The Noun Doctrine: Why Governments Prefer Enemies That Can’t Surrender10/10/2025
Mises Wire
Sako Garabedian
Whiskey never signed a treaty; neither did cocaine, nor did covid. Yet, for over a hundred years, American politicians have declared “wars” on these abstractions with the same certainty that they declared wars on foreign nations. But, unlike wars against actual enemies, these crusades can never end in a victory because they have failed to realize that nouns cannot surrender.
This is the logic of what I call the noun doctrine: when governments frame their campaigns against abstractions like poverty, vice, risk, and so on, they create interventions that have no natural conclusion. Each failure justifies a larger budget, broader powers, and deeper interference into everyday life. The lesson is clear: wars on nouns are designed to be permanent.
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Synthesis and ConclusionA century apart, these experiments tell the same story. Prohibition created Capone, the Drug War created cartels, and covid contributed to the normalization of emergency. The objects change—alcohol, narcotics, pathogens—but the structure remains fixed. When the state declares war on an abstraction, it discovers the formula for perpetuity.
The first step is the goalpost drift. Promises are modest at first—reduce drinking, “slow the spread”—but abstractions are bottomless. What cannot be measured cannot be finished, so the target inflates until the crusade justifies itself.
The second is potency substitution. Suppression doesn’t eliminate behavior; it redefines it into sharper forms. Beer yielded to moonshine, marijuana to fentanyl, and “precautions” to firings and passports. The attempt to extinguish vice or risk instead concentrates it into its most corrosive expression.
The third is the enforcement ratchet. Every shortfall produces its own cure: more agents, more prisons, and more mandates. Each failure becomes the evidence for escalation. This is not malfunction, it is design. A war without an enemy that can surrender is a war without an end.
This is the essence of the noun doctrine. Abstractions are not chosen by accident, they are chosen because they cannot yield. The impossibility of victory ensures the permanence of command. Failure is not the barrier, failure is the system.
Wars on nations can end with treaties, but wars on nouns never end. A century of experiments show the same pattern: when the state chooses enemies that cannot surrender, it chooses wars that cannot end. These were never failures of policy; they were displays of power. Each collapse justified expansion and each defeat guaranteed escalation. The slogans changed, the objects shifted, but the lesson endured: failure is not the opposite of success, failure is the strategy. Thus, freedom isn’t stolen in one blow. It is eroded noun by noun, mandate by mandate, until crisis becomes ordinary life. The only cure is recognition: abstractions cannot be conquered, but instead, liberty can be achieved.
Source:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/noun-doctrine-why-governments-prefer-enemies-cant-surrender
