A few days ago, I was at lunch with a colleague, an ex-military man, and the talk got to politics. I mentioned that the government was never going to voluntarily shrink in size; it would only collapse in on itself through bankruptcy. He said that he had a lot of...

It has been often said that war is the health of the state – but the argument could also be made that the reverse is more true: that the state is the health of war. In other words, that war – the greatest of all human evils – is impossible without the...