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No need to effort post on this, but I've always been curious of what anyone caps thought of other strains of anarchism like mutualism, an coms, and syndicalists.
Ask a genuine anarcho-capitalist anything* - *ideally where a libertarian framework is relevant
- Thread starter XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG
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- Dec 31, 2019
What's to stop a few players from colluding together to dominate the whole market? You argued why the market ought to be free. Now explain how one keeps it free without an overarching authority. And I want examples drawn from real life, not hypothetical scenarios which can go down howsoever you imagine them.
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- Nov 14, 2022
You're assuming that law only exists if there's a single designated enforcer. That's the positivist premise I reject. Law is not whatever a monopoly declares. Law is objective, derived from property and conflict. Enforcement is the act of defending those boundaries. You can enforce them yourself, or contract others to assist you, but that does not make them the source of law.
What you call a legal system is really just monopoly decree. And monopoly enforcement doesn't make contracts more secure. Just the opposite, it makes them vulnerable, because once the monopoly is captured, its corruption is institutionalized.
In anarcho-capitalism, order emerges from property and contract. People can and will form communities, firms, or associations, but those remain bound by the same rules as anyone else. None of them gains an exemption that lets it override the rights of others.
For a state to appear, that exemption has to be claimed. One group has to declare itself above the rules, entitled to tax or regulate others without consent. That is not a natural extension of voluntary association, it's a break from it, an act of aggression. The fact that states exist does not make them natural, any more than the existence of theft makes theft a legitimate form of property transfer.
Owning a weapon and using it are not the same. In anarcho-capitalism, you can own any scarce good, but you can't use it in a way that violates others' boundaries. Nuclear weapons are the clearest case, their detonation almost always spreads damage far beyond the user's property, which makes their use aggression by definition, unless you're prudent and targeting unowned things in outer space.
That doesn't mean nukes are impossible to own, only that anyone stockpiling them would face prohibitive costs. Insurers would likely drop them, defense coalitions would likely see them as a standing threat, and pre-emptive retaliation would be justified. Economically, that makes nukes unusable except, like I said, maybe in outer space.
Feudal coercion only worked because states enforced lordship over people who couldn't leave. In a libertarian order, no corporation has the right to trap you on its land or override your self-ownership. If Disney executives tried to impose "rights of the lord", they'd face exit, boycott, retaliation, and defense coalitions treating them like any other aggressor.
So your scenario is at best not an argument against anarcho-capitalism, it's a caricature of statism. A ruling class claiming special exemptions and using overwhelming weapons against people who can't escape. That's exactly the structure that is categorically rejected under libertarianism.
Conflating the two just muddles categories. Like, I'm not dumb, I know the correlation exists, but there is no causal mechanism that makes things a necessity. Like, if I drop something I hold in my hand, it is necessarily the case that it accelerates relatively downwards, because there is a causal mechanism that makes it so.
Consensual sex between adults is not aggression, rape of children is aggression. That distinction is and remains absolute.
No set number by decree. Consent is a question of capacity. Just like, today, courts evaluate whether someone is competent to sign a contract or a will, the same standard would apply to sexual acts. Is the person in question capable of informed consent? Children, by definition, aren't, which is why sexual acts with them count as aggression. Essentially, people aren't the same, so a one-size-fits-all solution is ludicrous.
The production of child porn requires child abuse. Accordingly, the child porn itself is evidence of aggression, and perpetuating it incentivizes further abuse. Accordingly, child porn is impermissible.
Work itself is not aggression, the question is whether the work is voluntary, safe, and within the capacity of the child. A 15-year-old working in a family shop is not the same as a 7-year-old forced into a mine. The state has often made things worse by banning the former and driving families into the latter.
Speaking only for myself, and not representing other people who might have similar ideas. The common thread in those other strains that you mention is that they reject private property as it's actually grounded, in first use and embordering of scarce resources. Mutualists, syndicalists, and anarcho-communists tend to treat property as illegitimate past some arbitrary point (like "use and occupancy", "the workers' collective" or "the community")
From my perspective, such """"anarchism"""" is just statism by another name. If you deny exclusion rights past a line that someone else chooses, then there has to be an authority to decide where that line is and enforce it. And that is just another state, even if it's dressed in pseudo-anarchist language.
