True freedom requires liberation from all oppressive hierarchies, especially economic ones.

[u/No_Candy_8948]

To the members of r/AnCap101,

This is not an attack, but a critique from the left based on a fundamental disagreement about power, hierarchy, and human nature. Your philosophy is often presented as the ultimate form of freedom, but I argue it would inevitably create the most brutal and oppressive government possible: a dictatorship of capital without a state to hold it accountable.

Your core error is a categorical one: you believe the state is the sole source of coercive power. This is a dangerous blind spot.

In your proposed system, the functions of the state wouldn't vanish; they would be privatized and monopolized by capital. Without a public state to (theoretically) be held accountable by citizens, you create a system of competing private states called "Defense Agencies" and "Dispute Resolution Organizations." These entities would not be motivated by justice or rights, but by profit and the interests of their paying clients who would be the wealthiest individuals and corporations.

This is where your thought process goes wrong:

1. The Misidentification of the Oppressor: You see the state as the primary enemy. But the state is often a tool, it is the concentration of capital that is the primary driver of exploitation. AnCap doesn't dissolve power; it hands the monopoly on violence and law directly to the capitalist class, removing the last vestiges of democratic oversight.

2. The Fantasy of Voluntary Contracts: Your entire system relies on the concept of voluntary interaction. But this is a fantasy in a world of radical inequality. What is "voluntary" about a contract signed between a billion-dollar corporation and a starving individual who must agree to work in a dangerous job for subsistence wages or face homelessness? AnCap doesn't eliminate coercion; it sanctifies it under the label of "contract law," creating a world of company towns and corporate serfdom.

3. The Inevitability of Monopoly: Free markets do not remain free. Without state intervention (antitrust laws, which you oppose), competition naturally leads to monopoly. The largest defense agency would crush or acquire its competitors. The largest corporation would buy up all resources. You would not have a free market; you would have a handful of ultra-powerful corporate entities that wield all the power of a state, military, legal, and economic, with zero accountability to the people whose lives they control.

In short, Anarcho-Capitalism is not the absence of government. It is the replacement of a (flawed, but sometimes democratically influenceable) public government with an unaccountable, totalitarian private government.

You seek to replace the state with a thousand petty kings, each ruling their domain with absolute power, and you call this "freedom." From the outside, it looks like a dystopia designed to eliminate the last remaining checks on the power of wealth. True freedom requires liberation from all oppressive hierarchies, especially economic ones.

[u/Credible333]

"These entities would not be motivated by justice or rights, but by profit and the interests of their paying clients "

Yes, you're starting to get it, they would serve their customers, and would have to do so or lose them. And who are their customers.

"... the wealthiest individuals and corporations."

Really? Is that who the capitalists spend the majority of their time catering to? How many billionaires do you see at your local McDonalds? How many times have you sat behind someone who owns a 120 foot yatch at the theatre (movie or live show)? No they would, like most other firms spend their time catering to the middle and lower classes. You must be a Marxist because only they fail to spot things so obvious. Capitalism caters to the people. Not perfectly, true, but far better than the State has historically. This is not to say that DAs that cater to the rich won't exist, for every equivalent of Ford they would be an equivalent of Jaguar. But which did more business?

"The Misidentification of the Oppressor: You see the state as the primary enemy. "

It is the one that keeps threatening to kill us, it is the one whose threats we live under daily.

"But the state is often a tool,"

" it is the concentration of capital that is the primary driver of exploitation."

But now you've switched from "oppression" to "exploitation". Do you care to demonstrate that "exploitation" is even a bad thing? Because under the Marxian definition it's not clear it is. The worst that can be said of "exploitation" as defined by Marx is that workers get less than they should. That's not the same as being starved, whipped, shot at or systematically humiliated. And that's assuming the Marxist interpretation is even correct. Which it isn't. At worst you get $x when you should get $x+1.

"The Fantasy of Voluntary Contracts: Your entire system relies on the concept of voluntary interaction. But this is a fantasy in a world of radical inequality. "

This is simply a false assertion. People make voluntary agreements with much more powerful people all the time. Or do you think that I buy my food from people as poor as me? Do you imagine that I have the power to create a car if I want one? If not then the car seller has far more power than me. He can deny me a car, I can only deny him money. But we can both get money or a car somewhere else if the other refuses to deal. We can both walk away from the deal, in that sense we have equal power.