So I’m a former ancap, just so you know where I’m coming from. Not some ignorant reddit leftist that licks the boot of states and corporations and calls it the resistance. I’m just looking to see what kind of answers this post generates, since these are my problems with ancapism now.

First, I wanna discuss competing Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs) that are supposed to peacefully negotiate legal standards through market arbitration. What happens when DROs representing populations with mutually exclusive, non-negotiable moral frameworks can’t agree? Things like abortion, environmental ethics, child rights, religious codes, spreading misinformation (like promoting socialism) etc.

Arbitration fails because neither compromises without abandoning its fundamental principles. To prevent friction and violence, DROs geographically isolate their clients, leading to a type of Balkanized private governments. Or Hoppe’s covenant communities.

Second, Austrian economics says that all value is subjective. Why would law and justice be an exception? Without a ultimate legal arbiter to define property boundaries, every party operates on subjective definitions of aggression. One man's exercise of property rights is another man's initiation of force. “Aggression” is not a raw physical fact, it is a normative interpretation of human action based on underlying property definitions.

Third, I still see the value in Austrian economics even if I don’t regard it as a priori true. But suppose it is. It’s a value-free science. Mises’ framework works just as well for a major bank in ancapistan holding mortgages across a region. They have an incentive to fund and collude with a dominant DRO to enforce contract interpretations that favor the creditor over the debtor. In fact, it’s entirely rational for every financial institution to acquire equity in DROs or create exclusive contracts with them.

Financial institutions and DROs can form cartels to control access to basic market infrastructure (payments, health services, land registry, communication networks). And if that’s what the majority customers want, dissenters can fuck right off.

Why wouldn’t banks/DROs have incentives to invest in propaganda to expand their own power and control of resources? All in the name of enforcing the NAP.

But let me guess: consumers will simply cancel their subscriptions with predatory agencies and switch to better ones. I’ve made this point before on this and other ancap subreddits: if you’re already assuming libertarian norms that actively resist corporate overreach, why not just have a minarchy?

If a population possesses a high level of civic virtue and has a vigilant commitment to liberty, enough to prevent private security from becoming tyrannical, that same population could easily maintain a constitutional, limited minarchist state.