This made my laugh. You did a good job of not getting tripped up in the explanation, but you came pretty close. lol
explain.
The EDIT saved you. In Stephanie’s case, she is clearly arguing for her version of government, which insofar as I can tell, is not anarchy. Which would make her a statist, whether she likes government or not. As you explained, there are those who believe the state is illegitimate, and then there is everyone else.
The grey area for not having considered it I will give you, although by their actions, most people treat the state as a legitimate entity, even if they have never considered an alternative. This is a knowledge problem, but it doesn’t eliminate them as statists.
Sure, except society is not well-represented by government. Instead, the judgement as to the use of force is applied by third party arbitration and mediation. Common law (and/or customary law) require no government to operate. Law isn’t a set of rules set up by a governing body, but a process of applying precedents and community standards–that gives a better representation of society than a monopolizing government.
Markets have proven remarkably resilient, even under government regulations. True, markets work best when the initiation of force doesn’t take place, but the alternative is that governments somehow work better at preventing the initiation of force, when history clearly shows that governments tend to use force to restrict competition and forcibly allow privileges for some businesses against other businesses. Governments concentrate power into a single entity that allow special interests to socialize the cost of restricting their competition. Without government, bad guys and bad companies find that not only can they not socialize the costs of restricting competition, but that it’s even more expensive and difficult when the opposition is so decentralized, as would be the protection against the bad guys.
Those who value things other than liberty likewise will find that economics works against them, and enforcing values contrary to liberty is expensive and difficult to maintain.
Rogue protection agencies who try to do more than merely protect the rights of their customers will also face these economic disincentives, decentralized opposition, and one more thing: a lack of legitimacy. They would rightly be considered an organization engaging in criminal activity, and thus opposed by the majority of society.
Anarcho-capitalism isn’t promising utopia–that may well be impossible for humans to achieve. Instead it offers freedom in the form of more opportunities and alternatives for individuals to choose from in protecting themselves. And by relating the economics of protection with the legalities of protection, the proper economic incentives are in place to minimize crime and corruption, as well as to recognize how much any person actually values such protection, as opposed to the socialized costs, corruption, and one-size-fits-all solutions of the government protection racket.
Objective law will not be achieved by wise philosopher-legislators or by democracy, representative or otherwise, but only by following the basics of human nature and praxeological understanding. The history of such things as common law and Merchant Law show that this is not an imaginary construct that is impossible in reality, but rather that the decentralized compeition of economic forces is the only sustainable system for justice and rights protection. For you minarchists out there, just think of it as the ultimate form of checks and balances.