So the disagreement isn't whether hierarchy or markets exist (they always will), it's about whether ownership rules are objective or arbitrary. My view is that property rules must be contradiction-free and objective. Any alternative to that ends up smuggling coercion back in the second there's any dispute over "who really gets to decide"
Collusion is always unstable because every member of the cartel has the incentive to cheat, and the more efficient the cartel member is relative to the others, the stronger that incentive is. And that's not a hypothetical, it's exactly what we see in history.
OPEC is the classic case. On paper, it's a perfect cartel, but it constantly fractures because members secretly pump more oil than their quotas. It only "works" at all because each member has its own state police to punish domestic dissent.
In the 19th century, American railroads tried cartel agreements over and over. They all fell apart until the Interstate Commerce Commission came in to enforce cartel rates under law. The cartel didn't fail because of too little government, it stopped failing the moment government propped it up.
It's the same story with airlines. Price-fixing collapsed until the Civil Aeronautics Board stepped in to mandate routes and fares. Deregulation in the 70s broke that monopoly and fares plummeted.
My point is that the pattern is not only consistent, but also logically governed by causal mechanisms. Where there is no state privilege, cartels fall apart under their own weight. Where cartels endure, it's because the state props them up. That's how the market "keeps itself free", not by some magical non-corrupt state enforcer making a decree, but because collusion without enforcement is inherently fragile
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- Feb 23, 2019
I don't think you were successful in explaining how this would prevent or deal with de facto monopolies from fucking over the majority of people.
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- Dec 20, 2022
You seem to be applying some form of Platonism with regards to law, which I generally reject. Law is socially constructed and does not exist beyond the people evoking, enforcing, and conforming to it.
To establish an operating definition, a law is anything which is consistently enforced. If it cannot be enforced, it is merely a request. If it is inconsistently enforced, then it is just a cudgel to beat people who aren't conforming to some other, often unspoken, law. Monopoly of force ensures there is a singular legal system and a consistent set of laws. Lacking this, you have conflicting centers of force which each may have a different interpretation of the law.
While what you have at the boundaries is competing interests, these authorities will have monopolistic control over certain geographic regions for as long as they are capable of exerting their influence. What you have is a fractured kingdom.
That is the "objective" nature of law.
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- Dec 31, 2019
States and their monopoly on violence can control markets and force everybody to either work with them or around them. Yes, they sometimes bleed money but that's a price they're willing to pay for the sake of geopolitical goals. How is a player in the market to deal with irrational players whom can afford to consider priorities other than market forces? Is waiting them out always the best option?
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AnCaps have no loyalty to a nation or race therefore their opinions are irrelevant. It's also an ideology impossible to implement because you'll be immediately crushed by the Hispanics and Somalis you've invited in for the sake of "green line go up" and because enforcing a border would violate muh NAP.
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- Aug 17, 2018
Where we're going, we don't need no stinking roads.
Correct, roads are built for the purpose of travel. Private roads would exist for the function of maintaining not just the literal road but the easement of its surroundings. That said, ownership of roads from public usage could open up some legal loopholes of necessity of needing to use that road. I think Disney owns roads in Florida too which is already a nightmare itself.
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- Dec 31, 2019
I disagree. Theft is a legitimate form of property transfer. How so? Let me demonstrate for you.
me -> 
you ->
you ->
And now the bike is mine.
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- Aug 17, 2018
I think what they're trying to say is your principles in regards to individual property rights would not matter if a greater force would "allow" uncivilized people to counter your principles through sheer force alone. What good would it do when your opposition would refuse to listen or understand?
Basically, this:
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- Dec 31, 2019
Obviously, the bird cheated and thus forfeits the match.Basically, this:
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- Dec 20, 2022
I'm sure the bird gives a shit.
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- Dec 31, 2019
@XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG sorry for derailing your thread a tad. No hard feelings. 
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- Nov 14, 2022
"de facto monopoly" in the absence of a state is a contradiction. Monopoly means exclusive legal privilege, and that requires a state. Without that privilege, all you can have is temporary market leadership which is always contestable.
A firm that gets very large by serving customers is not a monopoly, it's just successful. It can't compel you to buy, it can't outlaw rivals, it can't stop entry into the market. The moment it stops serving well, it bleeds business to competitors.
