Lol 😂
You’d probably enjoy a decent chunk of ancap philosophy and ideas Mike, much more than the new car assessment program at least 🤣
Discussion
I spent far too much of my late teens and early 20s studying anarcho-capitalistic ideas. I just never ran in to the shortened form "ancap" back in those days.
BTW I concluded that anarcho-capitalism is no different from what the world already is, and as you can see it doesn't work very well.
You concluded that a world dominated by big governments with corporations in their pockets, effectively 50% taxation on people, and unelected international bureaucrats making decisions no-one wants, is anarcho-capitalism?
Are you serious?
Ancap is (correct me if I am wrong) where people choose which Justice Organisation they want to belong to because there is no centralization, and there are multiple, and they fight it out when they have differences. That is what nation states are.
I assert that whatever your imagined ideal system is, it will evolve/degrade into what we have now.
Yours is a rather oversimplified version of anarcho-capitalism. It refers to an entirely voluntary society.
So yes, you would voluntarily choose justice systems (likely offered via insurance companies who would provide arbitration and security services), but you’d also voluntarily choose your money (legal tender disallows this) based on markets, there’d be no entity taxing you for “free” shit that governments hand out but rather there would be co-ops and other systems that you could join/opt into so you’d only pay for services you want to consume.
There wouldn’t be these arbitrary bans on things like online poker, communities could forbid it but if the market wants to provide it they will and there’s no man with a gun to take you to prison for violating a nonsense rule.
It’s more like a 180 from the world as it is now where everything is imposed upon you through multiple levels of government top-down, where you have zero choice in the matter, can’t affect those decisions increasingly as power is more distant and have no recourse to opt out.
Rules would be bottom up, localised and community oriented to match their values with an ability to opt out by moving. Higher levels of governance would exist but they’d again be fewer, voluntary and set by the market. Think of things like internet standards, humans need to cooperate so we’d still have rules like that but we’d be free to not follow any we don’t like and alternatives can emerge (no IP, legal fiction stuff blocking).
The argument that it would devolve into what we have today isn’t correct - todays borders are themselves a figment and constantly changing, look into the secessions in Oregon/Idaho for one example.
I would agree there would always be centralisation tendencies for sure, but the consolidation of power coming off that base would be much less likely. We don’t have that base though, we’re starting from the other end so it’s not a fair comparison.
Anarcho-capitalism is really the natural state of mankind, these figments we’ve created to abstract power are unnatural and that’s why they inevitably breakdown over time.
I could write a book about my thoughts on this, but let me just give the core summary. Any population of human beings that is representative of actual human beings and not specially crafted will have a subset of people who seek to profit from criminality. Left alone (and even with quite a bit of interference) they will form into gangs and dominate the non-criminal people as well as fight each other in tribal wars.
The only way to free a people from such a Hobbsian state of affairs is via the formation of the Leviathan, the powerful government and police force that is more powerful than the most powerful of the criminal gangs. This necessarily has a monopoly on force, or else it operates just like yet another gang. If it succeeds in its monopoly on force, even if it starts out composed of the most noble souls, it will draw criminality into itself as people who seek to profit from criminality see an opportunity to do so by corrupting it.
Once such a leviathan exists, it will morph in predictable directions which will run roughshod over your beautiful anarchocapitalist state.
Luckily it leads to a state that is much less violent than tribal warfare. Unluckily is is never anarcho-capitalistic.
Every description of anarchocapitalism I've heard of fails to address the reality of this situation. Of course I'm probably ignorant in this arena, but this was my general conclusion back in my 20s when I considered anarcho-capitalism.
For more detail, read Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
I’ve read Leviathan so yes I understand these points.
> This necessarily has a monopoly on force, or else it operates just like yet another gang.
This is where it falls down - that monopoly on violence will inevitably devolve into the same ‘tribal warfare’ you fear, they are no different to a gang, such is the nature of monopoly. Once the men with guns realise they’re the only men with guns in a certain area, they run roughshod. Afterall, who is there to stop them?
Now you might think it’s more civilised because we anoint a ‘President’ or ‘Prime Minister’ and they seek a “democratic mandate” but that’s just ignoring the underlying reality - they’re simply the most powerful ‘tribe’ or ‘gang’ of a given land. It’s not as if other tribes/gangs don’t exist which have their own smaller competing monopolies, the overarching nature of coercion present in these systems means they will inevitably arise - it’s the incentives inherent in the system.
Now an Anarcho-capitalist system isn’t without flaws, I’m not arguing it would be utopia. The argument is the dynamic would be different if coercion weren’t present in the system.
If your insurance provider, the entity likely to take up defense and justice (which is the primary motive of States in the first instance) has alternatives, then they have to compete.
States today don’t have to compete. They just put a gun to your head and extract. You say it’s not violent - well try not paying your taxes, or not paying court mandated child support, or opposing your military and then tell me they’re not violent.
Removing coercion from the equation and shifting towards voluntary interaction is possible. We manage to arbitrate contracts outside the State all the time because people long ago realised it’s mutually beneficial to cooperate inside an agreeable framework than to subjugate themselves to an entity with monopoly over a space.
The State is not the best form of structuring society, they’d just have you believe that because it’s in their interests to do so.
The conclusion misses the entire point.