 An arco-capitalism is certainly one of the most controversial political ideologies around, and definitely the most misunderstood in my opinion. It garners a lot of vitriolic hate from the left and the right because with only two words in its name, they're the most divisive political words of all. To brush in a very broad stroke, the right hates anarchy and the left hates capitalism. That's enough to make 90% of the people who hear the name alone stop in their tracks, plan to flag and refuse to try and understand any further. What I'm here to do today is to break down the barriers that people have in trying to understand its principles, methods, interpretations and actual application. What does an arco-capitalism stand for? The man who came up with the whole idea was the heralded economist and philosopher Murray N. Rothbard, and his description was that it was the final conclusion of the non-aggression principle commonly abbreviated to the NAP. The NAP can be explained in a few different ways, but here is how I will put it. Every human is granted by nature itself with a set of natural and inalienable rights. Among those primarily are the rights of life, liberty and private property. The NAP is a stance that any initiation of force, through violence or coercion, an act against those rights without the person's consent is inherently immoral. A robber, for example, who threatens your life and property is in violation of this principle and it is therefore justified for the person on the receiving end of it to take defensive action. The vast majority of all libertarians agree on this principle and an arco-capitalist take it to its logical conclusion. If taxation is the removal of your money without your consent, just as it is with a robber, then the state which exists solely off this method must be inherently immoral. A supermarket that you willingly give your money to in return for food is participating with you in a voluntary transaction and is therefore moral. If you stop paying your taxes, you will be hunted by the government and punished as severely as possible. If you decide to make your own food or go to a local farmers market for it, the supermarket is not going to hunt you down in order to throw you in a cage. An arco-capitalism wishes to abolish those institutions born out of immorality and allow society to function completely off of consensual individual choices and not at the behest of whoever has a monopoly on violence and calls their rules law. When translated from Greek, the word anarchy means without rulers. This does not mean without rules. The owner of any private property holds the right to set the rules of use or otherwise exclude people from its use entirely. This is just as true for you and your car as it is a business owner and their machinery or a homeowner and the land around it. The NAP is a set of rules that all inhabitants of an inarco-capitalist society must abide by or they will face repercussions. There would still be a legal system without a government, just as now there are competing law firms, in this system there would also be competing courts. Now of course this is a complex idea to wrap your head around and it was the last issue that kept me from endorsing an arco-capitalism until I read the book Chaos Theory by the amazing economist Robert Murphy. That book summarises in a few hours the whole concept in a far more succinct way than I ever could in just one YouTube video and you can get a free PDF or audio book of it online from the Mises Institute. For now you'll just have to take my word that the law itself is not exempt from the law of competition and if you really want to know more you should go there. This notion ranges from an individual defending themselves from a robber like the previous analogy to how the anarchist society can defend itself from external threats and the resolution of disputes between people and businesses. Just as all businesses will have their morality held accountable by market competition this is no less true of any institution of arbitration and justice and the insurers of individuals against such violations. So let's talk more about competition in this society. Our proposal is that in today's societies the government does not protect people from the evil wishes of giant megacorporations as is so commonly believed but in fact it's the other way around. The government actively goes out of its way all the time to protect the interests of big business by any means necessary and there's no better time to see this at the time I'm writing in April 2020 in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown. At the first notion of an economic slowdown the government's and central banks of Europe and North America shat one giant collective brick and sent the money printers into overdrive. Through spending bills, quantitative easing, interest rates and liquidity provisions to Wall Street banks, the US government in the space of just over a month pumped roughly $6 trillion new dollars into circulation. Within this there is a section which will give American citizens a universal basic income check. The average amount of money each household will receive from these checks is approximately $3,000. The average sovereign debt acquired per household from all of this is around $60,000. Is it remotely appropriate to say that the government protects the little guy from the big guy when the little guy gets 20 times less help than the big guy in a time of uncertainty? Do you feel safe and provided for when the government cuts off your income and gives your family $3,000 at the same time as handing you a bill for $60,000? The taxpayer is footing the entirety of this absurdity while industries like commercial airlines are being rescued from certain doom from being faced with the prospect of needing to survive on bare minimum operating costs for a few months. Now imagine if these airlines didn't receive this bailout. What manner of horror would we see? Well, if a plane company goes bust, the planes don't magically vanish. The valuable skill sets of pilots, cabin crew and airport personnel don't suddenly just leave their brains. The company will have to sell their assets at a massively discounted price to balance their books to other companies that had the responsible business sense to retain revenue and capital in order to remain solvent in times of hardship. So a bad company goes out of business and a good company benefits, making all of us benefit. This is the economic law of competition. Apply this logic to every single large business who is on the list to receive a bailout because of COVID. If they are on that list, they would not exist without governments. If they would not exist without corporate welfare, they do not represent the ideals of anarcho-capitalism. If all the banks, warehouses, real estate businesses, landlords, pharmaceutical companies or any dubious company or industry that you could think of had to operate knowing that the government wouldn't be there to catch them if they fuck up. Just