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Comment by fncndhdhc | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the point. If we magically enacted perfectly libertarian business policies overnight, business would immediately get to work creating new regulations because they're still self-interested like they were before. This is what they do now, this is what they would do then, and this is also why anarcho capitalism is a contradiction.

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Anarcho capitalism, which is not necessarily the view of every libertarian (some being "minarchists"), would be the absence of any government authority. Without a government the regulation you speak of is non-existent. There is no contradiction.

...until the interested business parties band together to form a government of sorts for their own benefit.

Precisely. Cartels don't require a government to exist, and the absence of government letting them beat you and kill you and take your stuff makes them easier to entrench. Some of these cartels may even claim land as theirs and exact payments from those under their "protection". We might call them "barons", say, and their henchmen "knights". And these strongmen might, due to relative imbalance of force, have to swear fealty to "counts" and "dukes" and "kings", and whoa I think I just had the weirdest dream, that ancap is an undisguised pathway to corporatist feudalism. Weird.

Any ruling order, whether it be a government or something else, requires at least the tacit consent of the majority. I believe it would be much more difficult to take over an area lacking a strong centralized government as opposed to an area with one. Militaristic efforts in Afghanistan being a prime modern example.

David Friedman style Anarcho-Cap has never denied the necessity of a government; it's more interested in constructing analyses of various costs associated with policies.

More foam-at-the-mouth anarchists tend to be empty vessels - louder, so they attract the disenchanted.

Quite the mental gymnastics. "If we magically enacted perfectly libertarian business policies overnight" <- this assumes we have SOME way to get there. "business would immediately get to work creating new regulations because they're still self-interested like they were before." We would then use that same MAGICAL way to get back to ancapistan. No contradiction at all.

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