Michael Malice already destroyed Yaron Brook and objectivism years ago: “What’s amazing about minarchism, which is what objectivists are, is they will argue that government is really, really bad at everything it does and everything it touches: therefore, it has to be in charge of the most important stuff.”
And what’s more, the claim that the greatest violator of private property and therefore natural rights is the greatest and only applicable defender of private property and natural rights is dispelled from one’s mind once one has read, even if it is only in summary, about the age of unparalleled industrial-scale death factories that was the twentieth century.
Or as Robert Higgs puts it: “Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.”
But as it pertains to anarcho-capitalism, or in other words, actual capitalism, whereby markets are actually free from government intervention because there exists no government to intervene — the argument that if government does not provide for one’s security then no one can is easily done away with when one puts themselves in the shoes of, say, the average Chinese citizen living through Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or the average Ukrainian citizen living through Stalin’s Holodomor: owing to their conditions, and indoctrination through relentless propaganda campaigns from the moment they were born, in addition to being cut off from the world that exists outside the totalitarian state and therefore any other way of living to the contrary, neither of said citizens could conceive of a reality whereby the government *does not* provide for the production and distribution of their food; but during the same period, on the other side of the world, the average American citizen was experiencing all the delights and abundance that non-government entities in the (mostly) free market could provide, and hence, conversely, could not conceive of a reality whereby *only* the government provided for the production and distribution of their food.
Once a good or service has been made into a market good or service, it is quite impossible to imagine doing anything any other way; and at the point most if not all goods or services are provided for overwhelmingly if not entirely by the free market, to pose doing anything any other way, with knowledge or perhaps even living memory of the expensive, inefficient, and unreliable alternative, becomes evidently absurd and transparently monopolistic to the average person living through the age of anarcho-capitalism, particular those having lived through the age of monopoly that preceded and inspired it. This includes security, even on a national scale.
As John Hasnas explains: “Consider what it would mean for a nation to seriously undertake a process of de-politicisation. Every reduction in the size and scope of government releases more of the creative energy of the population. The economic effects of this are well known and are currently being demonstrated in China. As economists point out, revolutionary change can be wrought by marginal effects. Even a slow process of liberalisation that is sustained over time will produce massively accelerated economic and technological growth. And the increase in freedom and prosperity in the liberalizing nation would have profound external effects as well. Many of the bravest and most industrious residents of more repressive nations would attempt to immigrate to the liberalising one, and some other nations would learn by the liberalising nation’s example and begin to copy its policies. [And] as the economic and technological gap between the liberalising nation and the rest of the world widens, as the rest of the world becomes more dependent upon the goods and services manufactured and supplied by that nation, and as a greater number of other nations are moved to adopt liberalising policies themselves, the threat the rest of the world poses to the liberalising nation decreases. Evidence of this is supplied by the demise of the Soviet Union... After years or decades of continual and sustained reduction in the size of government, how much wider will the economic and technological gap between the prenatal anarchy and the more repressive nations be? How much more sophisticated its defensive technology? How much more dependent will the repressive nations be on its goods and services? Let a nation begin to tread the path toward anarchy and by the time the question of whether national defense is a public good that must be supplied by government becomes relevant, it is very likely to be moot.”
If one merely reads John Hasnas’ “The Obviousness of Anarchy” and “The Myth of the Rule of Law,” all of Yaron Brook’s arguments — and objectivism and minarchism’s likewise — completely collapse.
https://www.youtube.com/live/dY3pma6nINQ?si=njjw13Kc-u_te-BZ
