After all, both can work equally well if punishment is inevitable.
Do prisons (they will exist in ancap, right?) violate the NAP? Or even not prisons, but any restriction of freedom or coercion. I understand that the punished person violated the NAP themselves, but then it becomes a kind of “eye for an eye” principle. Personally, in my understanding, it should not be that way.

Kirill

I have already had to answer the question of how the NAP differs from contractual jurisdictions, and now I am similarly being asked to find differences between heterogeneous things, between a general principle and specific prescriptions, which may be based on this principle, or may not be.

The NAP is a principle stating that no one has the right to initiate violence with impunity—it specifies nothing about what the measure of retribution should be. State laws, by contrast, regulate the measure of retribution both for NAP violations and for many other types of actions, but at the same time, they mandate that this retribution be carried out through the mediation of specialists paid for by taxes, denying this right to those who are, in fact, directly interested in retribution.

Is someone who has been robbed by a private individual willing to voluntarily pay the state so that it keeps the robber in prison for several years? Usually not, so the state reaches into the citizen’s pocket itself and carelessly pulls out the required sum, after which it spends it haphazardly on whatever it feels like, though some of it does end up going to prisons.

Is someone who has been robbed by a private individual willing to voluntarily pay some private company of their choice to keep the robber in prison for several years in the absence of a state? Obviously, they are no more willing than under a state. This means the only person who could pay for the cost of keeping someone in prison under ancap is the person hiding in the prison itself, and I have written about this in sufficient detail. On the other hand, for example, if I have purely property claims against a robber, there is hardly any reason for them to lock themselves in prison; one can always agree on the payment of compensation, like civilized people.

Will that very inevitability of punishment be ensured under ancap? Not necessarily. The damage may be too small to pursue independently. But if someone is engaged in the seizure of other people’s property on a systemic basis, they will almost certainly be caught eventually. They might get lucky, and a substantial compensation will be politely demanded from them. Or they might be unlucky and be shot on the spot. A dangerous trade, to be sure.

But the richer and more prosperous a society is, the more likely it is that the capture of various gangsters and thieves will be streamlined and handled by specialists. After all, until the state over-regulated the detective market beyond all reason, the Pinkerton agency in the US flourished quite a bit.