That's why I don't accept the premise. A monopoly without the state is not just unlikely, it's impossible. If we call every successful firm a "de facto monopoly", then words have lost their meaning.
Objective law is not Platonism. I am not talking about Forms floating in an alternate reality, I am talking about the facts of reality, namely scarcity, conflict, agency, and self-ownership. Those things don't vanish just because no one enforces them. Theft is still theft even if every cop looks away. A crime doesn't turn into "law" because it's consistently committed
Your definition (law = whatever is consistently enforced) collapses law into power. By that standard, slavery was law, genocide is law, and whatever today's rulers decree is law. But that completely annihilates the distinction between rules and crimes. If law is nothing more than "whatever sticks", then the word law does no real work.
And the claim that monopoly ensures consistency is complete nonsense. States contradict themselves all the time, reverse laws at will, and apply them selectively. Consistency doesn't come from monopoly decree, it comes from rules grounded in reality that no one has an exception from.
What you're describing as "fractured kingdoms" is exactly what happens when law is mistaken for power. Anarcho-capitalism is a rejection of that conflation. Law is objective, power is optional.
Think about it, if law is just power, then Stalin and Hitler as the greatest legal scholars of their age.
The ability to sustain "irrational" behavior isn't a feature of the market, it's a feature of the state. States can tax, inflate, and conscript, which means they can bleed money indefinitely because they're externalizing costs onto unwilling victims. That's what lets them pursue geopolitical goals at a loss.
In a free market, nobody has that shield. If a billionaire decides to burn his fortune propping up an irrational cartel, he can, but it collapses as soon as his capital does. And he doesn't get to refill it by taxing strangers.
And "waiting them out" isn't the only response. Rivals can refuse to contract with them, form defensive coalitions, undercut them, or simply treat them like any other aggressor as soon as they cross into coercion. Market dynamics accelerate their collapse because they can't force everyone else to subsidize their losses.
So the real asymmetry isn't between rational and irrational players. It's between players who have no choice but to bear their own costs, and players (states) who can shove those costs onto others. Remove the state's privilege and irrationality becomes self-liquidating. Really, only states can afford persistent error.
Same reason you were, because I felt like it.
I don't know what makes you think loyalty is absent in anarcho-capitalism. I have loyalty to the people I value, my family, my community, and to the principles that make peaceful life possible. If you call that irrelevant, all you do is assume that nation or race is the only thing that can matter, and the burden to prove that is on you.
Regarding borders, in libertarianism every border is private. You can exclude anyone from your property and you can join with others to set mutual rules of entry. What doesn't exist is a central bureaucracy that forces one border policy on millions of unwilling people.
And it's worth noticing that inversion. Was it ancaps who flooded Europe and America with mass migration? Were ancaps responsible for wars abroad, welfare promises at home, and decrees that nobody can opt out of? Or have ancaps been busy advocating that every property owner controls their borders directly, instead of hoping and coping that politicians won't sell them out?
Seriously, it's crazy to me how many people think backwards. Anarcho-capitalism isn't "invite the world" or "no defense". Defensive exclusion is built into property rights. What's categorically excluded is the political machine that forces demographic experiments on everyone else.
Needing to use something does not erase ownership. Food, water, housing, medicine, all of these things are necessary and all of these things are scarce goods. Roads are the same. The fact that they're important actually strengthens the incentives for competition. People want alternate routes and connectivity between communities, and landowners benefit from linking their property to others.
Cases like Disney exist because the state handed out corporate privileges. Disney's so-called "private roads" in Florida are not the product of a free market, they're the product of state-created fiefdoms. Without that backing, Disney would face competition from rival developers and communities offering better access.
It's true that roads can be chokepoints, but in a genuinely free system, chokepoints are unstable. The more people need a route, the bigger the reward for anyone who offers an alternative. It's only under the state that chokepoints harden into monopolies, precisely because the state bans or regulates away competitors.
If need be, I can describe to you how 19th-century turnpikes and bridges often competed within miles of each other.
What you demonstrated isn't legitimacy, it's possession.I disagree. Theft is a legitimate form of property transfer. How so? Let me demonstrate for you.
me ->
you ->
And now the bike is mine.
