End War - Support Capitalism!

Via Division of Labor comes a report of a recent study by Eric Gartzke of Columbia University, part of which looked at the relationship between economic freedom and incidence of war across countries around the world. The findings? The greater the degree of economic freedom, the lower the risk of military conflict. Contrast this with the data that indicates no such relationship between level of democracy and the propensity for war. This is all part of the Economic Freedom of the World report, including the special chapter by Gartzke on Economic Freedom and Peace (pdf). It's pretty simple: if you're freely trading with someone, military force is an unneccesarily expensive way of getting things from them.