We’re a fairly independent lot in our community, though perhaps no more so than you and your neighbors. We have certain common interests, of course, but there are differences, too, in the way we earn a living and spend our earnings, how we think and behave. I don’t mean that we’re independent to the point of self-subsistence or isolation, or any­thing like that. In many respects, we rely heavily on the cooperation and help of one another.

For instance, when the hot water line in our home sprung a leak, we called the plumber. The electrician hooked up the new lighting fixtures in our living room. The garage mechanic in­stalled new brake linings in our car. The surgeon at the hospital removed our son’s tonsils. We look to the milkman, butcher, grocer to help get food from the farm to our table. And we could extend almost indefinitely this list of goods and services we get from others through peaceful voluntary exchange. It’s true that each of us who more or less specializes in some field of production depends heavily on trade with other spe­cialists; but we’re independent in the sense that each is free to choose from among a tremendous variety of competing goods and services available for his con­sideration, and he isn’t really obliged to buy any of these.

On the other hand, there are some things you have to buy in our community if you want to live there. You can’t sit back and re­fuse to help pay for the roads and streets, for example, or the gov­ernment schools, or the services of the police department.

Ask us why we don’t leave such things as schools and roads and policing to competitive private en­terprise, and you’d probably get as many answers as there are local residents. Some would contend that government operation in each of these fields is an absolute neces­sity — that there is no alternative. Others might defend them on grounds of convenience or practi­cality. And at least with respect to schools, some might even ex­press a reasonable doubt as to the propriety of government opera­tion. The several private schools in the community, supported vol­untarily by persons who also pay school taxes, reflect their faith in education by voluntary means.

Of all local governmental opera­tions, the police function of pro­tecting life and property undoubt­edly comes nearest to gaining gen­eral and unanimous approval. I be­lieve that most persons in the com­munity could give a reasonably logical explanation of the reasons for codifying and organizing their individual rights of self-defense into a societal police force financed through taxation. This communal design for preserving the peace, maintaining law and order, pro­tecting the lives and property of the weak and meek against the aggressive exercise of brute force or deception, is widely accepted as a necessary requirement for the freedom of the individual within society.

So, we maintain an organized police force — to protect life and property — and citizens generally are grateful for the security af­forded by this agency comprised of trusted men from within their own community. We tend to take this service for granted, give little thought to it, find it somewhat difficult to recall specific instances of actual police activity in defense of life or property.

Most of us have little compre­hension of how and where police­men, often unseen, quietly perform the defensive and inhibitory func­tion assigned to them. If we were to judge solely from what meets the eye — from the policemen we see at busy intersections or pedes­trian crossings, or in patrol cars, directing traffic or checking park­ing on government streets and highways — we might conclude that traffic control has come to be their most important problem. And, in some cases, that may be true. If so, how much of the rea­son can be traced to the fact that our protective agency has gotten into the business of transporta­tion, the building and maintenance of roads and parking areas? How come this departure from the theory and the tradition of a com­munity police force that was to be limited in scope to the defense of life and property?

Is it possible that even the local policeman, whom citizens can ob­serve and check most closely, is actually spending less effort in protecting the lives and property of individuals than in directing how the lives of peaceful persons are to be lived and how they are to use the property they have earned and saved?

If the protection of life and property, the preservation of peace, is the prime purpose of an organized community police force, do we not jeopardize the peace and weaken the protective force when we begin assigning to policemen an ever-lengthening chain of duties and responsibilities for managing a highway system, car­ing for our children, supervising government parks and housing projects and relief programs and miscellaneous activities of all kinds? At this rate, how much longer before we’ll be calling a policeman rather than a plumber to fix a leaky faucet? Or to do the electrical wiring, or install new brake linings, or perform a tonsil­lectomy, or deliver the groceries —and collect the taxes levied against each and all of us to cover the costs of added government "aid" and intervention? In that event, may not the police force itself become the greatest menace to the lives, the liberty, and the property it was supposed to protect?

The trend we may perceive in the operations of the local com­munity police force also has broader implications. What of the protective governmental arrange­ments at the state level? And the national level? What are the pros­pects of efficient national defense from a national police force grown so big that the conduct of its multitudinous operations requires approximately a fourth of the pro­ductive effort of the entire popu­lation — in addition to the costs of state and local police action? Indeed, what happens to the very definition and character of the na­tional defense operation as govern­ment grows in this fashion? Is it still to be primarily the protector of the lives of 170,000,000 indi­viduals, their personal freedom of choice, and security in their pos­session and use of privately owned property? Or, as the Welfare State expands, does national de­fense change in character so that the government concentrates largely on the preservation and perpetuation of its own institu­tional bureaucracy and the special interests of the political pressure groups that control the balance of power?

No conscientious American cit­izen really enjoys raising such questions with respect to his own government. These are unpleasant questions, and it is regrettable that they are made necessary by the national and international situations, by the advance of com­pulsory collectivism, and by the precarious status of human liberty in the world and in the United States of America.

Just what is the character and objective of the national defense of these United States? If the question were posed with regard to Russian defense, does anyone seriously doubt that the Russians are mainly defending their State — the coercive apparatus of col­lectivism — at the expense, if necessary, of the life, the liberty, the property, and the sacred honor of every last Soviet subject? And a moment’s reflection must reveal that national defense will neces­sarily follow that same pattern in any communistic or socialistic or advanced Welfare State where a majority of the citizens have lost the faith and the right to practice self-control in the peaceful management of their own lives and their own private property.

What, then, is to be the nature of the defense program of the United States? Is it to become more and more a program of pre­serving the expanding bureaucracy — a program to be designed and managed, without limitations, by that same bureaucracy? Or is it to give consideration to the de­fense of the life, the liberty, and the property that lone individuals most cherish? What is it that you yourself would defend? Would you willingly offer your life, your property, your sacred honor for the defense of the Welfare State?

Does the possibility that the Moscow power center may attack and destroy the comparatively free way of life we’ve known con­stitute a serious threat to your peace of mind and body? If so, are you fully satisfied with the kind of police protection — national de­fense — that exists or is in pros­pect at the moment? Are we ex­pecting too much, even of the federal government of the United States, when we ask it to build rocket weapons but in the process to pay obeisance to the leaders of organized labor, to cure the de­pression, to dole out "cheap" elec­tricity to millions of voters, to pay unemployment compensation to 5 or 10 or 15 million idlers, to build houses and schools for adult and juvenile delinquents, to store mil­lions of bales of cotton and bushels of grain on behalf of farmers?

In short, are we expecting effi­cient protection from a police force that is so busy doing our plumbing and wiring and deliver­ing our groceries that it has lost all competence for defense? If so, isn’t it time to whittle the defense establishment back toward the only purpose for which it can ever be justified — just defense of life and of the opportunity to sus­tain life — nothing more?