although I do feel that there is some rhetorical space for a hypothetical Ancap nation that isn’t currently occupied, namely turning a jaundiced eye to all forms of organisation: the state, corporations, familial clans, tribes, and telling them all to go to hell lest they institute oppression.
while this isn’t a super realistic scenario, in the context of ancap debates I feel it’s actually not that outlandish!
a society that wants to avoid being dominated by organisations that restrict freedom needs to institute hardcore anti-organisation memes, even to the point of inhibiting freedom of association if necessary; a truly individualistic society deserves nothing less.
Technically speaking I guess you can just view any given political system as an ancap framework in which all property is already owned by Westphalian states and all other laws are just conventions they’ve established since you have a right to decide how to treat people on your own property.
Yes, the ground state that we are likely to collapse back into.
But the states-as-people-in-ancapistan concept works well, it even has polycentric law, multiple defense organisations (NATO, Warsaw Pact, alliances) and bilateral and multilateral agreements of all kinds without any top-level state that holds a monopoly on violence (as much as the US would like to play this role).
And you can see the downside, it’s the one that Hobbes talked about and is formalized in the realist school of IR. Because it’s an anarchistic, in order to survive you have to be constantly worried about the power of other players and in many cases you damage them to maintain your survival.
Don’t worry m8, we can just replace it with one World Government to resolve these competitions and then-
No, stop killing each other over ideology! We can’t turn the entire world Communist!
Or Islamic!
No, these people have a right to free-
