While studying scenarios for how a country collapses into anarchy, I’ve come across a very interesting and sober blog called Surviving in Argentina. The situation, as the author describes it, is very similar to what Gary North calls the “Great Default”. The state has defaulted on all of its obligations, including its regalian ones (providing security). As a result, mass unemployment combined with the absence of any welfare system has created an explosion in crime that no one, trapped in a statist mindset, understands the solution to.
The description of life in anarchy is vivid enough that you know it must be true. For the most part, business, investment and economic growth goes on (the author is a businessman himself), except that leaving and entering one’s home requires taking a defensive posture to fight off possible raiders. And so a lot of the advice the blog gives is how to provide personal protection, even though that’s only really good for young males, not women and children who can only radically change their behavior.
Frighteningly, one recent post detailed how the biggest TV stars of the country, all rich enough to afford all the private security they could want, got together to beg the nation for someone to do something about the crime. They did not specify who this someone or what that something may be. That is to say, even when the country collapses into total anarchy, the same people who believe that the state is essential to provide security and that a market system of security provision would just result in warlords and raiders, still cannot imagine a market system of security.
I think that everyone should read his account of life in Argentina, because it appears that the USA is following the same script. (The USA would be where Argentina was in 2000.) Europe can’t be more than a few years behind.
So events are unfolding where anarchy is going to sweep across the world. There is no longer any reason to engage in philosophical debates over the merits of life in anarchy with statists. Even when the state is gone, they will still not understand. The problem now is providing people a way out of anarchy, not by convincing, but by preparing our system to function the moment when the empire gives up. There is an emergency.
What it says is that anarchy is not the same thing as anarcho-capitalism.
Statists denounce anarcho-capitalism because of its tendency towards anarchy. Argentina shows that statism can (and will) collapse into anarchy anyway.
In that sense, anarcho-capitalism provides a solution to the problems of anarchy, one that Argentines, in their desperate pleas for someone to do something about the anarchy, have not accepted and embraced.
An enormous financial bubble caused by fractional reserve banking combined with a fixed exchange rate to the USD, combined with generalized corruption.
A few things happened in 2001. The government spent money they didn’t have (as usual) so at some point they defaulted. The farming mafia were complaining that the peso (which was pegged to the dollar) was ‘overvalued’ - in plain English that means they wanted a devaluation, which they got. Same thing for some local ‘industrialists’.
Menem’s government (1990-98) was mostly fascist/corporatist with some half-genuine free-market reforms. The left and the conservatives hated that and pretended that the 90s were an example of ‘unbridled capitalism’. The coup of 2001 was partly a coup led by nationalists and farmers.
It’s funny, South Africa is also virtually an anarcho-capitalist society but this doesn’t stop people bleating about how the now pseudo-socialist black government (which is really just a corrupt crony capitalist manifestation similar to the former white regime) needs to “do more”.
You’d think after living through decades of national socialist authoritarianism people would realize less government is the solution…
This really isn’t about anarcho-capitalism though, its about a devastated economy. Anarcho-capitalism relies on a solid, free market economy which will enable the average person to earn enough to feed his family, and not have to resort to crime.
In any case, this blog: Survival in Argentina, should be required reading for everyone, its really incredible and eye opening.
before I read, does this blog say how the state in argentina is still funded. If they are just looking out for themselves how can they gather the taxes needed to still be called “state”?
No idea, but according to this post the military has been mostly dismantled and former soldiers have become commando raiders.
It appears that the people’s general defenselessness still makes them prey for the government, even though most of the instruments of state have ceased to exist. But the moment people reorganize their defense, I don’t see what the government will be able to impose on them.