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Brief explanation of anarcho capitalism

The free market is efficient and just. People have the right to forcibly defend their property, and part of their property rights is the right to travel, to move goods about, and to make deals with those who are willing to make deals.

Freely competing groups without territorial monopoly can uphold justice and defend people. Enforcement should protect person and property, and not redistribute wealth, etc.

Anarcho Capitalists argue that private enterprise can provide law enforcement, and the market place can resolve disagreements about what the law is and what the law means.



Anarchists are not opposed to leaders and leadership, nor to law and laws – What anarchists oppose is that certain leaders should have a special privilege to use force, a privilege to coerce, to compel others to submit to their leadership, to use force in ways that would be impermissible for other people to use force. Anarchists favor there being more leaders, not no leaders – as many leaders as can find followers. Similarly, anarchists do not oppose law, but rather oppose the existence of any body of men with the power to make law by merely decreeing it to be law.

Everyone has the right to defend themselves. Under some very common circumstances a right to defend oneself will necessarily imply a right to exact reasonable and proportionate vengeance for offenses committed against one, to prevent and deter repetition. Of course a right to oneself punish offenses against oneself is a dangerous and not very useful right. One might lose. If one wins, others will find it hard to tell who is the offender, and one's own idea of “reasonable and proportionate” is apt to be unexpectedly different from other's ideas of “reasonable and proportionate”.

We therefore expect that in anarchic society most people, most of the time, will contract out of this dangerous right, by specific contracts with specific people, contracts that provide less dangerous methods for imposing justice, contracts that are for the most part signed, with clear terms that are written down somewhere, explicit contracts that unlike Lock's “implicit contract” are genuinely voluntary in that one has a real choice to contract with one group or another, or not contract at all, or form one's own protection organization.

We expect that most people, most of the time, would sign up with various defense agencies, who would for the most part be responsible for enforcing law, that law would be enforced by freely competing rent-a-cops, vigilante groups, and militias.

The best way the agency can win such a dispute is to persuade its customers that it reasonably found him at fault – the best way it can win such a dispute is to ensure that justice is seen to be done, and the best way it can save money by ensuring it has the right clients is to allow justice to be done to those of its clients that create trouble. The clients want an agency that will do justice to those that do them wrong, and the agency wants clients that refrain from doing wrong.

So, provided that most affluent and respectable people with something to protect sign up in advance of any dispute, each of the agencies involved has an interest in ensuring that justice is done, and wants to be able persuade the other agency, its other clients, and potential customers, that justice was done – the agencies want justice to be done, and want justice to be seen to be done.

Sometimes, to ensure that justice is seen to be done, it might well be necessary to rely on an outside arbitrator, an independent rentacourt, neutral between both groups of rentacops.

An arbitrator needs a reputation for doing justice, an anarcho capitalist defense agency needs to actually do justice. Government courts do not need either one.

For all this to work, we need free markets and competition, thus enforcement areas must largely overlap, so that there is no monopoly of enforcement, and courts must be independent from enforcement organizations, and people must have reasonable grounds to believe they are independent from enforcement organizations, and it must be hazardous for any man to act as judge in his own cause. If enforcement or court monopolies arose, or exclusive cartels of enforcement or courts arose, anarcho capitalism would resemble industrial feudalism for those people who found themselves with little choice of enforcement.

Under Anarcho Capitalism enforcement is based on fealty and association, not on location.

If someone suffers an adverse judgment from a well respected court, and refuses to abide by that judgment, then the judgment will not automatically be enforced, but his reputation is damaged in a fashion that makes it comparatively safe to use violence against him.

Courts are kept honest because they fear loss of respect, leading to loss of authority and thus revenue. Enforcement organizations generally, but not always, adhere to what the courts commend because they fear loss of respect, leading to violence from other enforcement organizations and loss of customers and clients.

It might happen that one enforcement organization preferred court X, and another preferred court Y, leading to the threat of expensive conflicts between these two organizations. If the courts are reasonably just, then both agencies would probably come to an agreement in advance as to which court to use in any future dispute that pitted clients of the two organizations against each other.

And if they did not agree, perhaps because one of the courts was thoroughly corrupt and biased in favor of the clients of the particular agency that wished to use it? Well then, it's war. But at least under anarcho-capitalism those who wish to make war must themselves pay the cost of war, which should make wars exceedingly rare. Since defence organizations do not "own" their clients and their client's property in the way that states own their subjects, they should have far less incentive to make war on each other than states do. If a defence organization wins a war, this means that its view of what law should mean is likely to prevail, but it does not directly gain wealth and power from winning a war in the way a state does. Other methods for determining law, or the interpretation and application of law, tend to be considerably cheaper.

Sometimes there would be conflicts. Perhaps Militia A might claim that Militia B was soft on crime. Militia B might claim that Militia A was lawless and violent.

If Militia A was lawless and violent, this would probably eventually bring it into conflict with other enforcement organizations, a conflict that would normally be resolved by the courts.

Militia A might reject the verdict of the courts, though this is unlikely. If it did it is likely that most of its clients would repudiate it, and the leadership of Militia A might very likely die.

The experience of the wild west was that bitter and prolonged conflict between enforcement organizations was very rare, but not totally unknown. Those cases that happened are alleged to result from persistent criminal behavior by one of the enforcement organizations, some say both.

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