I do disagree; let me express my disagreement more clearly:
- Government rents are not determined by the market, they act outside the market to incentivize activity that the market would not incentivize.
- Government actors (who by and large wage war) are not market actors; they determine for themselves which costs, if any, they will pay.
Therefore, war does not have much to do with the market.
I can and do deny that. A market is based around voluntary exchanges. In “nature”, might makes right, there are no property rights, there is no rule of law governing what one can and cannot do. A market depends on both parties to a transaction willingly entering into the transaction, agreeing to it. That is not “nature” in the sense represented by the pictures you posted (to which I was referring in mentioning the lion and the gazelle). If you mean something different by “nature”, please clarify. Otherwise, the market, even a very free market, seems very different from nature.
In nature, if I can beat you up, I can take your things.
In a market, if I want your things, I need to give you enough in return to convince you to give your things to me.
But it is still quite relevant. What’s the point of discussing a concept and trying to see what follows from it if we aren’t going to accurately describe the concept? We could make up a million meanings for “market” to which economists would object, and find the awful consequences of all of them, but none of them would necessarily bear any relationship to the concept of a “free market” as its supporters mean when they invoke that term. Nor, for that matter, would such discussions necessarily have anything to do with the “market” as I mean it when I describe the “market as information aggregator”. I’m interested in referring to the “market” that economists are referring to, so the economist’s meaning is quite relevant to this discussion.
I agree that the relationship between wealth and birth rate does not seem to be one-to-one, but this chart does suggest that, up to a point, lower birth rate is strongly correlated with wealth; this chart indicates that above about $15k in gdp, virtually none of the sampled countries has a birth rate at above the replacement rate. Below about $5k, nearly all of them have birthrates well above it.
I’d argue that the causal relationship is that wealth causes a lower birth rate: as the countries stacked along the left side of the chart gain in wealth (which is a trend we see happening across the developing world), we’re likely to see their birthrates fall to developed-world levels.
EDIT: edited for clarity.