non-trivial problem.
It seems more than bit of scaremongering to predict within a lifetime the US will be a military dictatorship. If that is true, you’ve already lost your battle.
In any case, the armed populace item is a crock relative to the prevention of a military dictatorship, as it will be institutions and civic spirit that prevent such a coup, not an armed rabble. Quite the contrary, the armed rabble, if your “Sulla” situation were in fact imminent, would rather more likely turn into instruments of support. Arms are a tool only.
Quite so. It pains me to agree with Trihs, but he is absolutely correct, taking modern history as a guide.
The national militias are useful as a defensive force against invasion, no doubt, but if internal support for democracy has collapsed or evaporated as you suppose, then said militias are instruments of domestic oppression.