That's like arguing that gravity is illegitimate because it hurts you when you fall from high places. When something is inevitable, we can consider that to be a natural law. Which brings me to:
Gravity is inevitable because it's metaphysical. You can't opt out of it, you can't resist it, you can only act within it. States aren't like that. They rise, they fall, they fracture, they collapse. Every history book is a record of states failing. That alone shows they aren't natural law, they're contingent arrangements built on coercion.
Yes they do. We used to call them villages until they inevitably grew bigger and began their natural consolidation into larger cities and eventually states because we are in fact social creatures, and we do in fact group together and pool resources and eventually act like humans. Including the wrong kinds of humans using coercion to consolidate power, which bring me to:
Villages and cities don't automatically "grow into" states. What happens is that people cooperate, produce, trade... and then some group seizes monopoly power over them. That capture is not a natural law, it is a crime. The fact that it recurs doesn't make it metaphysical any more than recurring wars make war a law of physics.
It's not a choice, it's an inevitability. We're not concentrating power, they are. The bad people. The ones you can't control, who don't give a fuck about what you think is right or legitimate - the ones screaming fuck yo couch, and taking your shit. You can "not like it" all you want, but pretending it isn't natural is living in a fairy tale land. It is natural and there is nothing you can do about it.
Bad actors will always exist, but what isn't inevitable is giving them a throne and calling their decrees "law". And that's the core of the issue. Anarcho-capitalists do not pretend that violence goes away, they just stop canonizing it as authority. Again: If states were as natural as gravity, they wouldn't need endless propaganda, conscription, and taxation to keep themselves standing.
Let me put it this way: If taxation were gravity, you wouldn't need the IRS to enforce it.
Because that's exactly what it is... the distinction being made is "what is allowed in this society in this time period."
Without property laws enforced by a central arbiter, the only validity to your boundaries is your capacity to defend them. The AnCom stance is more consistent in this case as it just kinda gets used by whoever's using it without any connotation of ownership. Abuse of resources is punished by all the other people who want to use that thing.
And without a centralized authority, there will be no "objective standard." The dispute will be settled by force.
Yet there's absolutely nothing in your system which stops these gangs from forming and becoming the law of the land. It's a barely coherent mess of lofty principles with no means of enforcing them.
You keep circling back to the same assertion, that law is whatever gets enforced. That is not an argument, that's surrender. By your definition, lynch mobs are law, gulags are law, Auschwitz was law. At that point, the word "law" has lost all meaning and is nothing more than a sociological shrug.
I've pressed you on this before and you've never addressed it. You have never explained how, under your definition, one can distinguish between a contract and extortion, between defense and assault, between a trial and a show trial. You just reassert "law is force" and move on.
Property rules are not "lofty principles", they're the only recognition of reality that makes peaceful human coexistence possible. Two people can't plow the same acre in two different ways at the same time. Ownership fixes boundaries in a way that everyone can understand and plan around. The alternative you posit ("rules for usage" without ownership) inevitably results in permanent squabbling over every resource because "use" overlaps constantly. It's literal ancom incoherence dressed up as consistency.
And "without a central arbiter, disputes are settled by force" is just as hollow. Every state in history has been a gang that settled disputes by force. The difference is that you canonize that particular gang's violence as "law". And we anarchists don't. Anarcho-capitalism draws the only objective line between crime and defense. And you've refused to face that line every time I've pointed it out to you.
Seriously, all you do is confess that under your framework, "law" is just whichever gang holds the whip. And if you were applying your own stance consistently, you would cease using words like "unjust" and replace it with words like "unpopular" or "inconvenient". Like, really, you argued yourself into a worldview where Auschwitz is just law, so congratulations?
I have access to 1 billion Sub-Saharan Africans, and 100 morbidly obese Dinduishas to tell them what you owe them. We do not respect your property and the only "legal order" we see is our machetes.
The
nanosecond you dissolve Border Patrol I will fly them nonstop to just outside your property line, which per your rules is fine.
"
Your [meaningful sense of ownership] has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful [property rights]."
If you import all those negros onto your land, they are still confined to your land. The moment they cross into mine without consent, it's aggression, no different than if you had imported a swarm of locusts. My border doesn't dissolve just because you crowded yours.
And you keep saying they won't understand, but law simply doesn't care whether an aggressor understands. Again, murderers don't abolish the rule against murder by murdering. They prove that the rule is relevant. And just like that, property rules don't vanish because someone lights a fire, they define what makes it a crime.
Like, Camp of the Saints shit only happens under statism. States wage wars abroad, subsidize migration at home, and forbid property owners from excluding or defending directly. Without that machinery, your NGO can't externalize its "horde" onto unwilling hosts. Each owner enforces their own line.
But look at what you have done. You have performed roleplay of what states already do in this very second. They import masses, forbid exclusion, and socialize costs.
Are you secretly making my point for me? You're showing that the existence of the state, not the absence of one, is the threat.
How do you go about applying this "objective criteria?" What does the process even look like? How is it enforced?
"Objective criteria" doesn't mean a committee handing down decrees, it means a rule that comes from the structure of reality itself. Two people can't plow the same acre in two different ways at once. That act makes boundaries necessary and respecting these boundaries is the line between peaceful use and aggression.
Applying it isn't mystical. In any dispute, you ask: Who first established the boundary? Who crossed it without consent? That's the same whether it's two farmers, two merchants, or two neighbors. The process is recognizing what's already dictated by reality.
And enforcement is simply defending those boundaries. You can do it yourself, you can do it with others, but the law doesn't come from whoever enforces it, it comes from the fact that the boundary exists before either side tries to override it. A monopoly doesn't create objectivity, it only claims the privilege to ignore it.
Will I be able to protect a weed farm with AK47s, turrents, and a pack of presa canario under your system?
If it's your property, you can defend it with dogs, guns, or steel walls if you want. Although I would be careful with steel walls, because if it's polished enough, you could cause accidental property damage on neighboring land due to reflecting sunlight. But the core question is not "what is being grown", it's "who owns it".
Defense is legitimate so long as it's in response to aggression. If someone tries to raid your farm, using serious force to repel them is no different than a jeweler shooting a robber. However, you don't get to aim turrets at the neighboring house or let your dogs loose on passerby.
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