Objectivist Criticisms of Anarcho-Capitalism
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.The anarcho-capitalist stance: competing governments in a single territory would not only work but be superior to having a single government, a monopoly on violence.
One illustration will be sufficient [to show that a society made of competing governments cannot work]: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of [arbitration service] A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of [arbitration service] B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of [arbitration service] A. What happens then? You take it from there.
As I have written before, Rand “implies that they could never resolve their conflict – or worse, that they would be in a perpetual state of war – because they don’t have a shared jurisdiction, an underlying legal framework.”
A common libertarian argument is that governments already compete. They are already in a state of anarchy with each other, yet the world still works somehow, and states can and do have agreements and common standards (eg extradition rules).
Governments often wage war against each other.
Governments do wage wars against each other, but private arbitration services would be less inclined to do so because, unlike governments, they do not have an effectively infinite amount of extorted money (taxes), fiat money, and human lives to draw from.