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  Dennis Hackethal criticized idea #894.

Harry Binswanger wrote a piece titled ‘Sorry Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government’ for Forbes, criticizing the libertarian position.

#894 · Dennis Hackethal, 3 months ago

Economic competition presupposes a free market. A free market cannot exist until after force has been barred. That means objective law, backed up by a government. To say it can be backed up by "competing" force-wielders is circular. There is no competition until there is a free market, and some agency has to protect its condition as a free market by the use of retaliatory force.

The anarchist idea of putting law on "the market" cannot be applied even to a baseball game. It would mean that the rules of the game will be defined by whoever wins it.

Once again, supranational treaties refute this point. Germany and the US have no shared government or jurisdiction. (They each have separate governments, but together they have no common government above them.) Yet they have come up with rules of trade and justice and extradition and so on. Those are objective and evidently work really well since war between these two nations is unthinkable.

I think Binswanger is invoking the fallacy of the stolen concept here: he claims libertarians rely on a concept on which they logically depend. Clearly, as international relations show time and again, that is not the case.

3 months ago · ‘Objectivist Criticisms of Anarcho-Capitalism’