Following up on my last post, I’d like to ask you which argument for libertarianism you find most compelling (do feel free to specify the version of libertarianism you affirm). In some ways, this should be easier than naming the best argument against libertarianism, though I find myself a bit puzzled as to which argument I think is most compelling. There are, after all, those I find compelling, and then there are arguments I think most reasonable people should find compelling. Nonetheless, here are two that move me (as arguments for more radical strands of libertarianism, such as market anarchism):

(1) Competition is great and worth trying: the best argument for market anarchism, in my opinion, is the promise of private competition for the production of nearly all goods and services (save unjust ones, like slaves). Even though I’m concerned about whether markets can handle the more standard forms of government services, like defense, given how rare it is to find private provision, I think it is certainly worth trying. In theory, competition could internalize the costs defense organizations typically impose on others (that is, state militaries), generate a great deal of innovation and encourage the application of more rigorous standards of accountability to private firms in contrast to military states. These are all attractive features.

(2) Political authority is really hard to justify: we don’t have a good argument that monopoly government is justified. Michael Huemer gives some good arguments against many standard views in his book, though I certainly don’t agree with all of his claims (see my post on his book here). But Robert Paul Wolff and A. John Simmons provide good arguments as well (though in Simmons’s case, the arguments are against political authority but not against the existence of the state). (Note: I think some states have political authority: most of their citizens owe them obedience on a sharply circumscribed range of issues. But reasonable libertarians have no political obligations beyond complying with institutions that function reasonably like market-based legal services, like tort law decisions.)

So if political authority is hard to justify and competition is great and worth trying, the biggest problem for market anarchism is that it cannot rely on being the default least coercive system, but we may be able to secure some degree of agreement on the matter in a small geographic zone within which we can experiment.