I was intent upon writing a much longer post, but in the course of writing it became apparent that my point was easily condensed thusly:
One of the natural consequences of anarcho-capitalism is the privatization of roles that traditionally government has undertaken including armed protection.
I have a couple problems with this.
First it will be in a defense contractors interest to convince his clients that the richest among them has betrayed them all and must be killed for everyones safety. You’d think that the people would rebel against such a silly assertion, but history shows that fearful people will enable tyrannical behavior. The defense contractor can now easily curry favor by distributing part of the fortune and keeping the other part for itself.
Second stability can only result in cases where defense is cheaper than offense. An example: What if we have a situation where offense is only slightly more expensive than defense. Say that I have 100 pounds of gold. I spend 25 pounds on defense. If offense is slightly more expensive than defense then someone else can spend 50 gold and probably have a pretty good chance of overcoming my defenses, at which point they gain 75 gold. a 25 gold profit.
so what variables have I missed? how would these situations resolve in real life?
If the guy is enormously rich he will be able to provide for his security. That is unlikely though as without government cronyism it would be extremley unlikely someone would become so rich as to singularly stand out. So what would happen is others as rich as the initial target would chipp in for his defense seeing as they are probably next in line.
You go to the courts and they rule that the offenders must pay you back 150 gold. Now you go and give your claim up or sell it for a lower value to an even bigger fish than the offender (or more small ones). The buyer(s) then goes and gets 150 gold from the offender. Since offense is cheap he can do it easy. Now the offender knows that crime does not pay.
whom does the court rely on to enforce contracts? it would have to rely on respect. I suppose we would have several competing courts vying for our patronage by being more just?
a lot of these features seem to rely upon “word spreading” of misdeeds. what about when they are good at keeping secrets? what about when, as now, the people know a certain entity is doing something wrong but don;t want to risk themselves against it?
and I don’t feel like the second two responses are real answers. the numbers were made up as an example, of course there is not perfect knowledge of success in the real world…we still have pirates.