Objectivist Criticisms of Anarcho-Capitalism
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.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.
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.
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.)
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.