How can a society without a government pay for national defense?
Many people, when first hearing the concept of a stateless society, cannot imagine how collective defense could possibly be paid for the absence of taxation. This is an important question to ask, but there is a way of answering it that also answers many other questions about collective action. In any society, there are four possibilities that can occur in the realm of collective defense. The first is that no one wants to pay for collective defense. The second is that only a minority of people want to pay for collective defense; the third is that the majority of people want to pay for collective defense, and the fourth is that everyone wants to pay for collective defense.
