Anarcho-Capitalism is not a valid criticism of American government or economics or morality, nor does it offfer any moral alternative.
Here’s an outline.
1. People aren’t all mostly good. While there are plenty of people who are, and I am one of them, human beings are animals struggling in various hierarchies and the nature of hierarchies is that is is better to be on top than bottom, and human beings want to be on top whether they earn it or not.
Human beings will and do lie, cheat steal and murder to rise in whatever hierarchy they care about. Even the best of us, in the most dire circumstances, are prone to violence and theft and all the rest.
This is one thing that Christianity gets about human nature that Objectivisits and AC’s get dead, dead wrong.
2. Human beings are calorie-sparing. For the most part, human beings seek the fastest, easiest, most pleasurable means to achieve their goals/ascend their hierarchies.
3. The VAST majority of human beings make decisions based on their emotions and use their brains to justify their emotional position. VERY few people can override their emotions with reason and logic, so the notion that you are going to reason together and find peace is nonsense. This INCLUDES very, very smart people and it is mediated by personality traits. Even here, some of the 'smartest' people I know are completely unaware when their feelings are engaged and in the drivers' seat.
Being aware of it is the best hedge we have to lead us back to being rational.
My personal opinion on this is that borderline autistic and people with certain personality disorders tend to put emotions aside in preference to reason best, but not always, and not consistently, and some are just also off their rockers.
4. Human beings have limited focus, energy and time. Bad guys are good at violence because they live by violence. Others realize gains by programming a computer or cobbling shoes, whatever. Shoe cobblers are not good at violence and they do not naturally aggregate with others who enjoy violence, like bad guys do. Shoe cobblers often do not have enough money to hire a rival gang for extortion money, so devil you know.
Expecting human beings to stop cobbling and become proficient at violence is not realistic. Instead, they will be victimized.
All government is force, but all human intereaction comes to force, if one party wants it. There will always be a hierarchy above and below you, government or not, and the threat of violence is at the core of them all. It is submit or die, with a continuum between them.
This is how is always has been, always will be.
We have enjoyed a brief respite from this in thUS and Western world, so like Marxist teenagers who think justice and wealth are a baseline metaphysically given, AC’s tend to think a flattened and largely safe and just hierarchy is a metaphysically given for human beings, but it isn’t so.
5. Human beings behave better with clear, simple rules which are enforced uniformly.
Fear is the best and for many, the only motivator. The argument that the better ideas win is obviously not correct.
People like free stuff (calorie spare) and they like systems that blame someone else for their problems. That’s why Marxism kicks the piss out of Objectivisim and AC except for maybe 10% of the population.
If better arguments and logic wins, Eve never eats the Apple.
The bad news? It is the emotional thinker and/or dumb 90+% which outnumber you, and who are happy to murder you with the right motivation.
And once they decide you have to go, you cannot appease them. And one they are in a mob, there is only emotion and destruction.
6. Hierarchies naturally devolve into systems where might makes right, and might has nothing to do with right. The biggest, youngest, most dangerous scares the other men and collects rewards for savagery or its proxy from women. Dismantling systems crafted over thousands of years and reflecting the best civilization has ever devised — these did not come into being by whim. They came to fruition by luck and by centuries of blood and slow progress.
Dismantling them is going to cause reversion to a primitive hierarchy or heirarchies, and unexpected consequences to those who think a new hierarchy will not immediately be established, and the base hierarchy is “Give me what I want or I will kill you”.
7. Only a very small percentage of human beings have the IQ and disposition to ever conceptualize a hierarchy which is flattened — which is what the US Constitution and capitalism are, essentially.
It is a means for the powerless to have some means to have their rights as human beings enshrined and a means of protecting them. It isn’t perfect but there is nothing better.
8. Human beings are tribalistic. Nothing will ever stop that.
9. Government has done a lot of bad things, including importing and creating an underclass more circumstantially and otherwise disposed to rioting and violence and a emotional thinking.
Most of these bad things are government creep and size increase due to the infiltrations — in culture and civilization — of Marxism. Throwing the US system out with the baby and bath water is a really, really bad idea.
You are throwing away centuries of hard won progress and the best and most just political and economic system ever devised.
Not perfect, but best. Where is better in the world?
A separate and valid question is whether the system must be done away with because of the Marxist infiltration, and then, the question is “In a thoroughly compromised civilization, what replaces it?” An AC utopia or a Marxist racist totalitarian hellhole along the lines of where South Africa is and is headed?
I know my answer.
10. Remaining silent in the face of rioting and violence — no matter its justification — makes you either a coward or close to complicit. It probably makes you a useful idiot.
Pandering isn’t going to save you from a raging Marxist crowd which hates you because of your skin color. A civilization which has educated everyone to believe that skin color is the only salient measure of a human being, and then says that only one skin color is bad, and that one skin color is responsible for all of the worlds’ ills?
You can shut up about it, you coward, but if you support it, you know who you are in history, if you’ve ever studied any, you fool.
11. The Marxist destruction of America is nearly complete. Race relations are the worst they’ve been in my lifetime, and there is no ‘conversation’ about race taking place.
There’s one side shrieking emotionally, getting people fired, deplatformed, beaten and KILLED...
And there’s another side being yelled at, blamed, fired, being beaten and killed.
There is no reason or rationality or justice about it.
12. There is no appeasing an angry mob. They either destroy everything until they are done, or you introduce them to a different emotion, and that settles them right down.
13. Blaming the economic system and government of the US for the Marxist destruction of the US is like blaming the cancer patient’s healthy tissue for the cancer.
You are not a college sophomore. It is time to grow up.
Like a Marxist who is waiting for the perfect implementation of Socialism, stop showing me a fucking intersection without a stop light and try to extrapolate it to all of human relations, because it is ridiculous.
Yes, freedom works. Cooperation is better than compulsion. Duh. Of course.
But what comes after this system you find to be so unjust compared to the utopian ‘morally perfect’ systemless AC ideal...
Let’s just say that very soon, in your lifetime, you are going to see how good you had it, and feel like a goddamned fool for ever damning it. You’re going too see the Visigoths cresting the hill, and you may weep.
Yes, our government is too big. Yes, it has become a Marxist totalitarian state in cooperation with big tech. All of that is bad.
But when the very nature of human beings and reality — the metaphysics of human beings — dictate that hierarchies will always be built, you do not destroy a superior one built on reason because it isn’t perfect.
And you do not contribute to its destruction or makes excuses for its destroyers based on thinking you did at 16 and never had the sense to ever reconsider.
In summary: hierarchies are a metaphyscially given in the creature known as Man. That's why every time Marxism is applied in the world, the worst hierarchies develop. That's why an attempt to create a 'systemless' world will always fail.
The best human beings can hope for, individually, is to be as rational as possible. But the best aggregates of humans can hope for is a hierarchy bounded by rational standards.