In this post I intend to critique what is commonly called “anarchocapitalism” to explain why it isn’t a good persuasion tool, and to extract what about it is worth keeping.

I. Why “Anarchocapitalism” isn’t anarchy

1. Ownership is authority to violate the Non-Aggression Principle

It should be obvious that property rights are necessary for free trade and thus capitalism. If you don’t first legitimately own a thing or a plot of land, how can you legitimately sell it? However, “ancaps” don’t dwell too long on the implications of ownership and how they complicate other portions of their philosophy.

For instance, most “ancaps” view a law against marijuana use as a government violating their exalted Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). However, if a land owner decides that marijuana use is not to be permitted on their property, “ancaps” accept not only the validity of that individual’s choice, but also the owner’s right to remove violators by force if they refuse to leave voluntarily. In other words, “ancaps” recognize the authority of individuals to make and enforce laws pertaining to the jurisdiction of their owned land, but do not recognize the authority of a “government” to make and enforce laws pertaining to their jurisdictions.

Indeed, fully owning something means being able to do with it whatever you wish, to include destruction, demolition or removal. Ultimately, what property rights mean is the rights to not merely reciprocate but to initiate the use of force upon said property, provided it doesn’t unreasonably violate the property rights of anyone else.

2. Any entity with jurisdictional authority to violate NAP is a government

As mentioned previously, individual property rights grant a landowner the right to make and enforce laws on that land. Any entity that exercises its legitimate authority to make laws and enforce them with the credible threat of force is a government. Therefore, the system advocated by “ancaps” isn’t technically anarchy; it is a series of governments consisting of single individuals (hence the title of this post).

In his book Win Bigly, Scott Adams ranks the various persuasion techniques and, in dead last, we have what he calls “word thinking,” which he describes as “trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words” — for instance, defining human life at conception or at birth to argue for or against legalized abortions. “Ancaps” have all kinds of definitions of “government” to ensure that they are always wrong and that anarchy is good. However, the definition in the previous paragraph is a much more widely-used and common-sense definition of “government” than the sophistry “ancaps” employ.

In contrast, true anarchy is marked by the lack of authority to legitimately initiate force against even non-human objects. For example, the belief that Nature is sacred and there are no (human) property rights at all because Mother Nature “owns” everything, would be an example of proper anarchy, as the illegitimacy of one human determining policy for natural resources would logically imply the illegitimacy of a group of humans called “government” determining policy for natural resources. In essence, true anarchy is rooted in the assignment of personhood of things we should consider to have no rights at all, up to and including things without the requisite consciousness to govern themselves. Of course, such a principle is completely incompatible with property rights and capitalism.

True anarchy, in short, is a very fringe eco-communist belief that “ancaps” reverse-strawman to maintain edgelord status.

II. On whether taxation is theft

1. Individual sovereignty, economic specialization, and the inevitability of collective governance

A right is not an obligation. If you have a right to own a firearm, you aren’t necessarily required to own a firearm to avoid legal penalties. Thus, the principle of universal individual sovereignty does not mean that every person must act as their own legislature, executive and judiciary; instead, it means they have a right to act in such a manner if they so choose.

The motor of human civilization is economic specialization. At the beginning of our development, we did pretty much everything ourselves, from planting and harvesting, to teaching our children, and, yes, determining the law of our land and enforcing that law by force. Thankfully, we’ve moved well beyond the need for most of us to be competent farmers, instead using economic specialization and trade to free most of us from the burden of farming, as well as the burden of self-governance.

While we should acknowledge the right of a person to farm land they own, I think we can all easily agree that arguing that everyone should farm their own food is absurd. In a similar manner, acknowledging individual sovereignty — that is, the right of each person to decline governance and govern themselves — is not the same thing as the preposterous notion that we all should actually do so. We will, quite naturally and reasonably, task those most proficient in the administration of government with the functions thereof, while the rest of us focus on things we’re actually good at.

2. The right to secede, and involuntary secession

What is important to individual sovereignty is the free, willing, and continuous consent of an individual to allow others to police his property. I feel strongly that the liberalist movement should always support the right of a people, or arguably even a single person, to secede from a larger governing body (ex: Brexit, Catalan independence) in order to create smaller jurisdictions better representative of the will of the people.

In that spirit, I will say this: I feel the only appropriate penalty for failure to pay one’s taxes should be a refusal by the government to police your property. If you don’t want to pay your dues, well, I guess you’ve seceded then. Your piece of land is now the United States of whatever your last name is. Good luck, you’ll need it.

Given that the penalties for failure to pay taxes generally are of a different sort, I wouldn’t quite say taxation isn’t theft, but look at it this way: unless you want to be unprotected, you’ll need to either pay someone or do the job yourself; unless you want to starve, you’ll either need to pay someone or farm the food yourself. From the perspective of a city-dweller whose residence contains little if any arable land, how much functional difference is there?

True or not, the whole “taxation is theft” meme comes off as whiny as “supermarkets are theft.” It’s simply not a persuasion technique that’s going to win over the normies — instead it’s a gathering of edgelords enjoying the smell of their own farts.

III. Outro

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome.