“Anarcho-Capitalism: The Commoditization of Violence
As can be easily discovered through perusing youtube, the anarcho-capitalist mentality is most vocally predicated on the “non-aggression principle”, which implicates government as being necessarily immoral due to their ability to collect taxes, for instance, through its use of monopolized force or violence (“initiating violence”). But what is tacitly being called for in the advocacy of a private legislature and judiciary, where law is subjected to competitive forces, i.e. the voluntary choices made by society as to what form of law they wish to respect determines the success or failure of a private law, is the repeal of law enforcement as a monopolistic enterprise in society, viz, the means to maintain law as a service, which necessitates the use of violence, turns into a commodity.
Irrespective of a sanguine judgment on the outcome of such a competition, which possibly would lead to the monopolization of law anyway as suggested by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it is argued here that anarcho-capitalists have an infantile perspective of the decency of human beings, unsurprisingly diametric to leftism’s justifications for government force yet ironically similar in infantilsm, viz, that such private judiciaries, and by extension humans, are perfect moral agents, and that the idea of “the non-aggresion principle” will be held as a virtue and will guide human choice. Yet through commoditizing violence, anarcho-capitalists have a massively internal contradiction — initiating violence actually becomes incentivized.
The simplest evidence to falsify such a belief that the removal of monopolized force will lead to virtue is one which no doubt many anarcho-capitalists are familar with: the illegal drug trade. By keeping drugs illegal, competition is restricted, which drives profit upwards, and enables great wealth to be accrued. This wealth, built through the exclusion of monopolized force, necessitates force as an operational cost of the drug business — the business needs to protect its interest in the absence of the monopoly. In doing so, violence is an integral form of the business. It is no wonder then that, through the act of competiting drug businesses, violence is used so frequently. It behooves drug business A to outcompete drug business B, so shortening the latter’s product supply through the use of violence is a “legitimate” business expense for the former to increase its profits. It is argued that this is already accomplished through the use of the government and hence the aim of reducing the scope of government. It can be said then that the “black market” is actually an “anarcho-capitalist” market.
The skeptic will argue it is fallacious to conflate private business with private law. Regardless of evidence of anarcho-capitalist enterprises (i.e. drug cartels) providing law in parts of Mexico and Columbia, as well as the infiltration of these enterprises in governments, violent competition would take place amongst private judiciaries and legislators by de facto of competing law enforcements. Or the skeptic will argue that presuming the existence of competing private laws is begging the question – why do laws even need to exist? Yet determining rational action is predicated on the ability to predict outcomes in an envrionment where actions are not arbitrary. Thus the usage of “law”.
In summary, anarcho-capitalism attempts to remove tyranny by replacing it with even greater tyranny — violence dictated by the marketplace.”
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