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A monopoly on violence amplifies the risk of abuse.

KodoKB points out a risk of abuse:

The use of retaliatory force has an objective risk of being misapplied and therefore of violating the rights of others.

Related: #4

Defensive force and security services are productive endeavors.

Retaliatory force is only part thereof, and defense involves the employment of scarce resources, thus economic principles apply. (Logan Chipkin)

[There is a] difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production.

Rand says ancaps make the same mistake as “modern statists” – they don’t see this difference.

There exist many legal variations between states of the US, eg with regard to wiretapping laws (single-party vs two-party-consent states), yet presumably that wouldn’t lead KodoKB to conclude that federalism is bad.

Since an objectivist government, by definition, cannot aggress upon its citizens, it cannot stop them from forming private arbitration services anyway. It has no way to enforce its monopoly. So an objectivist society would sooner or later turn into an ancap one anyway.

Even if it’s true that people need shared, objective legal standards for a society to function, that doesn’t mean government is the only way to supply such standards. (Logan Chipkin)

Private protection/arbitration agencies would actually be better than the governments described in #5 (the US and Chinese government, respectively). Consider how things would be different if these governments were not extorting their citizens for money, but instead had to rely on a value proposition to earn their money – that is, if they both operated like private arbitration agencies. Then both would prefer to have shared rules around intellectual property so their customers continue to give them money.

That sounds no worse than the current situation between the US and China, say. China protects Chinese companies violating US trademarks.

(There’s a common libertarian saying about how criticisms of libertarianism are usually just criticisms of the status quo.)

KodoKB writes:

If someone decides to make a website that only supports a certain browser, or to only allow certain encoding methods in their phonelines, while that may exclude me from their services it does not violate my rights. If someone decides that they can steal my IP [intellectual property] and they have an agency that supports this view, they are violating my rights and are being protected in doing so.

Common standards often emerge voluntarily because people prefer objectivity and wish to avoid arbitrariness.

Consider communications technology and the web. Competing phone companies agree on standards for underlying technology so their customers can call each other. Developers of web browsers adopt common standards for the web. Developers of operating systems follow shared, cross-OS standards (called POSIX).

These standards result in objectivity, and they emerged without government involvement. People develop and agree upon such standards voluntarily because of the benefits they offer: without them, there’d be chaos. People generally don’t like chaos.

[I]t is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.

In other words, having multiple governments in a single territory would not result in having objective laws.

Reddit user KodoKB explains why:

[T]here could be thousands of slight (or not so slight) variations between the different agencies. Because there are so many different definitions of what’s allowed, the law then would not be objective in the sense that it’s not practically possible for an individual to know what actions are permissible and which aren’t.

Top objectivist criticisms of anarcho-capitalism and counter-criticisms.

The objectivist stance is that people need one shared government to write laws and resolve disputes. The anarcho-capitalist stance is that private arbitration services and judges could not only do that, too, so that no government is necessary, but could actually do it better.

This discussion is for objectivist criticisms of anarcho-capitalism in particular. Other common criticisms have been addressed here.

The anarcho-capitalist stance: competing governments in a single territory would not only work but be superior to having a single government, a monopoly on violence.

The orbit of the star S2 around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way turns by about 12 arcminutes each time around, as general relativity predicts. Newton’s law predicts no such turning for a single star orbiting a single mass.

The threshold theorem assumes errors strike independently, but in real devices they don’t: noise is correlated with the very states being computed. So no quantum device will get far enough below the threshold for error correction to work.

Originating ideas is something brains do, and brains are physical objects. Whatever the laws of physics let a physical object do, a universal computer can be programmed to do. So with the right program, a computer could originate ideas just as people do. What’s missing is the program, not the machine.

Error correction can’t save a quantum computer in practice. It needs many more qubits and steps, each of which errs too, and the large entangled states it relies on are extremely fragile, so it would add errors faster than it removes them.

Quantum errors can be corrected without looking at the data. Spread one qubit over nine, tied together so that checking how they relate to each other shows whether one of them went wrong, and how to undo it, without revealing what the qubit holds.

A quantum computer could never run long enough. Its quantities vary continuously, like those of an old analog computer, so small errors pile up and can’t be corrected the way a classical computer corrects a slipped bit: you can’t even look at a quantum state to check it without disturbing it.

A quantum computer could factor numbers hundreds of digits long in hours, by finding how often the remainders of a number’s powers repeat. That would break the codes that protect most of the internet’s secrets, which rely on factoring being too hard.

A classical computer can’t simulate quantum physics efficiently: the numbers it needs double with every particle added, so a few hundred particles would take more numbers than there are atoms in the universe. To simulate nature, build a computer of quantum parts that behaves as nature does.

A computer can run by the laws of quantum mechanics alone. A Turing machine can be built of quantum parts that carry it through its steps one after another, as an isolated system, without losing energy.