Anarcho-Capitalism

The position that every service currently provided by the state, including law, courts and defence, could and should be supplied by competing private firms in a voluntary market.

Position auf dem Kompass: lib-right (9.5, -8.5) · 1949 – present

Wichtige Denker

• Murray Rothbard
• David Friedman
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Ursprünge

Formulated by the American economist Murray Rothbard from the late 1940s, drawing on Austrian School economics and the individualist anarchist tradition of Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. David Friedman later developed a parallel version arguing from efficiency rather than from natural rights.

The core argument

Anarcho-capitalism begins from the non-aggression principle: the initiation of force against a person or their justly acquired property is illegitimate, without exception. Applied consistently, the principle rules out the state, because taxation is compulsory and a monopoly on legal jurisdiction is maintained by force against competitors who would offer the same service.

The distinctive move is to treat law and security as ordinary goods rather than as things only a sovereign can supply. In Rothbard's account, individuals would purchase protection from competing defence agencies and disputes between clients of different agencies would be resolved by private arbitration, with agencies preferring negotiated settlements because violence is expensive. Legal codes would emerge through competition in the way that commercial arbitration standards already do.

Two routes to the same conclusion

The deontological route, Rothbard's, holds that the state is illegitimate as a matter of principle regardless of consequences. The consequentialist route, developed by David Friedman in The Machinery of Freedom (1973), makes no rights claim at all and argues instead that polycentric legal systems would in practice produce better law than monopoly provision, because a monopolist has no competitive pressure to improve.

The distinction matters because the two versions respond very differently to evidence. A demonstration that private law produced poor outcomes would refute Friedman's version and leave Rothbard's untouched.

Historical claims

Advocates cite several cases of law without a central state: medieval Iceland's system of competing chieftaincies between roughly 930 and 1262, the Law Merchant that governed international commerce across jurisdictions in medieval Europe, and modern commercial arbitration, which resolves a very large volume of high-value disputes without state adjudication.

Critics reply that the historical cases were small, culturally homogeneous, and ultimately collapsed into conflict or were absorbed by states — Iceland's system ended in a period of sustained violence between consolidated chieftaincies — and that modern arbitration works precisely because state courts stand behind it to enforce awards.

Position on the compass

Anarcho-capitalism occupies the extreme corner of the libertarian-right quadrant: maximum economic freedom combined with the complete absence of state authority. It is the furthest point from Marxism-Leninism on both axes simultaneously, which makes the pair a useful illustration of what a two-dimensional model shows that a single line cannot.

Kernpositionen

• The non-aggression principle: initiating force is illegitimate in all circumstances.
• Self-ownership, from which property rights in externally acquired resources are derived.
• All services, including courts, policing and defence, can be provided competitively.
• Taxation is coercive appropriation rather than a contribution to shared provision.
• Contract and voluntary association are the only legitimate sources of obligation.

Häufige Kritikpunkte

• Defence and law have strong public-good characteristics: it is difficult to exclude non-payers from the benefit of general order, which undermines competitive provision.
• Competing agencies with the power to use force plausibly converge on either violent conflict or a cartel, and a cartel with a monopoly on force is a state.
• Initial property titles almost everywhere derive from historical conquest, which the theory's own principles would treat as invalid — the rectification problem Nozick raised and left unsolved.
• The model offers no account of how those without purchasing power obtain protection.
• No large, diverse modern society has ever operated on these lines, so the evidence base is thin.