Anarcho-capitalism
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Anarcho-capitalism (colloquially: ANCAP or An-Cap) is a political ideology and economic theory that advocates the abolition of state institutions and services and their replacement with private providers. Parts of it argue that a society could function without a state through voluntary exchange and private institutions that provide law and security. This model envisions a voluntary society, drawing on concepts such as the non-aggression principle, free markets, and self-ownership. In the absence of statutory law, private defense agencies and insurance companies would operate competitively to provide services analogous to those performed by courts and the police under a state system.
While the earliest documented use of the term anarcho-capitalism appears in Karl Hess's essay "The Death of Politics", published in Playboy in March 1969, the American economist Murray Rothbard is credited with developing and popularizing the concepts of anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-capitalism in the early 1970s.
Rothbard, an American libertarian, drew on elements of the Austrian school, classical liberalism, 19th-century American individualist anarchists, and mutualist thinkers such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, while rejecting the labor theory of value.
Rothbard proposed that an anarcho-capitalist society would operate under a mutually agreed-upon legal code, "which would be generally accepted and which the courts would pledge themselves to follow". This legal code would recognize contracts between individuals, private property, self-ownership, and tort law, in accordance with the non-aggression principle. Unlike a state system, enforcement in Rothbard's model would apply only to those who initiated force or fraud. Rothbard argued that state power is unjustified, asserting that it violates individual rights, reduces prosperity, and creates social and economic problems.
Proponents of anarcho-capitalism cite several historical precedents that they regard as examples of quasi-anarcho-capitalism, including the Republic of Cospaia, Acadia, Anglo-Saxon England, Medieval Iceland, the American Old West, Gaelic Ireland, as well as systems such as merchant law, admiralty law, and early common law.
Anarcho-capitalism is distinguished from minarchism, which advocates for a minimal state (often described as a night-watchman state limited to protecting individuals from aggression and enforcing private property), and from objectivism, a broader philosophy advocating a limited role, but not necessarily limited, government.