Every state is a community with its own voluntary hierarchy and structure, in which all basic libertarian principles are recognized and could even be formalized as contracts, but they are simply ignored by the majority; if some maniac with his own private army terrorizes people, the lack of resistance is the responsibility of the latter, for their hands are completely untied.
Belkovich
Ancap can be viewed as an ideal construction in which all goods and services are supplied only on a free competitive market. Such a construction serves as an analytical tool, but is unimplementable in real life. At the very least, because kinship ties, friendship, love, dislike, and the like have no direct relation to the market; and to claim otherwise, describing how, for example, the marriage market should be organized or the mechanism of selling oneself into slavery—this may, of course, be a way of exploring the limits of the model’s applicability, but it looks more like a way of pushing principles to the point of absurdity, only to then say: I don’t like where this logic has led me—so I choose to change nothing in life.
Conversely, one could postulate that since we consider ancap to be the natural and most suitable state for society, then we must say that we live under ancap and can reason about it in ancap terms. Namely, that a person’s relationship with the state is a contract, a sort of poorly drafted open offer where people checked the “I agree” box without even reading the text, and that the state is a corporation and its territory is the private property of the corporation. Such a vision can help one look at the world differently, but it can also function as a path of self-deception. That is, ancap is already all around us, why fuss, we have already arrived. We relax and, once again, do nothing.
The same reality can indeed be described in different ways, depending on how a person intends to interact with it. One can think in terms of “in office 202 sits the department head, he must sign the permit if the application is submitted in the correct form and the state fee is paid.” One can think in terms of “Petrovich will sign for ten thousand, but one could invite him fishing, which is even more useful in the long run.” Finally, one can think in terms of “enter, clear out the secretary, then the boss, exit through the window.” One can think “Vasya is so sweet,” or one can think “perhaps I’ll string him along for one more dinner, and then I need to bail.”
The difference between descriptions of the declared, the actual, and the ideal is also quite obvious. It is one thing to describe how the state looks according to official documents: the Constitution, separation of powers, legislative mechanisms, and so on. It is another thing how it looks in reality: the mutual influence of political actors, corrupt ties, the monitoring and formation of public sentiment, and all that. And it is a completely third thing to describe how one would like society to be. There, the state may be present in a completely different form, or be absent entirely. Private property may be revered as the highest form of manifestation of human freedom, or condemned as the highest form of exploitation. Power may be viewed as violence, or as fatherly care.
Anarcho-capitalism today, in most cases, is only suitable for describing the ideal order of things. The actual can be described in political science terms—and then one can try to devise separate descriptions for the transition from the actual to the ideal. Alternatively, one can describe the actual as a corrupted ancap, and then it becomes seemingly obvious what to do: simply eliminate all differences between the current state of affairs and the ideal model. The trouble is that while such an approach answers the question of what to do magnificently, it says nothing about how to do it. That is precisely where its main problem lies.
