Excerpts from the article:
Imagine you live in Denmark. You wake up in a country that ranks first in the world for rule of law, first for absence of corruption, fourth in human development, and third in life satisfaction. Your streets are safe. Your courts are functional. Your government, while imperfect, is accountable through elections that people trust. Your children will almost certainly outlive you, receive an excellent education, and never go hungry.
Now imagine someone shows up at your door and says: “I have a proposal. Let’s abolish all of this and replace it with competing private security firms, for-profit courts, and a legal system determined by whichever corporation outbids the others. No, I have not tested this anywhere. No, the closest historical examples either collapsed into civil war or were pre-industrial subsistence societies with fewer people than a mid-sized American suburb. But I have a very compelling thought experiment about a neighborhood vigilante.”
You’d close that door immediately.
Anarcho-capitalism (ancap) isn’t just “less government.” It is the complete abolition of the state and its replacement with private, competing providers for everything the state currently does: police, courts, military defense, environmental regulation, the works. In the standard picture, you’d subscribe to a security/protection agency the way you subscribe to Netflix. If your protection agency and your neighbor’s protection agency disagree about whether you owe your neighbor damages, they go to a private arbitrator. Law emerges from competition, not legislation. The whole thing runs on voluntary contracts and the non-aggression principle.
Michael Huemer is a careful philosopher, and The Problem of Political Authority is a well-constructed book. But it contains a structural move that undermines his project.
The book splits into two halves. In Part I, Huemer argues that political authority is an “illusion”: there is no general moral duty to obey the law, and no special “right to rule” that governments possess. In Part II, he argues that we can replace the state with competing private protection and arbitration firms.
The slide from Part I to Part II is where the magic trick happens.
Huemer defines “political authority” as a package deal: (i) a right to rule (legitimacy), and (ii) a duty of citizens to obey (political obligation). He further specifies that this authority involves content-independence (you must obey even if the law is bad), comprehensiveness (the state can regulate almost anything), and supremacy (the state is the final authority). He then proceeds to demolish this target over five chapters, arguing that no existing theory, including social contract, democratic consent, hypothetical agreement, consequentialism, or fairness, can vindicate authority understood this way.
And he’s… largely right! Most political philosophers agree that a sweeping, content-independent duty to obey the law is indefensible. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on political obligation treats this as an old, heavily contested question with no settled answer. Philosophical anarchism, the view that there’s no general obligation to obey the law, is a perfectly respectable position held by serious philosophers who have zero interest in abolishing the state.
And that’s the problem. Huemer attacks an extremely demanding picture of political authority and then slides to the conclusion that we should abolish the entire apparatus. It’s as if someone proved that no restaurant actually deserves a Michelin three-star rating and concluded that we should stop eating food.
The gap between “political authority, as maximalistically defined, is unjustified” and “therefore, abolish the state” is huge. You can believe the state lacks some cosmic right to rule while also believing that state institutions are, on balance, far better than the alternatives. You can reject content-independent obedience while supporting democratic governance. Most working political philosophers do exactly this.
Huemer’s method is to start from “common-sense morality,” specifically the widely shared intuition that coercion requires special justification. He argues that state coercion (taxation, imprisonment, regulation) fails to meet this justification. The state coerces you, the coercion is wrong, and therefore the state is illegitimate.
The philosopher Jesse Spafford took Huemer’s exact method and pointed it at private property.
Think about it: private property is also a system of coercion. If I claim ownership of a piece of land, I am asserting the right to exclude you from it by force. If you walk onto “my” land and I call my private protection agency to remove you, that’s coercion. The property regime itself is a vast, ongoing system of coercive exclusion: “You may not touch this. You may not enter here. You may not use this resource. Or else.”
If coercion requires special justification, and common-sense morality is the standard, then the coercion embedded in private property needs justification too. And all the usual justifications for property (labor mixing, initial appropriation, efficient resource allocation) are at least as contestable as the usual justifications for state authority. You can deploy Huemer-style thought experiments against property as easily as he deploys them against taxation. Imagine a stranger fences off the only water source in your area and says you can only drink if you pay him. We’d call that extortion. So what non-magical fact makes it acceptable when a property owner does it?
This puts the “anarcho-capitalist” in a bit of a pincer. The “anarcho” part uses Huemer’s anti-coercion arguments to demolish the state. But the “capitalism” part requires an extensive, coercive property regime. If Huemer’s method is powerful enough to destroy political authority, it’s powerful enough to destroy private property rights too. And if you respond by building a complicated theory of why property coercion is justified but state coercion isn’t, you’ve abandoned the “simple, common-sense moral intuitions” strategy that made Huemer’s book persuasive in the first place.
Anarcho-capitalism proposes to build a competitive market for the final arbiter of coercion within a territory. But the best theory in institutional economics, from Cowen to Ellickson to North, Wallis, and Weingast, suggests the thing ancap is trying to marketize either tips into monopoly or selects into violence and cartelization. In either case, you've reinvented a state-like power, just with worse public constraints. That's why ancap looks less like "a system" and more like a transitional phase between states: from a functioning state to a weak state to a new coercive order, or from a state to privatized coercion to a cartelized quasi-state. It is the political equivalent of taking apart your parachute because you find the harness uncomfortable (i.e. suicide).
Posted by lakmidaise12