There already exists literature dealing with common objections to anarcho-capitalism (a society with private ownership of everything) such as who will build the roads, how security and national defense would be produced, etc. (see specially the works of Hans-Hermann Hoppe on security/defense and Walter Block on privatization of everything).
In my view, however, what hasn’t been emphasized enough are the errors of minarchists (people who believe in a minimal state with only security and national defense) when defending their minimal state position. Since the state is clearly an organization different than other enterprises, minarchists, classical liberals and regular libertarians should have the burden of proof of explaining their positions.
Many of those errors are also shared with more prominent state worshippers such as socialists and communists. Minarchists share many of those errors in small scale which they probably don’t realize. In this essay I will point out some of those errors and defend the free society from some objections.
Redistribution and knowledge
Most classical liberals, libertarians and minarchists declare that they’re against redistribution of wealth, yet they still offer redistribution, in a reduced form, in a night-watch state wealth is still being redistributed from the private sector to the public sector. This means that wealth is being taken from their optimal destination (that means what people want to do with that) to uses decided by government bureaucrats.
What if a minarchist state is providing more national defense or courts than necessary? How would they possibly know what’s the right amount of any of those that has to be provided? That takes us to the second point, which is knowledge. The right amount and form of anything is discovered by the function of profit and loss, not from bureaucratic plans.
Superiority
This point is similar to the last one. Classical liberals and minarchists although believing otherwise, think themselves as above society, in the sense that they think they can decide better than people doing voluntary transactions, what to do with their money. Again, what if people don’t want a road where the classical liberal government has decided to construct it, what if a neighborhood needs more security than other? Markets provide the optimal amount of everything through the process of profit and loss.
In defense of that state of affairs, proponents of a small state will spin out an arrange of arguments (public goods for example), all with the basic premise that regular people could not possibly manage any of those services or plan ahead of time. What makes them think that government officials could? Aren’t they just regular people too? The only answer proponents can give is that bureaucrats are special, above society. Frederic Bastiat in The Law already pointed out this problem when refuting socialism:
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
The non-problem of evil
Many proponents of the state apparatus claim that in a private security society, people that do not commit crimes but who are capable of wrongdoing, necessitate regulations to stop them. This is a misunderstanding of libertarian theory; first, libertarianism is a political theory, not a mechanism to discover what is morally good or bad. Thus, it does not apply good or evil to social choices when judging them from a libertarian point of view.
In a free society people, that are “evil” would suffer losses if people regard their activities as such, but what if the “evil” people don’t care about losses? If that is the situation, they will have the living standard that such valuations confer.
Again, knowledge
As Jesus Huerta de Soto has pointed out, economic science has already proven that the state is not necessary for a functioning and prosperous society. For those who believe otherwise, I refer them to the scholarship of Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Hans Hermann Hoppe, Walter Block and the entire of works of the Austrian School of economics. (Even some mainstream economists such as David Friedman agree that the state is not necessary.)
Secession
To embrace secession is to accept anarcho-capitalism, since secession helps to bring about a free society. Minarchists and classical liberals reject secession or simply ignore it as a talking point. Secession is a right, since people own their bodies and property, and they are able to exercise to full extent their use of them as long as they don’t infringe on anyone else’s property. Secession does not infringe on anybody; therefore, it should be permitted.
Even from a consequentialist (a philosophy that regards good consequences as ultimate goals) point of view, it should be legal since it would lead to less government bureaucracy. The common objection to this is that if it is highly impractical to secede, what if then? It is highly impractical to do many things but still these things are done and accomplished, and in any case, it is a problem of the person or region who secedes.
No, ancaps (anarcho-capitalists) are not communists
This point should be obvious but there are still libertarians that anarcho-capitalists are one step below communists. People that think so fundamentally misunderstand or simply don’t know what anarcho-capitalism or what communism is. I will just say that communists are proponents of government ownership of everything, while ancaps offer private ownership of everything – a total contrast to communism. Communists worship the state, ancaps reject it entirely.
The Market vs the State
It is a matter of who decides what, either the market or the state, even though many believe that it actually is the state vs chaos. However, they forget that the market is an institution that can and does manage and protect itself. That’s why the state uses coercion to seize private assets in order to exist. Böhm-Bawerk’s essay could not have had a better name to describe this issue “Control or economic law.” We must never forget is that there is an underlying order in human cooperation, which we discover by studying economics and through understanding economic laws.
It might sound radical, but within the libertarian movement there is a struggle of capitalism vs socialism. A free society is a world of capitalism, while a minarchist or classical liberal one is world of minimal socialism. We have to decide whether we defend capitalism or socialism in a small scale? In any case we must not forget that liberty (or private property) is what orders society. The state, on the other hand, creates disorder.
