Suppose a certain representative of an anarcho-capitalist society is currently unable to apply market mechanisms or resolve any issues of establishing justice. He is asleep, and during this time, he is completely devoid of legal agency. Nevertheless, he sleeps in a house, in a bed, covered by a blanket, breathes air, and occupies space. That is, he uses certain resources that another person could claim. Yet, in his name, there are active lease agreements for housing, mobile communications, and health insurance; he has relatives and acquaintances—in short, despite his current helpless state, he continues to remain a subject of legal relations and an object of someone’s affection. It is precisely these relations that allow him to successfully survive periods of total incapacity, despite the fact that he may also be an object of someone’s antipathy.
How long can a person remain in a helpless state and still expect that others will not deprive them of their property or even their life? This depends on how willing others are to tolerate the situation. The more resources a person consumes in their state of non-agency, the less property they have that can be used for life support, the poorer the people around them are, and the less they sympathize with them—the higher the chances that they will not wake up. Therefore, for an ordinary peaceful citizen sleeping in their bed after work, the risk of not waking up is minimal; the risk for an unwanted embryo not surviving until birth is significantly higher; and the risk for a poor person in a coma, connected to an expensive life-support system, is maximal—as soon as everyone willing to pay for it runs out of resources to fund the system’s operation, it will be disconnected. Moreover, the chances of survival are even lower for a lonely outlaw hunted and wished dead by everyone: here, the resources of those who care will be used not to prolong his life, but to shorten it. Such a factor might not deter a person with an extremely short planning horizon, but at the very least, it does not encourage recidivism.
In constructing their individual plans, any person can well imagine a situation in which they find themselves in the position of that very unwanted poor person in a coma. Concerned about this, they take certain steps aimed at reducing the chances of such an unfavorable outcome. These can be a wide variety of measures, from old-fashioned methods, such as maintaining strong friendships with reliable people, to advanced market ones, such as purchasing reliable insurance policies. Then the market mechanism of coordinating individual plans kicks in, and gradually, orders are established in society where people experience fewer difficulties in caring for the incapacitated and therefore show such care willingly—this large trend has been observable for humanity since at least the Neolithic.
A similar mechanism works in situations with a short planning horizon. People whose horizon is more or less distant take measures to avoid, as much as possible, situations where the planning horizon closes in, or at least give all necessary instructions in advance. At the same time, for these instructions to be carried out, the executors must also have a distant planning horizon. One could, of course, simply rely on the strong memory and sound mind of younger, personally devoted relatives and friends, but thanks to market mechanisms, a more convenient tool exists—the creation of companies in which these long-term instructions from others will be carried out by an easily replaceable hired employee, for whom a sufficient planning horizon would be the time until the next paycheck—and such people can be found always and everywhere.