think of how accountable, fair and sensible they would be. Something else is not a free market and is not an example of what we stand for. Profit is the reward a firm receives for offering consumers a product of better or similar quality at lower or similar prices to their competitors. Every individual in an economy is a consumer. If a firm can exist and profit without doing this, they do not deserve to exist. I will have to make a whole video dedicated to completely debunking the fear that corporations will just take over in the absence of government, or even with a small government. The belief goes against vast swathes of logic of human action and history proves it entirely false. Every single supposed example I've been presented with of a company doing absolutely terrible things leads back to the government. That doesn't excuse the company for it and they should be held accountable, but a government in any form has the complete incentive to not hold them accountable. You will never beat them at their own system. The cards are stacked in their own favour. Now it leads me nicely onto a point about the environment. The environmental damage that we are seeing today is what is called the tragedy of the commons on an unprecedented scale. This is the notion that when nobody truly owns something, nobody has an incentive to maintain it and it will be abused to the point of destruction. Consistent private property rights answer this problem. Milton Friedman used a great example that if a company's pollution dirties your shirt without your consent, your property rights have been violated and you have legitimate grounds to seek restitution. This analogy can be unpacked for eternity so I'll go straight to its conclusion. This will make it far too costly for companies to pollute above a certain level and it would actually be their incentive as profit seekers to advance clean production far more than they currently do. The fines and taxes that governments impose on large polluters pale in regards to the potential liability that they are causing. By substituting individual restitution for a discounted rate from the government, they are in a sense allowing harmful practices to continue mostly unopposed. But of course, like just about everything else, issues of the environment are subject to trade-offs. We could make the world have a net carbon emission of zero or less overnight, but it would mean the death of three and a half billion people and I'm not going to take anybody seriously who will say that is worthwhile. What I know more than anything else is that an unhindered market is inexplicably better at managing trade-offs than an unaccountable monopoly, which is what a government is. And I'm just putting it out there that I'm vegan so if you say that's not doing enough or doesn't consider animals, I will whack that out and ask you what you're doing for animals and the environment. If you're not doing anything or go on a march once a month and wear a pin on your backpack to feel good, you have no leg to stand on with me and now you understand the point of individualism. Now for my final point in this introduction, I'll talk about immigration. The leading writer in this area is Hans Hermann Hopper, or as I like to call him, Triple H. He is a man of absolute intellectual genius whose ideas are unfortunately very often misconstrued and taken out of context. It's safe to say that Triple H is on the conservative side of the Ancap's fear and pictures this society to have strong border control. This would be well within the rights of an individual to do so as the ownership of private property completely morally justifies the exclusion of others at the owner's discretion. As individualist as we are, we do not deny that communities form their own set of standards and agreements. In the way that a homeowner's association is a voluntary agreement with a community of homeowners to behave in a certain way, a community can create such rules in order to participate within them. As Triple H explains, owners of this private property within a given community will have a vested interest in making sure that people who wish to enter are approved to do so under their set of guidelines. This could be how many people are let in, the rate at which they are, their intentions while they're, and so on. This is where Triple H brings up a lot of traditional right-leaning people on board because if they want strong borders or no immigration at all, then our ideals allow them to have this if they so choose. I for one do not see I to I with Triple H on his interpretation of this. My first political video on this channel was justifying open borders as libertarian, but that does not mean I disagree with his interpretation. I question how close these systems can come to being a state, and if you need to have a manner of licenses and enforcers in order to participate in other voluntary actions, well that just doesn't sit right with me. That being said, I would simply choose to just live in a more open community with a different set of ideals and norms rather than disputing the legitimacy of them imposing their rules because truthfully there is no dispute to be had. The last big part to end on is the issue of money. Here we go back to the Austrian Economic School and their appraisal of a system of free banking, where competing banks issue their own currencies to be used. What's interesting about this argument is that it is completely as applicable with or without a government. But banks are what many people fear about the private sector and lots of classical liberal writers voice their skepticism and worry about them. Little did they know that after their writings, many examples of free banking would form and prove to be very successful. This is the part of ANCAP theory that has indeed been tried. The best known examples are Scotland and Switzerland, where at various points in time, these developed countries did not have a central bank to issue a national currency and in fact the result was that the economies that they took place in were found to in fact be more stable than the ones around them. This is historical proof that government issuance of money and credits through a monopoly does not stabilise economies as the proponents will tell you, but in fact causes the booms and busts that we currently witness. Such booms and busts are feared as an inevitable part of market economies and that without a government, clearly they would be unbelievably drastic. But this does not stand up to any scrutiny of both praxeology or history. So that will wrap up my first introduction to anarcho-capitalism. It's a topic that has been written on and developed for decades, so don't be under any sort of illusion that I've covered all of it. If the content of this video garners a lot of criticism or many points are made that I didn't address here, I'll likely do a follow up. But if you appreciate this, then please go ahead and like the video and subscribe to the channel, as that is much appreciated. Take it easy.