Anarcho-capitalism
[7] While the earliest extant attestation of "anarchocapitalism" [sic] is in Karl Hess's essay "The Death of Politics" published by Playboy in March 1969,[8][9] American economist Murray Rothbard was credited with coining the terms anarcho-capitalist[10][11] and anarcho-capitalism in 1971.
[65] Writer Stanisław Wójtowicz says that although anarcho-capitalists are against centralized states, they believe that all people would naturally share and agree to a specific moral theory based on the non-aggression principle.
Deontological anarcho-capitalists believe that the only just and most economically beneficial way to acquire property is through voluntary trade, gift, or labor-based original appropriation, rather than through aggression or fraud.
Anarcho-capitalists make the example of a number of private businesses which may arise in an area, each owning the land and buildings that they use, but they argue that the paths between them become cleared and trodden incrementally through customer and commercial movement.
[85] American economist Randall G. Holcombe sees challenges stemming from the idea of common property under anarcho-capitalism, such as whether an individual might claim fishing rights in the area of a major shipping lane and thereby forbid passage through it.
[85] In contrast, Hoppe's work on anarcho-capitalist theory is based on the assumption that all property is privately held, "including all streets, rivers, airports, and harbors" which forms the foundation of his views on immigration.
[98] Anarcho-capitalists only accept the collective defense of individual liberty (i.e. courts, military, or police forces) insofar as such groups are formed and paid for on an explicitly voluntary basis.
[109] Rothbard stressed the importance of restitution as the primary focus of a libertarian legal order[72] and advocated for corporal punishment for petty vandals and the death penalty for murders.
Benson opines that despite the lack of objectively measurable losses in such cases, "standardized rules that are generally perceived to be fair by members of the community would, in all likelihood, be established through precedent, allowing judgments to specify payments that are reasonably appropriate for most criminal offenses".
[110] Morris and Linda Tannehill raise a similar example, saying that a bank robber who had an attack of conscience and returned the money would still owe reparations for endangering the employees' and customers' lives and safety, in addition to the costs of the defense agency answering the teller's call for help.
[41][44][112] In both its social and individualist forms, anarchism was usually considered an anti-capitalist[113][114] and radical left-wing or far-left[115][116][52] movement that promotes libertarian socialist economic theories such as collectivism, communism, individualism, mutualism and syndicalism before Rothbard challenged these ideas.
[127] According to Jeremy Jennings, "[i]t is hard not to conclude that these ideas," referring to anarcho-capitalism, have "roots deep in classical liberalism" and "are described as anarchist only on the basis of a misunderstanding of what anarchism is."
[50] British author Andrew Heywood also believes that "individualist anarchism overlaps with libertarianism and is usually linked to a strong belief in the market as a self-regulating mechanism, most obviously manifest in the form of anarcho-capitalism".
[51] Frank H. Brooks, author of The Individualist Anarchists: An Anthology of Liberty (1881–1908), believes that "anarchism has always included a significant strain of radical individualism, from the hyperrationalism of Godwin, to the egoism of Stirner, to the libertarians and anarcho-capitalists of today".
Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights."
Classical liberalism, while accepting critical arguments against collectivism, acknowledges a certain level of public ownership and collective governance as necessary to provide practical solutions to political problems.
[144] Rothbard held that the economic consequences of the political system they advocate would not result in an economy with people being paid in proportion to labor amounts, nor would profit and interest disappear as they expected.
Rothbard claimed that Tucker was wrong to think that interest would disappear regardless because he believed people, in general, do not wish to lend their money to others without compensation, so there is no reason why this would change just because banking was unregulated.
As Tucker explained in State Socialism and Anarchism, his theory was that unregulated banking would cause more money to be available and that this would allow the proliferation of new businesses which would, in turn, raise demand for labor.
[19]According to the libertarian theorist David D. Friedman, "[m]edieval Icelandic institutions have several peculiar and interesting characteristics; they might almost have been invented by a mad economist to test the lengths to which market systems could supplant government in its most fundamental functions".
[153] Although noting that there was a single legal system, Friedman argues that enforcement of the law was entirely private and highly capitalist, providing some evidence of how such a society would function.
[20] Friedman and Bruce L. Benson argued that the Icelandic Commonwealth saw significant economic and social progress in the absence of systems of criminal law, an executive, or bureaucracy.
The fairs of Champagne and the great marts of international trade in the Middle Ages enjoyed freely competitive courts, and people could patronize those that they deemed most accurate and efficient.
[60]: 1051 Economist Alex Tabarrok argued that Somalia in its stateless period provided a "unique test of the theory of anarchy", in some aspects near of that espoused by anarcho-capitalists David D. Friedman and Murray Rothbard.
In its place he allows countless private states, with each person supplying their own police force, army, and law, or else purchasing these services from capitalist vendors.
[3] Friedman responded by arguing that the Icelandic Commonwealth was able to prevent the wealthy from abusing the poor by requiring individuals who engaged in acts of violence to compensate their victims financially.
If a-caps imagine a world divided into property-holding employers and property-less wage laborers, but with no systematic coercive mechanisms[;] well, I just can't see how it would work.
[177]Some critics argue that the anarcho-capitalist concept of voluntary choice ignores constraints due to both human and non-human factors such as the need for food and shelter as well as active restriction of both used and unused resources by those enforcing property claims.
Anti-state critics of this view posit comparatively weak abandonment criteria, arguing that one loses ownership when one stops personally occupying and using it as well as the idea of perpetually binding original appropriation is anathema to traditional schools of anarchism.
And, needless to say, if we do not accept the right-libertarians’ view of what constitutes "legitimate" "rights," then their claim to be defenders of liberty is weak.The following is a partial list of notable nonfiction works discussing anarcho-capitalism.
