There is no fundamental difference between a state that owns a corporation and a corporation that owns the state. In the absence of a state institution that has absolute authority, people with money will end up buying the state. In an ancap paradise, with functionally no government, one corporation or a partnership of corporations will eventually usurp the function of the state. Absent ‘regulation’ you get massive monopolies, because free competition is only a step on the way to the endstate of capitalism. Success has a snowball effect. If you manage to get bigger than your competitors, you can use your leverage to suppress competition, and it’s in your best interest to do so. It’s also in your best interest to gain control of the regulatory apparatus of a modern democracy and use it to suppress competition that you can’t simply buy out. Big corporations love regulation. They’re already big, and can afford an army of lawyers to cut through a massive cobweb of red tape. It’s a small cost compared to the risk of being outcompeted by a startup with a better product. But startups can’t cut through the red tape as easily, and incur growth-inhibitive costs by doing so.

Simply put, the endstate of capitalism is a massive business entity that suppresses innovation and competition through state mechanisms and a massive bureaucratic apparatus. It doesn’t matter if the restaurants are called “McDonalds” or “Soviet Restaurant #3184”. You will still end up living in a cheap, ugly brutalist building. You will work for an entity that is either the state itself or a close partner of the state. Wait, under socialism the peasants get welfare, right? But Amazon would love, absolutely love, to pay its workers in housing vouchers and food stamps rather than cold hard cash, if there were no welfare. It would love to have them all live next to the warehouse. We saw this in the late 19th century with the rise of the company town and company store. Both unfettered capitalism and socialism destroy the freehold and the vocation.

The only difference between socialism and the end state of ancap is the motive of its leaders. Socialism is run by the priests of utilitarianism who seek to maximize human pleasure while the capitalist runs his state to maximize profit. But once the capitalist has a universal monopoly, his best interest shifts to maintaining its monopoly rather than maximizing profit. And a corporation in this state is already a moribund institution. The benefits of capitalism are the benefits of competition. Free competition is a brief, fleeting stage of anarcho-capitalism. The Randian Hero-CEO is soon replaced by the Brezhnev-CEO who is concerned with minimizing cost and risk in a monopoly, and socialism and capitalism converge in form and function. Today, we have a system where both coexist in a hellish fashion. The socialist state subsidizes the underclass so the capitalist class can get filthy rich, which is then allowed some influence in the state as long as they don’t run afoul of the Cathedral, which turns out to not really hate the capitalists very much despite their Marxist roots, because it turns out that capital is an extraordinary tool for stamping out heresy.

The spirit of our civilization is expansionary. It needs a purpose. It does not sit in tranquility like Edo Japan unless it is rotting. We are like a shark; move or die. Both socialism and capitalism are death. R&D is expensive; it’s of no benefit to the monopolist to innovate. No carriage-maker with a monopoly will invent the car. Perhaps an extraordinarily powerful state can enforce free competition, which was the point of Teddy’s anti-trust laws, but it didn’t really work out that way, did it? The state apparatus that enforces this halcyon condition of free competition is necessarily going to be massive and intrusive, and ends up becoming its own form of socialism. When competition occurs, somebody wins. The trick is keeping the inevitable monopoly far away from the state apparatus.

The question of capitalism is not a question of ‘regulation’, or of state interventionism. The capitalist class is, to the King, a contractor hired by the King to make use of the physical and human capital that is the King’s property. The contractor is a capable man of considerable expertise, but his contracted use of the King’s estate does not and must not give him legal interest in said property. If I discover a rare earth mineral beneath my land, I may hire a miner to come dig it up. I will likely give him the right to sell this mineral to his profit, as long as I get a rightful cut. If this miner comes back and tells me that now he owns my land, or if he tries to cut me out of the profits, or if he harasses me in an attempt to get me to sell the land, I am entitled to take him out into my woods and shoot him in the back of the neck, and so it is with the King and the Capitalist.