(noting again: I’m not an ancap, and don’t think it’s a realistic or even necessarily desirable outcome)

The amusing thing here is that Syria is one of the places that shows what happens when you get a collapse of the state

You can also pretty easily label syria as an example of what happens when you get a collision of four states, all shitty to different degrees (the old syrian regime, their russian backers, ISIL, and the us coalition proxy state).

History suggests almost nobody actually wants to live in this atomized state, they will form associations and thus attempt to reform the state almost immediately. Although that state could be one of aristocrats or warlords.

I agree, statelessness is probably not stable and this one of the reasons I am not an ancap. However, this still leaves 95% of the ancap position intact, even if it ruins their sound bytes. There are ancaps who will admit that statelessness may be unachievable, but that this has no real bearing on the rest of their platform.

The whole anarcho-capitalist idea set is filled with such astonishingly unrealistic projections on what people will do it astounds me.

I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism. Sure, the bottom 95% of ancaps are hugely unrealistic, but this is true of every ideology. I’ve not read the literature widely, but in his book, the thing about david friedman (one of the more important ancap writers) that impressed me the most was how realistic he was.

I disagree with him in a number of places (I wrote an entire series of posts mostly criticizing him!) but his arguments were mostly well thought out and set realistic expectations for how successful such policies could be.

One of the things that tends to draw me to libertarian policies is that they are often the only people in the room who are actually paying attention to incentive systems and how people actually act. The places where I most often disagree with libertarians are, in my estimation, the places where they’ve failed to consider historical precedent, but this is not the most common case.

See, I think incentives are the problem with their system.  One of the main times you see this is when they think of everything in property rights. You can see that’s the primitive they use to manipulate the world.  The problem is, it’s a legal construct. It’s this whole idea that society is governed by rules and not power.  The attempts they try to use to patch this are ridiculous, and without it the whole system falls apart instantly into violence.

I see these incentives, but I see these incentive arguments as ridiculous because there is so much they fail to consider.  It’s the classic libertarian-arguing point, when they say “Let us suppose“ you have to say “Let’s absolutely not suppose“ because the whole thing is often based on unrealistic assumptions.  These synthetic problems are constrained to give the result that they want and these  toy problems are used to show how great their system is.

I’m of the opinion that “incentives“ is not a good system to use, because you can construct problems such to give any incentive you want.  People take actions because they have an incentive, opium knocks people out because it has a dormitive power.  These arguments have the problem of unfalsifiability, I prefer to pay attention to what people do than make arguments about incentives.  You can tell just-so stories to give anyone any incentive you want, doesn’t mean that corresponds to any reality.  Much better to observe what people actually do.