Anarcho-Capitalism as an Awareness-Raising Project

The free market is always logically anterior to the state, since no group of roving bandits can turn into a group of stationary bandits without the use of resources that only the free market can supply. Since such resources cannot come into being in a lawless and disorderly environment, the foregoing implies that law and order are also anterior to the state: the state cannot create or improve them, but only pervert them through coercive monopolization. All that is needed to stop this from happening is to make a critical number of individuals sufficiently aware of the nature of this process and shake off the Stockholm syndrome and economic ignorance that prevent its successful reversal.

In other words, anarcho-capitalism is not a speculation about how a genuine free market society would work (since, in an accurate sense of the term, there are no non-free market societies), but an awareness-raising project aimed at explaining how the economic and moral powers of society are turned against it by anti-social forces, biases, and prejudices. It is not an exercise in utopian thinking, but an exercise in spotting and understanding the dystopian features of the social status quo. This is what makes it the most profoundly pragmatic of idealistic social visions and the most profoundly modest of ambitious ones.