Move to Somalia, Tunisia or Haiti if You Want Anarchy

Nonsense, all of these are extremely repressive statist regimes with very extensive government, weak property rights and massive state expropriation (=“socialism”). None of them to the least qualify as “anarchist” in our sense of the term. Rather, all of them, in fact all poor countries, are not capitalist at all and attempted some form of socialism in their recent history.

To act as if Somalia is the anarchist equivalent of the Soviet union - the example that shows that too much laissez-fair doesn’t work either - is so wrong that it’s funny. Somalia is a failed communist state, not a voluntarist experiment. Sure, if you start your analysis in 1991, then Somalia can act as an example of a country that is “anarchist”. But Somalia has no functioning government because communism was so dysfunctional that the central government broke down, not because they consciously attempted anarchism. Interestingly, standards of living actually went up for most people after the fall of big government “services” in Somalia. Life expectancy went up (during a civil war!) after the end of universal health care in Somalia. Mention that one next time someone says universal health care can work because it works in Norway, which ironically is extremely capitalist.

In Haiti most people do not own their houses officially and it takes two decades (!) to register ownership of a piece of land that your family has been on for generations, because there is so much red tape and regulation. Does that sound very anarchistic to you? People who think that miserable countries are lawless and anarchistic are just ill-informed. The problem is that we (public school, left-wing media) never mention stuff like regulation in these places, so people naturally assume that there is none. The opposite is the case: These countries are poor and violent because they have such extensive government meddling, overregulation and decades of ill-advised social engineering, not because they lack proper governance.

And didn’t they just have huge a revolt against big government in Tunisia? Why would they do that if the country is anarchistic? These Arab revolts are always portrayed as a rebellion “for democracy” in the media, but of course they are more about immediate statism in peoples lives.