My own view of war can be put simply: a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them...
[W]ar, in the penetrating phrase of the libertarian Randolph Bourne in World War I, has always been "the health of the State," an instrument for the aggrandizement of State power over the health, the lives, and the prosperity, of their subject citizens and social institutions.
[T]he classical international lawyers developed two ideas, which they were broadly successful in getting nations to adopt: (1) above all, don't target civilians... (2) Preserve the rights of neutral states and nations...
[N]eutrality was considered not only justifiable but a positive virtue. In the old days, "he kept us out of war" was high tribute to a president or political leader...
In real life, however, it's not so easy to identify one warring "aggressor..."
To get Americans stirred up about intervening in a war thousands of miles away about which they know nothing and care less, one side must be depicted as the clear-cut bad guy, and the other side pure and good; otherwise, Americans will not be moved to intervene in a war that is really none of their business...
The second Wilsonian excuse for perpetual war, particularly relevant to the "Civil War," is even more Utopian: the idea that it is the moral obligation of America and of all other nations to impose "democracy" and "human rights" throughout the globe...
A nation's highest and most moral course was to remain neutral; its citizens might cheer in their heart for A's just cause, or, ... if champions of country A were sufficiently ardent, they could go off on their own to fight, but they could not commit their fellow countrymen to do the same...
"Rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local"... A group of people may have rights, but it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to defend or safeguard such rights...
Government is not something imposed from above, by some divine act of conferring sovereignty; but contractual, from below, by "consent of the governed..."
All taxes, by their very nature, are paid, on net, by one set of people, the "taxpayers," and the proceeds go to another set of people, what Calhoun justly called the "tax-consumers," [a]mong [whom] are the politicians and bureaucrats who live full-time off the proceeds...
Just War by Murray N. Rothbard
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