You can
a , but that doesn't make the yours in any meaningful sense, it just makes you a thief in possession of someone else's property If legitimacy were reducible to "whoever holds it owns it", then there would be no longer a distinction between ownership and theft. There would be no such thing as theft, because everything is always "legitimately" owned by whoever grabbed it last. But you yourself call the act theft, so you already admit that there is a standard beyond mere possession.
So I suppose thank you for illustrating the point. Existence of theft proves exactly the opposite of what you claim. It shows that possession and legitimacy are not the same thing.
@The Last Stand @Gog & Magog @Penis Drager 2.0
I think the point in dispute is "principles are pointless because force trumps reason"
The thing is, if someone refuses to "listen or understand", that doesn't make the principles disappear. Murderers don't abolish the rule against murder by killing, they prove that the rule is relevant. The whole point of law is to identify aggression regardless whether or not the aggressor consents to the label.
So the notion that the mob doesn't care is just an admission that mobs commit aggression. That's a description and not a refutation. The question is then how to respond to aggression. And without the state shielding them, a mob is just another gang, subject to defense, retaliation, and exclusion.
And to our feathered biped, the pigeon, it did not win a game of chess, it just knocked over pieces. It's a demonstration that it wasn't playing chess at all. In the same way, a mob ignoring property boundaries is not "proving libertarianism false", it's proving why clear rules of property are needed in the first place.
Don't worry, I got some informative points out of it@XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG sorry for derailing your thread a tad. No hard feelings.
I have also received a question in private, but I will answer it here in public.
It's a good question. Ownership itself doesn't change just because someone else puts money or effort into maintaining a thing. A owns the car because A acquired it first and holds the title.
But B's investment isn't irrelevant. If there was an agreement (even informal) that B would get something in return (like shared use of the car, or repayment, or a stake if A sold it), then B has a contractual claim. That's not ownership of the car itself, but a right against A based on the agreement between them.
In other words, repairs and gas don't automatically dilute ownership. They do give grounds for a contract claim if there was a promise and understanding. In a libertarian system, that would be the line. Ownership stays with the original owner unless transferred explicitly, but agreements about use or cost-sharing are enforceable as contracts.
If A and B, for instance, are family members or close friends, it's true that many such arrangements are kept informal and trust-based, but in ancap terms, informal contracts are still contracts. The question is whether both sides had the same expectation.
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- Aug 17, 2018
Yes, it does. If my principles would mandate that I should not do anything about the opposing force because of XYZ, then in essence, my principles would not mean anything since I am deprived of whatever from the opposing force.
But you decided to "play" a game of chess with a pigeon. The pigeon does not know, or care, about the game, but to you, it is a willing participant. In that, how would you enforce the rules of the game of property to the mob?
No, whoever allowed the illegal migrants to ignore law and order and populate the host country are to blame. Now with your next point, what if that ancap allows illegal migrants onto their property where the surrounding property are now under victim of your land? Do you expect them to stay put in your land because it's YOUR border?
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- Feb 23, 2019
It's not in the absence of a state, it's the case of a de facto monopoly because this "successful" company is enough so that there is no way for a competitor to be built or continue, realistically and not in fantasy land, and is not really possible to boycott it, unless you want to go through rough times yourself or deprived of basic means.
I can give an example where I am of telephone companies & ISPs that are basically a de facto monopoly, and they are all complete shit. I'm not powerleveling with this, but I can probably give even better examples.
What is the stance of anarcho-capitalism in regards to consumer rights?
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- Dec 20, 2022
Theft only exists if property exists. And you only have property insofar as you are able to assert your claim to it. In this sense, AnComs and the like have a more internally consistent view than AnCaps do as they reject the power structures necessary to maintain a concept of "property."
(Note: I hate commies a lot more than I hold AnCaps in patronizing contempt. I'm just saying their logic with regards to this particular issue is more sound.)
Yes. That is a correct interpretation of my stance here. If the dominant power structure decreed tomorrow that I am required to ingest a daily ration of tranny cum, the reality of the situation is I must eat the tranny cum or endure the consequences of violating the law.
Something being law doesn't make it good or just. There are plenty of laws I disagree with and plenty of legal things I think should be banned. But I'm not the one with the power here.
And what defense does your framework implement that prevents this "conflation" from manifesting as tangible reality?
I'm not saying principles don't matter. What I'm saying is the only way to get your principles to matter to other people who disagree is the capacity and willingness to enforce them.
