public_off Anarcho-Capitalism

Political philosophy advocating stateless capitalism

format_quote Quotes

"The essays collected in this volume challenge the conventional wisdom that the state is necessary for the provision of security. Defense, like any other service, can be produced competitively on the free market, and there is no economic or ethical reason why this one category of goods should be exempt from market competition."

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann event 2003

menu_book The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production

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"Medieval Iceland, medieval Ireland, the Law Merchant of stateless commercial networks, and many other historical examples demonstrate that legal and judicial order does not require the state. These polycentric legal systems provided security and conflict resolution through purely private and voluntary mechanisms."

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann event 2003

menu_book The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production

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"Private insurance agencies, competing for clients, face a powerful incentive to minimize conflict and aggression: each unresolved conflict imposes costs on the insurer. A territorial monopoly state, by contrast, profits from insecurity; it can externalize the costs of war and aggression onto its tax-paying subjects."

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann event 2003

menu_book The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production

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"Without the erroneous public perception and judgment of the state as just and necessary and without the public's voluntary cooperation, even the seemingly most powerful government would implode and its powers evaporate. Thus liberated, we would regain our right to self-defense and be able to turn to freed and unregulated insurance agencies for efficient professional assistance in all matters of protection and conflict resolution."

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann event 2009

menu_book The Private Production of Defense

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"Every state is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making and taxation. Because it is a monopoly, it will inevitably produce its goods at higher cost and lower quality than would competing private providers, and it will use its compulsory revenue to further entrench and expand its power."

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann event 2003

menu_book The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production

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"No government should have the right to prevent another government from going into competition with it, or to require consumers of security to come exclusively to it for this commodity."

de Molinari, Gustave event 1849

menu_book The Production of Security

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auto_stories Books

Against Intellectual Property

person Kinsella, Stephan event 2008

Drawing on Austrian property rights theory and the insight that ideas are non-scarce goods, argues that patents and copyrights are not natural righ...

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Anatomy of the State

person Rothbard, Murray event 1974

Concise treatise analyzing the nature and origins of the state, arguing that the state is fundamentally an organization based on aggression rather ...

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Democracy: The God That Failed

person Hoppe, Hans-Hermann event 2001

Controversial critique of democracy from a libertarian perspective, arguing that monarchy is economically and ethically superior to democracy, and ...

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Legal Foundations of a Free Society

person Kinsella, Stephan event 2023

A comprehensive collection of revised essays spanning three decades of libertarian legal theory, covering the foundations of rights, punishment, co...

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The Private Production of Defense

person Hoppe, Hans-Hermann event 2009

In a free market, private insurance agencies competing for clients can deliver security and conflict resolution more efficiently and fairly than st...

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The Production of Security

person de Molinari, Gustave event 1849

Molinari's short but explosive 1849 essay, the first systematic argument that security and defense, like any other commodity, should be produced by...

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person Authors

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann

German-American economist and political theorist, student of [Murray Rothbard](/library/authors/rothbard-murray/), known for his work on private pr...

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Kinsella, Stephan

American patent attorney turned anarcho-capitalist legal theorist and the most rigorous critic of intellectual property within the libertarian trad...

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de Molinari, Gustave

Belgian-born French economist, editor of the Journal des Économistes, and the first thinker to propose a fully free market in security and defense,...

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Rothbard, Murray

American economist and political theorist, leading figure in the Austrian School and anarcho-capitalism, founder of modern libertarianism

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