On Anarcho-Capitalism

Anarcho-capitalism is often considered a cousin to minarchism - but it has one crucial difference which is precisely the difference between minarchism and capitalism: Anarcho-capitalists reject the doctrine of collective self-defense. Indeed, they necessarily reject the doctrine of self-defense entirely, as anywhere violence is encountered, the party that wins, wins; there is no agency which can be granted the function of determining whether the party that won was in the wrong or in the right, because that agency, granted that it had the right of arbitration which necessarily would require it possess the right to enforce that arbitration, would be government.

The suggestion that you can hire out to agencies such as police ignores the fundamental problem that those agencies, in order to be effective, must be capable of enforcing themselves on individuals who have -not- agreed to their policies; anarcho-capitalism ignores the problem that those who government would protect you from are not going to be willing parties to a voluntary government, and if such quasi-governmental agencies can enforce themselves anyways, then there is no benefit to be gained from the arrangement.

An example is an individual who builds a trebuchet in his yard and launches projectiles at your house - if his yard is his domain, and he has not leased out to the same police agency you have, then in a voluntary system there is no recourse. In an involuntary system he is subject to the rules of the police agency regardless of their rules or enforcement practices, and therefore has gained nothing in terms of liberty over a traditional governmental system - and indeed, has probably lost considerably, as the police agencies will not have his interests in mind while enforcing the interests of the parties who contracted out to them; with multiple competing police agencies, the effect product is a system in which the "police agencies" become nothing more than agents of retribution. This situation is inherently unstable, and leads rapidly to single-agency territories, where everybody within that territory is required (as there is no agency which can protect them from the agencies of protection) to pay into the single agency - effectively a normative governmental situation.

This is true because geography is significant; in a situation in which geography is morphable, this problem to some extent disappears. Mobility of capital removes this primary barrier. In the US we see mobile capital primarily in the form of retirees and other individuals living in RVs and similar, who have little barrier to leaving one geography in favour of another; this is not a practical solution on land for most capital goods, however, as mobility is very expensive. In the ocean or in space, this problem changes - boats and spaceships both share the characteristic that mobility is relatively inexpensive.

Examining that, a potential arrangement for anarcho-capitalism might be the idea of, say, an aircraft carrier being a protection agency, with a massive field of ships docked in place against it; those who grow unsatisfied with that agency's protections may undock and move to another, there is no fundamental structural opposition to mobility. -However- - the aircraft carrier is in no way obligated to respect ships which are not paying for its protection, and there is nothing in place to prevent it from, say, launching strikes on any ship which attempts to leave, or launching strikes on ships which attempt to leave without paying a penalty, or even just sending boats out to physically drag the offending ship back into place, and imprison those who attempted to leave. The possibility of hostile governments thus remains in place, although it is to some extent mitigated in this last scenario by the potential for "preliminary counterattacks" - individuals who wish to leave destroying the infrastructure which would prevent them from doing so, perhaps by planted remote explosives.

The real issue with the final scenario is that there is no structural emplacement against acts of piracy or invasion - the situation may be stable, but it can be destabilized - and the likelihood of annexation from land (or planet, in the case of space) based governments seems fairly high.