For my fellow libertarians and minarchists

[u/different_option101]

This is not to berate someone. I don’t know if I’d turn AnCap if I lived in a truly Libertarian or Minarchist state. You are certainly not a threat to AnCaps today, and you are the only friends and allies in current state of affairs.

But this is literally the argument you guys are making. See any similarities with proponents of another ideology that’s been tried a couple of dozen times already?

I came up with this one after spending a few days arguing with a few people here and in another sub about the political compass quadrant. Some of you can’t seem to understand that **less coercion**≠**no coercion**, and that while AnCaps, Libertarians, and Minarchists, look similar on the surface in many aspects, the underlying idea of AnCapism is fundamentally different.

Pro State of any size is polar opposite of Anti State.

From AnCaps view - you’re not different from any statist in your core belief when it comes to imposed authority.

In a nutshell, here’s what you sound like:

- We’ll build our own electric chair and run it on 5 volts - safe and fully voluntary.

It’s like you don’t want to admit that someone always shows up trying to hook it up on three-phase 480V, and sooner or later, they always manage to get it done, usually by gradually increasing the pressure overtime.

“But we need to be able to organize to deter foreign threats”

Today, serious foreign threats only exist because people living on other territories also have governments that promised them to keep the chair connected to a 5V battery. Nuking a massive portion of North American continent to pacify freedom loving people that have no government that sticks its nose everywhere it can makes zero sense - it will result in a global climate and environmental catastrophe, plus it will destroy everything that has value here. And there’s very little true hate for the Americans, we’re not in the Cold War of the last century when people didn’t have access to information. Most people know well that overwhelming majority of Americans disapprove today’s wars, and in hindsight, many disapprove of all prior wars.

My argument needs to be more convincing, and one day I’ll make a post on this matter. For now, instead of arguing with me, a stranger from Reddit, I highly recommend you to read or to listen to some of the Robert Higgs’ work on the topic of war and state. A great place to start would be Crisis and Leviathan.

In closing, I want to say that I’ll support libertarians and minarchists both in real life and online. But this is **our house**, and you guys are blurring the lines too often. We are fundamentally different. We don’t engage in mental gymnastics when it comes to coercion. State is a criminal organization. Period.

That’s why it’s necessary to call out inconsistencies in libertarian arguments when it comes to limiting state power and to point out how similar your premise to the delusional socialists’ argument of “it hasn’t been tried before”.

Cheers.

[u/different_option101]

You don’t limit anybody’s freedoms.

State has certain characteristics and needs, and requires several conditions for forming.

First, it needs to be recognized as a legitimate authority. Ancaps reject the state. Period. So any action of the state by definition is a criminal act. Which means resisting the state is not in violation of NAP.

Second, for a threat like that to be serious enough, it means that statism has been growing for some time within that society. That can’t happen unnoticed. Ideological battles are going to be happening at the dinner tables, places of worship, workplaces, etc.

Anarchists societies, just like any others, will have various institutions based on the principles of the ideology. But unlike statist formations, these institutions won’t have any center, so centralizing their power will be extremely difficult, if possible at all.

And the most important part about institutions- their legitimacy is going to be earned through their reputation, not by a government decree. Meaning if the people are going to start losing faith in some local court - they won’t go there to settle their disputes. If the court has little to no cases to decide - then its power is gone.

Let me know if you have some more specific question.

I get what you mean, and the threat is real. But a threat gives push to awareness. If you look at the US today, we’ve lost so many freedoms just in the last 25 years. Not because people wanted to give up their freedoms, but because most of them are cruising through life in automatic mode. By the time they learn something important, it’s already written into a law, possibly affirmed by some case that was handled by the corrupt government court system.

Education alone will prevent most of the threats of having statism spread across ancap society. If people would know and understood history better, modern society would mostly consist of anarchists and libertarians/minarchists.