I think turning the world into much smaller joint stock privatized small communities will make us far closer to ancapnistan

While ancapnistan may or may not be practical within our life time we can get pretty close.

I learn economy with my daughter.

I am impressed by competitive equilibrium.

Under perfect competitive equilibrium resources are allocated efficiently and that happens when everyone max out profit. Firms marginal revenue is just the price and firms are just price taker.

Then we have monopoly.

In monopoly, firms marginal revenue drop faster than declining demand curves. Firm undermine production and get more surplus.

Government surplus is bad. At best it enrich rulers. Often it just fueled bigotry. Prohibition of drugs may just be there to fullfill bigotry against drug users. They know you will still stay there and pay taxes and suffer bigotry because you don’t have any other much better place to go anyway.

That is why ancap hate monopoly of power in an area. I got it.

But life is not black and white. There are many shades of grey. Somewhere between perfect competition and monopoly, we have imperfect competition.

You can think off burger King and mc Donald as competing franchise. Or you can think of them as monopoly that is almost perfect substitute to each other.

Mc Donald have monopoly of power to sell McDonald. Burger King is the same. No other competitor can produce burger King. But they also compete.

Here, libertarianism can be measured as consumer surplus. The more free and secure we are and the less tax we pay, the better.

It’s a lot like burger King and mc Donald. The more they compete the bigger customer surplus. The lower the price of burger and the more delicious the burgers are. The more delicious the burger the more money we are willing to pay for those burgers. The difference between how much money we are willing to pay and the actual price is our customer surplus.

The same way the more private cities compete the more surplus we get as private person. The less tax we pay and the more freedom and security from aggression we have.

Imagine banning franchises or restaurants from having monopoly of their own brand. That’s not going to help anyone.

So is pure ancap that ban private cities or all kinds of government.

It’s competition among government, and not total elimination of it that leads to libertarian values.

Here, we shouldn’t debate whether pure ancap is better or worse than network of private cities. We should see that network of pribate cities will be closer to ancapnistan than where we are now.

Also it seems that network of private cities and even pure ancap is very compatible.

With network of private cities, you can just buy a private city and turn it into ancap. Of course, if you do it abruptly you gonna lost money. You spend money to buy the city and then get no revenue because there is no tax. Open border and legalized guns means commies can literally invade by just going there. But hei. At least it’s a real ancapnistan, at least for a while.

The same way under ancapnistan you can buy large territory and set up your private city there. Your territory, your rules I guess.

Here, size of autonomous private cities are huge. If private cities are huge like Indonesia during VOC or EIC then the result is not libertarian. The British and Dutch enslave lots of Indonesians during cultural plantation.

But if the private cities are relatively small then any excessive “ruler’s surplus” Will be minimized and people just shop around for better places.

Of course, one strategy that MC Donald and burger King do is differentiating their products. But that is not bad for customers either. Customers have more choices.

The same way different private cities may not be all libertarian. Some will criminalize drugs and another will only allow economically productive people.

And that is fine. You just shop around.

Eventuallyosome of those private cities will just handle national security and tax land and live regulations and security to private markets. That’ll be close enough to ancapnistan.

Imperfect capitalism works and that’s good enough for me