анонимный вопрос
Of course they can. The most vivid example of this is the British East India Company. Therefore, the question one must actually answer is “how to prevent corporations from doing this?”
Political philosophers have long been chewing over a related question about how to prevent a government from descending into tyranny. The proposed solutions can be divided into two categories. The first is technological. These are various schemes for the separation of powers and other types of institution-building. The second is ideological. This is the promotion of a readiness to resist any attempts to slide into tyranny.
It is roughly the same with corporations. One can build schemes for exactly how conflicts will be resolved in a distributed mode under ancap. For example, I am quite fond of the Friedmanite, or the related Molinieu scheme. Or one can simply postulate that, firstly, it is always the individual who decides whether to abide by a particular contract or leave it, and secondly, that man is the measure of all things, and if he believes he sees an injustice, it is up to him to decide whether to help eliminate it. There is no magic non-aggression pact that is mandatory for universal compliance; there are only private notions of what is right. Has a corporation crossed the line? The corporation should be punished.
Anarchy is not viable without the constant readiness of people to take direct action to uphold justice. Certain structures, such as dispute resolution organizations, simply allow for the division of labor. A small and tight-knit corporation of evil is capable of terrorizing a small territory and squeezing it dry. But under conditions of anarchy, it has little chance of building on that success and expanding beyond a certain limit: the accumulation of a critical mass of coordinated adversaries will drain all the corporation’s strength into containing them.
So, if I wished to assert myself under ancap through coercion and the seizure of others’ property, I would do so with a small group, anonymously, and vanish into the night as soon as the opponent regained their senses. In a developed information world, this would most likely mean hacking attacks—it is harder to cover one’s tracks after raids on physical objects. Yes, this kind of criminality is entirely possible and even viable under ancap. But all those speculative cases in the vein of “your grandfather installed a pirated version of Windows half a century ago, interest on the penalty has accrued since then, and therefore by the decision of our pocket court, you are consigned to contract slavery for thirty years”—these are attempts to imagine an anarchy in which everyone remains afflicted by statist brain rot. As long as they are afflicted, there will simply be no anarchy, and once the disease is overcome, such cases will become impossible.
