No, that’s not what I’m saying. My argument is that minarchists cannot use “how would X work” questions as an objection to anarchy; rather, they must give reasons why the argument against monopoly doesn’t apply to the legal system. This is because any attempt to answer a “how would X work” question is necessarily going to be speculative, and the argument for the market is that competition is a discovery procedure: it is through the process of market competition that we learn how to best organize the economy. In other words, the market will take care of it.
But this isn’t the whole story. The efficiency of markets depends largely on entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs must be constantly seeking profit opportunities and marketing new business plans. Entrepreneurs coming up with solutions is one part of what it means for the market to take care of something.
So at least some entrepreneurs need to be engaging in creating speculative business plans (see, e.g. the work of Gil Guillory); if absolutely no one had any business plans, that would mean that the market couldn’t take care of it. At some point people are going to have to create and run these businesses, and that means having a workable business plan.
But say a minarchist considers a speculative plan like Guillory’s, finds it wanting, and concludes that anarchy is undesirable. Is this a legitimate move? That is, can the minarchist justifiably reject anarchy on these grounds? I don’t think so. It seems to me the minarchist would be committing the fallacy of argument from personal incredulity: reasoning from “I don’t know how the market could provide X” to “the market cannot provide X.” But this is fallacious. Just because you as a single entrepreneur don’t have a workable business plan does not mean that everyone else on the planet doesn’t have one, or couldn’t develop one in the future.
Hence the minarchist cannot use “how would X work” questions as an objection to anarchy. Instead they must give reasons to show that anarchy is conceptually impossible, or that the argument against monopoly does not apply to the legal system. For example, Objectivist minarchists are on the right track when they argue that anarchy lacks constitutional restraints on the use of force, or that anarchy lacks a final arbiter, or that a functioning market presupposes a functioning legal system. Now, I don’t think these particular arguments are successful, but in principle they could be; on the other hand, the “how would X work” objections are necessarily fallacious, because they commit the fallacy of argument from personal incredulity.
Thus, anarchists have no burden to answer “how would X work” questions, although someone needs to answer them eventually if a libertarian society is ever to be achieved. For more on this, see Long’s discussion of the light bulb joke here.
One last point: the minarchist position is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy. Minarchists reject anarchism because anarchism doesn’t have a workable business plan, but one reason anarchism doesn’t have a workable business plan is because minarchists refuse to become anarchists and develop such a plan. So to all minarchists I extend an invitation: why not become anarchists and work toward creating a workable business plan? Instead of criticizing anarchism from the outside, join us and help to improve it.
That said, it does seem to introduce this: if private education cannot be made cheap enough to compete with the nearly free public education system, then wouldn’t security fall to the same problem?