Alevuss wrote:The issue with this is that capitalism alone would not create certain goods that are accessible to portions of the population, either because the demand itself is too low and there would be no sustainable profit in this without some sort of tax collection by a state whose job is to provide a basic standard of living to its people, or because certain jobs are not in the interest of many corporations or even small businesses. If it is optional, very few businesses would be interested in paying for an environmental regulation services that exist solely to limit where it can work or the materials it uses.
Not to mention, privatized militarism has employed by a number of companies to maintain monopolies or low labor standards. Private military companies would still exist after the dismantling of a state because a corporation is better at promising a payment or some return on an investment than a ragtag group of laborers with low wages or a corporation that seeks to work within the confines of permaculture, the latter of which would be limited by the likely higher costs of distributing its goods across a large population and the extra care needed to extract/develop those resources without significant long-term damage to the environment or infringing upon another corporation's resources.
You could argue labor unions would enforce all standards that would protect people, but then that's no longer anarcho-capitalism; it's anarcho-syndicalism.
1) Capitalism does not create anything. People create things, and we call that capitalism.
2) We have strong theoretical and empirical reasons to suspect that this argument is not true - that there won't be 'disenfranchised poor' who lack access to legal representation under ancap.
--- 2a) Theoretical reasons - by definition, there are no barriers to entry in the legal market for ancap. Law doesn't face limitations imposed by natural scarcity in the same way that finite resources do; in fact, law is unique in that it gains value with increased social cooperation (the value of a legal service increases depending on how many people use it, because the value is dependent on its ability to arbitrate interpersonal disputes. Think about this the same way that the internet gains in value depending on the content/users who use it). We have strong reasons to believe both that legal insurance agencies will seek to provide services to the poor (they gain value from it) and that the poor will generate their own legal services (because, again, no barriers to entry).
---2b) Empirical reasons - comparing the manner in which goods are provided in decentralized markets and centralized states, in almost all circumstances the former provides better access to services for the poor than the latter, and we have strong economic scholarship to back this up. The poor have fairly reliable access to low-cost high-quality clothing and food, for example ('food deserts' notwithstanding, the poor in the US are incomparably better than elsewhere with respect to these market-provided circumstances; I don't want to paint too rosy a picture, but we need to think comparatively). The poor in the US do not, however, have reliable access to two services which are provided by the state: education (monopolized by the state and low-quality) and law (monopolized the state and low-quality), both of which are actually often detrimental to the poor (see: police brutality and violence in urban schools).
3) The point here is that it is not optional for businesses to abide by environmental protection regulations under anarchocapitalism. I'd recommend that you take a look at the video I linked to a lecture by David Friedman in my second post in this thread for a fuller explanation, but basically we can expect a polycentric legal order to produce laws in a way that is 'economically efficient', and I mean that in the term economist's use it: a way that balances the aggregate social benefits and costs of policies. There are numerous ways to enforce these policies (legal insurance companies could, for example, send troops to force a factory to stop polluting), but we have strong reason to believe that people will have economic incentives to assent to these laws, because polycentric law thrives on discouraging rule-breaking through ostracism.
4) I believe the link I provided on ancap IR theory provides an explanation as to why militarist adventurism would not pay under polycentric law, whereas I think it does pay under statism (see: almost every war in the last few millennia). The warlords argument is the most common that ancapism deals with, but I recommend you take a look at my post on why I think ancapistan can exist in a stable equilibrium (sort of 'balance of powers' theory).
5) I contrast this with the reasons why I don't think that the international state-based order can ever have a true 'balance of powers' (I think that the international system is chronically unstable, I recommend looking into John Mearsheimer's theory of 'offensive realism' from "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics"). If you are worried about ancapism because of 'private militarism', you should be even more greatly worried about statism because of statist militarism
6) Labor unions are compatible with anarchocapitalism. Anarchocapitalism merely defends a legal order based on the protection of private property rights: if the free organization of labor seeks to represent itself (and I am an anarchocapitalist who actually thinks labor unions would face a strong revival in an ancap society; they would be far stronger and more important than they are today), then that is completely compatible with a system of property rights. You will find that many strong early proponents of free market capitalism and even anarchism were advocates for labor unions: Herbert Spencer comes to mind.