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- Aug 21, 2018
*points weapon* "WHERE'S THE FUCKING MONEY, SHITHEAD?"
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- Nov 14, 2022
The principles I speak of don't mean standing still while you are being attacked. They define what counts as defense and what counts as aggression. If a mob storms your land, enforcing property rights against them certainly is not in violation of my principles, it's actually acting on those principles. What's ruled out is being the aggressor, not defending against aggression.
I hope you are not laboring under the misapprehension that I am a pacifist who rejects all violence. I only reject aggressive violence. Punitive, restitutive, defensive, retaliatory violence, all of those are perfectly fine.
Let's assume we're not talking about pigeons, but actual human beings, since those can be reasoned with. Law does not require aggressors to agree first. Murderers do not need to acknowledge murder laws for murder to be a crime, thieves don't need to agree that theft is wrong for theft to be wrong. The same goes for property. If a mob ignores the rules, they're aggressors. Enforcement is the act of stopping them, not of persuading them.
If I invite people onto my land and they trespass or aggress against your property, then I am responsible. The rule is the same as if my livestock trampled your crops or my guests trashed your home. You don't need a central border czar for that, you just need to hold property owners accountable.
And precisely that is the inversion. It's states that invite the world with welfare, wars, and open borders decrees, while dumping the costs on unwilling citizens. In anarcho-capitalism, no one has a right to do any of these things. You control your borders directly, and if I dump problems onto you, I am liable.
Think about it. If I host a party and my guests start smashing your windows, you don't sue "the neighborhood", you sue me.
Don't worry about powerleveling, the geographic locations where these infrastructures are not distorted by the state are in a stark minority.
But the examples you give are exactly what I mean when I say that monopolies don't exist without the state. Every single one of those firms depends on government licenses, rights of way, and regulatory barriers that exclude competitors. They are not "de facto" monopolies that could exist "naturally" without government enforcement, they are state franchises dressed up as private firms.
Without that legal shield, success doesn't result in markets being frozen. If a company gets big and has the chutzpah to start offering garbage service, it creates an opportunity for rivals. That's why Standard Oil kept cutting prices and expanding supply. If it had stopped for a moment, competitors would have eaten its business.
So the reason you can't switch ISPs isn't that they are "too successful in a free market", it's that the state made it illegal for anyone else to lay the cables.
I think I touched upon this briefly earlier, but I'll give a more general answer.
The libertarian stance is that rights are not government handouts. They are protections against coercion, and that includes fraud and breach of contract. If a company lies, cheats, or damages you, then you can hold it liable. If the company simply stops being acceptable under your standards, you can walk away, and nothing stops competitors from stepping in.
What is being called "consumer rights" nowadays (like product safety boards, FCC mandates etc.) is usually just bureaucracy that shields incumbents. In a free market, consumer protection is direct. Contracts are enforceable, fraud is punishable, and reputation is everything. The mechanisms already exist in their babby form today, with private arbitration, rating agencies, and consumer reports. And without the state cartelizing industries, these things would be even stronger.
You're right about one thing, namely that principles only matter if they can be enforced. Where we differ is on what they are enforcing. If "law" is just whatever the dominant gang decrees, then you've defined away the difference between rule and crime. Slavery, genocide, or your daily ration of tranny cum all count as law. But in that case, calling them law doesn't add clarity, all it does is get rid of the very category you're trying to describe.
Property doesn't come into existence because a gang asserts it. It comes from the fact of scarcity. Two or more people cannot simultaneously use a physical thing in the same way at a time, so boundaries have to be drawn if conflict is to be avoided. That fact exists whether a czar proclaims it or not. Enforcement defends those boundaries, but it doesn't create them.
And the answer to what prevents such conflation is decentralization. If you collapse law into power, what you get is a monopoly gang with immunity from its own rules, also called "the state". Anarcho-capitalism rejects that by universalizing enforcement. That means that anyone can defend their boundaries, anyone can contract for protection, anyone can hold an aggressor liable. The principle matters precisely because it tells you what is being enforced, and why aggression doesn't become "law" just because it's consistent.
So yes, enforcement is necessary, I don't think anybody with more than a dozen brain cells denies that. But enforcement does not mean redefining crime into law. It means defending the only rules that make peaceful life possible, and those happens to be libertarian legal theory.