Any philosophy, in order to be effective must deal with reality. The only way that any form of anarchy in any of its modifications can work is with a race of mature and rational persons. Unfortunately, that is not the human race. Some day in the far future perhaps, but neither today nor tomorrow will that be true. Objectivism deals with humanity as it exists today, with goals to be achieved as signposts on the road to rational maturity. The goals are achievable within our vision of tomorrow. If your object is a future without the need for government, then be an objectivist until you can actually see that goal on the horizon. It may take a while, so don't hold your breath.

The AnCaps are trying to short cut philosophy. The NAP makes no sense without property rights. Freedom cannot be protected in a world that accepts the irrational.

Locke's starting point "that you own yourself" is much more profound and useful than NAP. The AnCaps want us to forget Calculus and return to geometry.

AnCaps are intellectually lazy and dangerous

"They ... they.... they...." with no citation of source. "Would... should... could..." a plethora of modal auxiliaries without empirical evidence.

If the free market allows "anything" then anyone could make billions of dollars with huge rip-off schemes for perpetual motion energy. And the world has no shortage of such swindles, from the South Sea Bubble to Florida Real Estate to Bernie Madoff. Let people do whatever they want and the parasites will enrich themselves by grinding everyone else into poverty. Just look at the world today.

But we know that is not true because reality requires reason which mitigates such silliness. While foolery exists, genius succeeds. The marketplace impels toward excellence.

In point of fact, if you look at the world today, you will find free market defense agencies, Securitas, G4S, AlliedBarton, Guardsmark,... And you will find arbitration written into your contracts for your mortgage, your credit cards, your car loan, your employment (especially if you are a contractor)... And those contracts specify _which laws_ are to govern the interpretation of the terms. Multinational corporations shop for laws. It is the only way that a manufacturer in Germany can buy parts from China for a product sold in the United States. Read your contracts. You live in one state. Your bank is located in another. The credit card company is in a third. They all specify the laws they want.

A hundred years ago, a self-appointed committee of jurists created the Uniform Commercial Code to reconcile the conflicts in contract law. Read any purchase order: it says one thing. Read any sales invoice: it says something else. How do you bring them together when something goes wrong? Today, the UCC has been included in part or in whole by various US state laws. It still exists on its own.

The essay is correct: this is the way the world works today. Some governments are better than others. Some businesses are better than others. Some people are better than others. Everyone is better on some days than on others. You cannot legislate it, mandate it, predict it, demand it, or avoid it.

These theories are all just explanatory filters. They say less about the way the world is (or should be) and much more about the persons who invent them.

Contrary to what the author asserts, we are not in a state of Anarcho-Capitalism. We are in a state of crony capitalism, a predecessor to a Fascist state, wherein the powerful corporations are able to buy government support. Real Anarcho-Capitalism implies an "every company for itself", with any state element avoiding interference with the market. In such an environment, entrepreneurs with superior skills would have a more level playing field to challenge the established firms that have become complacent.

Any license I was willing to give the author went out the window when he ranted about allowing a government that permitted "infant genital mutilation", obviously referring to male circumcision. The link between uncircumcised males and female cervical cancer has been reliably established, and I'm astounded that women's rights groups haven't demanded mandatory circumcision.

The very arrogance of the web site name tells it all, implying the owner has a superior intellect that can judge the views of his inferiors. I don't like the precept of MENSA, as I found most in that group to be what I call "educated idiots", lacking common sense and possessing unduly inflated egos.

There is no contradiction between the non-intervention principle and monopoly government IF the scope of said government is kept limited as it was in the US prior to 1900. Anarcho Capitalism is like the Articles of Confederation - good on paper but difficult to implement. The Constitution, as written and followed until 1900 for the most part, is the way things ought to be.

A very good essay, it needs more than the 10 mins I have given it so far.

They may be a few others on this site who like me do not like the existence, let alone the paying, of taxes. Yet a government that relies only on voluntary payments would have several difficulties such as resisting significant aggression from outside.
There is a concept in economics that relates- the free rider principle.

Maphesdus wrote: "No one becomes a billionaire by selling perpetual motion machines." That is exactly the point, Maph. Although some people became hundredaires or thousandaires, it is an overblown accusation, divorced from reality, even from the reality of actual scams and schemes. Yet, that is by analogy, the claim of the anti-market people that _ALL_ protective agencies "would" (could, should) engage in a perpetual war-of-all-against-all, when in fact, few ever do, and those that do have become governments and abandoned businesses.

The protective services of Ford Motor Company and General Motors worked in the same cities, the same neighborhoods, without ever firing upon each other -- or their own workers (even labor disputes being limited in force). Minarchists claim that that was because they were under the dominion of a monopoly government... but that same monopoly government is incapable of stopping gangs such as M13 and the Zetas... So, what is the explanation that subsumes both sets of facts? To me, it is a commitment within the persons involved to engage in business or to engage in aggression.

Incentives matter. However, culture is deeper. Changing culture via incentives seems to require means and methods that are not well understood. These objecto-could-be-anarchos and their mini-objecto-would-be-governors all argue _should_ (everyone should do as I say) without ever referring to the actual facts of human action.

Alright! I'm excited lol.

Motivated by several of khalling's questionable claims, I took down a book, THE LAW GOES WEST by Forbes Parkhill (Western Sage Press, 1956). Parkhill was an autodidact who taught writing at the University of Denver. This book came from his discovery of two troves of unclassified judicial records from the territorial days of the places we now call Colorado. It was rough and ready justice, to be sure. However, some of those who rushed to Pike's Peak for gold in 1856 were lawyers. They set up courts in the methods described by Wolf Devoon in his "Constitution of Government for Galt's Gulch" reviewed in the Gulch here: http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/9f... According to Devoon, courts are properly the creations of lawyers.

(Forbes Parkhill biography here:
http://kenoshakid.wikispaces.com/Forbes+...
His movie credits here:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0662751/)

Would anyone here like to articulate the Non-Aggression Principle? And distinguish it from the Non-Initiation-of-Force Principle? Are they the same, or different?

An ideal Objectivist government which did not initiate force even to collect taxes would be, in practice, no different from an ideal AnCap defense agency. And both ideals are abstractions which will never exist in practice.

The system of governance is somewhat random given time, place, and scale.