Although, I believe that if you were able to kill children at will, the game would not be allowed to be released/sold in various countries.
Jokes on you, you can actually kill children in unmodded Fallout 2 if I'm not mistaken. You even get a perk for doing this, although it has massive negative repercussions.
Regardless, my point was about how people behave when their actions are decoupled from negative consequences. And many sovcits think their actions are decoupled from negative consequences, and therefore they act like jackasses.
Even more regardlessly, in an anarcho-capitalist society, there exists no such thing as limited liability or the Nuremberg defense. Everybody has unlimited liability to everything they do. I also reckon that everybody will be armed to the teeth. Think Wild West except much higher budget. In such a society, you will meet the most polite people you have ever imagined, simply because of the consequences of being a jackass.
Syllogisms 1 and 2 are accurate to my position.
That's good, let's tackle 1:
The nature of law
Premise A: Law is whatever rules are consistently enforced by the dominant power structure.
Premise B: If rules cannot be enforced, they are not law, only requests.
Conclusion: Law is an observable social fact, not a principle.
As far as I can see, this simply collapses into something that's trivial, contradictory, unusable, or all of the above.
If "law" just means "what the dominant gang enforces", then calling something "law" means nothing beyond "this is what the gang is doing or will do". It's replacing a normative category with a weather report. "Expect batons". Under that definition, there is always law, by definition, wherever someone can hit hard enough. And that makes the claim of law unfalsifiable and simply empty. No possible observation could show "there's no law here" because any stable coercion counts as "law". And a theory that explains everything explains nothing.
The criterion of consistent enforcement is also a shot in the foot. No actual system enforces consistently. Selective prosecution, discretion, budgets, and corruption are universal. By premise B, most statutes, regulations, and constitutional provisions (which are chronically underenforced) are "not law" while ad hoc crackdowns are "law". And thus your position inverts ordinary usage in a way that "law" tracks sporadic force instead of announced rules. And what's even worse, the moment enforcement is shaky, your "law" blinks in and out of existence.
And you make it impossible to describe illegal state action. If the dominant power violates its own self-proclaimed rules (think unconstitutional acts, unlawful orders, police criminality etc), do those violations count as "law" (because they're enforced by the dominant power) or do they count as "not law" (because they're contrary to the code)? Under your standard, there is no place for state illegality as a category. Whatever the monopolist does is law by definition. Yet in ordinary speech you rely exactly on that distinction.
How do you propose any actor (in the sense of being that acts) is supposed to plan? Like, "if I do X, then Y follows" is a plan. In your view, "law" is just a retrospective or probabilistic forecast of what the gang might enforce tomorrow. So it's not "rule of law", it's rule of whim. And the "objectivity" you claim is merely measurability of force after the fact, not an objective standard any actor can conform to beforehand.
What even is "the" dominant power when authority overlaps? Like central government vs province vs agency vs cartel vs militia vs platform? Either there is simultaneous contradictory law or a normative rule of recognition to pick a winner is smuggled in, but the latter is precisely what you claim to reject? If a regime falls at 2 PM, do its "laws" cease to have been law at 1:59? Is it even intelligible to have a criminal trial against government officials for past "legal" acts? I mean, it would be intelligible if you concede a standard beyond whoever held the whip at that minute. But if you answer "it was law then", you're conceding that "law" is just a timestamped label for who was stronger.
Your notion of "objectivity" is also wrong. "We can observe enforcement" is not normative objectivity, it's just sociological measurability. I can count batons and it's objective the same way I can count raindrops. Neither of these tell us what a law is, they only tell us what happened. You're replacing the truth of a standard with a frequency of a behavior?
And when I pressed you regarding the distinction between contract and extortion etc., you appealed to duress, instigation, predetermination, yet all of these are normative criteria that do not reduce to "who enforced what". If law is nothing but enforcement, then these distinctions are simply meaningless. The moment you invoke them, you've already abandoned your own point regarding the nature of law.
And you later extended this to "rights are whatever the dominant power guarantees if you comply", but that's clearly permissions and not rights. The words "violation", "abuse", "overreach" become incoherent, because only revocation exists. Yet you and everyone else use those words meaningfully. And your position on the nature of law makes that impossible without smuggling back in an independent standard.
The thing is that law that precedes enforcement, such as the notion of law I advocate for, namely law grounded in objective features of reality, such a law can do things that your notion of law can't.
It can explain why the order of a ruler can be unlawful. It can guide conduct in advance and enable planning for the future. It can survive changes in who holds the whip. And it classifies show trials as show trials even when spectacles are enforced. So enforcement then is a defense of law and not a definition of law.
So either you double down on your legal positivist notion of law and concede that "law" means nothing but regularized force, in which case I insist you cease using the vocabulary of trials, contracts, rights, illegality, and abuse because the terms have no content.
Or you admit that law has content apart from enforcement, in which case your point is false and the doorway opens to objective standards that you have been knowingly or unknowingly borrowing all along.
If I'm reading this right, your position is divorced from reality? If a gang or cartel gives you the choice between some tax or the application of force, you pay the tax. That's de facto law. It might be unjust, but justice doesn't make laws. Law and justice being in accordance only really matters to give laws the air of legitimacy.
The only difference between a gang and a government is its legitimacy, which is determined by its subjects. If your view is that all forms of governance are illegitimate, then all forms of governance are gangs.
That doesn't change the base fact that power is ultimately a factor of both cooperation and coercion, and disregarding one or the other is idealistic.
Power is also not necessarily monopolistic, if you don't like your nation, you can go elsewhere and freely associate with another state. However, as it turns out, most places don't want you without you providing some benefit to that state, and most places have some form of immigration requirements.
Oh no, that's exactly the conflation I warned about. If you treat "whatever a gang can make you pay under threat" as the definition of law just because they say it is, then the word has no distinct meaning. At that point, "law" just means coercion and you've basically thrown legal philosophy out the window and surrendered to the banal fact that stronger people can use force to impose their will. At that point you're just using different words to talk about violence.
The anarcho-capitalist point is that law is not a mere description of violence, but principle. Law is rules grounded in the condition of human action which can be identified objectively. Force exists, but either force is aligned with these principles (like defensive, punitive, restitutive, retaliatory force) or it's opposed to these principles (like aggressive force). If you deny that distinction, then you have successfully gotten rid of your ability to say why one gang's edict is "law" while the edict of another gang is mere thuggery.
Regarding legitimacy, it's complete nonsense. Legitimacy is not conjured like a magic spell because of subjects "recognizing" it, because belief does not create truth. The Nazis didn't somehow become right because millions of people saluted. You're describing sociology instead of law, the behavior of people under power. It's good knowledge to have if you want to predict the behavior of others, but it's irrelevant to the question of legitimacy.
And again cooperation is natural, and anarcho-capitalism is cooperation without a monopolist gang claiming jurisdiction over everyone else. Once you admit that monopolies of violence are neither natural nor necessary, the burden shifts. Why canonize the strongest gang's decrees as "law" instead of calling them what they are? (violations of principle)
Your last point is a pure mockery too. "If you don't like it, you can move" is exile and not freedom. The whole point of anarcho-capitalism is that you don't have to uproot yourself just because some gang captured the bureaucracy. Your home, your business, your body remain yours, they don't suddenly switch ownership because someone with numbers and uniforms declares it so.
