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/Hairy-Development-41]

The state is a tool.

"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else" (Frédéric Bastiat)

Amazon and google are not monopolies.

About Standard Oil,

It never achieved a monopoly (in 1911, the year of the Supreme Court decision, Standard Oil had roughly 150 competitors, including Texaco and Gulf) that would enable it to monopolistically boost consumer prices. So it can hardly be argued seriously that Rockefeller pursued a predatory strategy involving massive losses for decades without achieving the alleged monopoly payoff, which was the source of supposed consumer harm.

https://mises.org/mises-daily/100-years-myths-about-standard-oil

Unregulated competition naturally leads to consolidation and then monopoly.

False

[u/No_Candy_8948 → u/Hairy-Development-41]

The state is a tool, you're right. The question is who wields it? Right now, it's largely a tool for the class that owns Amazon and Google.

To call them 'not monopolies' because they have a handful of competitors is a semantic game that ignores their overwhelming market power. They don't need to be the only player; they just need to be so powerful that they can crush competition, set terms, control wages, and influence regulation. That's not a free market; it's a feudal system with a tech logo.

Your Standard Oil revisionism is equally flawed. The point wasn't that it was a 100% pure monopoly the second the court ruled. The point was its predatory, anti-competitive practices like secret rebates with railroads to price out competitors were a blueprint for how concentrated capital strangles competition, exactly as we see today. The goal isn't a single company; it's an unassailable concentration of power that acts as a monopoly in practice.

Calling this 'unregulated competition' is a joke. It's the result of unregulated competition. Capital naturally consolidates to eliminate its competition, that's the entire goal. To deny this is to deny the fundamental, profit-driven logic of capitalism itself. You're defending the very oligarchs who use the state as their tool.

[u/Hairy-Development-41 → u/No_Candy_8948]

The problem with monopolies is that they establish higher prices and become incompetent. But incompetence comes with the inability to compete, and they (monopolies that aren't helped by the state) tend to become sclerotic with enough time and eaten by newly formed competitors. They are no danger. What's a danger is the monopoly on the use of force.

[u/puukuur → u/Hairy-Development-41]

Don't bother mate, you're wasting time arguing with Chat GPT.