Dennis Hackethal

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.