Anarcho-capitalism: who pays for the police if there's no state?

Anarcho-capitalism: abolishing the state and paying for your own police

Anarcho-capitalism doesn't fail on sarracena grounds. It fails on the bill. If the monopoly on coercion disappears, no one has yet explained who pays for the neighborhood police station or who the neighbor who can't afford a private security agency is supposed to call. And the question is no longer a seminar pastime: with Javier Milei in the Argentine presidency and Cristina Kirchner under house arrest after her six-year corruption conviction was upheld, according to BBC News Mundo reporting, the doctrine finally has a real laboratory to pull on.

What is anarcho-capitalism and what does it have to do with Milei?

The premise is simple: any institution financed by force is a parasite, and the state is the mother of them all. The canonical reading list is Rothbard, Mises and Hayek, with the Mises Institute as the gateway in Spanish. From there trinc the program: absolute private property, free contracts, and security, justice and defense provided by competing agencies.

The Argentine case works as a stress test. It's claimed that Milei is an anarcho-capitalist and that, for consistency's sake, he doesn't intend to run the economy: his proposal wasn't to impose the dollar, but freedom of currency choice. Anyone can sign a rental contract or set a salary in dollars without asking permission. And they haven't done so en masse. That's the uncomfortable fact for friend and foe alike: voluntary dollarization exists and is advancing far more slowly than the rhetoric.

The central bank reform remains, for now, halfway there. Its borrowing function has been removed, but the institution still stands. The campaign promise was different: to exterminate the peso, literally. Anyone demanding doctrinal consistency from the man in office has plenty of material here.

Who protects the person with three houses and two businesses?

The most repeated objection isn't theoretical, it's about money. The argument goes that the textbook anarcho-capitalist wants to keep everything from the state except the police, the courts and the army, and expects that cost to be covered by the community while he protects several properties, assets and livestock. A revolver and a shotgun, goes the recurring joke, are enough to defend what's yours; let everyone else pay for the helicopter. In that reading, the voluntary paradise is a cost externalization scheme with good PR.

The libertarian response has two legs. The first is that current spending is already socialized: everyone pays for security to cover the interest of a few. The second is empirical: where the state retreats, voluntary solidarity appears. They cite online crowdfunding in the US for unpayable medical bills or for house and business fires, and contrast the citizen response in the Valencia floods (dana) with the official machinery. The Mad Max propaganda — man is a wolf to man, therefore you need Leviathan — would, according to this reading, have an interested author.

Are monopolies created by the state or the market?

Here the exchange moves up a level. The argument is that regulation manufactures oligopolies: the thicker the official gazette, the more expensive it is to enter and the fewer competitors survive. Big business wouldn't hate the state; it needs it as an entry barrier. And the same diagnosis serves to attack both the big corporation and the ministry that protects it.

Against this weighs the objection that contemporary corporate power is intertwined with tailor-made rules, and that without a final arbiter no one breaks a organización criminal or enforces a contract. The paradox is subtle: the Austrian school and its critics use the same fact — the state blesses the big — to reach opposite conclusions.

The national objection: no sovereignty, no freedom

There's a third way that disputes not the economics but the framework. Any liberalism, with prefix or suffix, would end up as a tool to dismantle a country and hand it to foreign interests; without nation and sovereignty as priorities, the government of the day is a puppet serving interests alien to its population. Hence national-libertarianism: protect the nation outwardly and liberalize inwardly, with drastic limits on monopolies. Uncomfortable for both camps, and for that very reason rarely traveled.

The lesson of the London and Liverpool stagecoaches

The historical curiosity brought up here is worth its weight. The birth of joint-stock companies was not an exercise in pure market economics: a bourgeois with an idea sought shareholders among other bourgeois, set up the operation, and prepared a nice envelope for the official who granted the government license — the feudal lord of everything. When the business prospered and had paid for itself, someone else would arrive to take it over. Private initiative, the story concludes, has always needed permission.

The political cost of the utopia

The cultural leg is missing. It's argued that anarcho-capitalism doesn't even benefit the rich of the moment: in the medium term it destroys rich countries and turns them into second-rate powers living off rents while others laugh. And there's the deeper diagnosis: decades of Keynesianism would have built a Matrix in which the state appears as the indispensable protector and any cut, as a death sentence. Reagan's line — we're from the government and we're here to help — remains the most terrifying in the field.

With these materials, the most likely outcome is that anarcho-capitalism never actually governs anywhere. It will govern as a pressure argument: the ultra-liberal who makes the old-school liberal look reasonable. If that happens, the police bill still won't add up on paper, and the debate will have advanced an inch. Or two.