I think there are reason to believe it is very unlikely that an army would attempt to invade a stateless society. For this discussion, I will assume that people think it is a big enough concern that people think some type of national defense in needed. National defense is what is commonly called a public good, a product or service in which it is difficult if not impossible to exclude people who have not paid for it from enjoying its benefits. A classic example of a public good is a lighthouse since any passing ship can use it to aid navigation. Similarly, if I hope to repel an invasion or discourage the threat of an invasion from a large-scale force, as a consequence then I will likely need to defend my neighbor’s property too. (Incidentally, I show how lighthouse operators overcame the problem.) The theory is that public goods become underproduced relative to their demand as everyone is waiting for someone else to pay for them. In essence, everyone sits on the sidelines hoping others will pay for it.

It is worth pointing out that the existence of a state does not address this problem of public goods, but only creates more public goods, namely the creation of just laws and an informed electorate. Meanwhile, laws that favor special interests are private goods under statism, and so they are produced in great supply, while laws to insure equal justice are underproduced.

Also, it is conceivable that the possibilities I point to below could exist within a taxless minimal state, however unlikely that would be to exist. I do think that if national defense could be shown to work without the state’s aid, then government officials would just exist as some nominal figure heads without much authority.

The free rider problem could also be minimized if defense expenses were reduced by not threatening other countries. Relatively cheap defensive weapons like shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles along with snipers would cripple any occupation before it even started. Such a free society could drastically reduce its defense budget, vastly decreasing the free rider problem off the bat. This would be something that people valued, not the paranoid national security state that now exists. The only solution that the state offers for public goods is to forbid competition and create more free riders in the beaucracy. Yet entrepreneurs have a financial stake to figure out how to exclude free riders, so listed below are just a few possible solutions that occur to me for privately funding a national defense. I cannot explain exactly which solutions people will eventually adopt, for if anyone could, that would be a good case of installing a dictator (which would sort of defeat the point).

1. Ostracism — The more anonymous a free rider can become, the greater the number of free riders. People who contributed to some national defense might proudly display a sign on their mailbox or on their car. Entire neighborhoods might brag that 100 percent of the households have contributed to national defense. A low contribution rate within a neighborhood would probably be seen as indicative of other social ills, and their property values would likely suffer.
2. Make it easier to pay — Businesses might raise funds by asking customers for voluntary contributions, as with tipping. At a restaurant, people know that their meals are discounted to some degree because their hosts are paid very little per hour. If people understood that their meals were discounted by the lack of any national defense overhead, it would seem fair to most people if they tacked on ten cents or something like that to a good cause that benefited them.
3. Ask for charity — Fundraisers could always be held to ask for donations from people in other countries. Citizens of neighboring countries who did not wish to see the invasion of an adjacent nation might find it helpful to contribute. They might be worried about an interruption of trade. We could also ask residents of foreign countries who value liberty to help.
4. Disperse the collection process — People could be asked to collect funds just from others around their neighborhood. This way the money was being given to others whom they know. In a free society, I think people might then become more engrossed in their communities, and have more invested in the caretaking of others through institutions like mutual aid societies.
5. Guarantee funds — There might be some guarantee to refund a contribution if a sufficient amount of money were not raised. An aspect of a free rider problem is the worry that not enough money will be contributed and the money will just idly go to waste.
6. Partially exclude free riders — There are ways of making the free rider problem more manageable by de-emphasizing services for geographic regions of the nation that failed to pay their share. You might also offer premium services to those who do contribute. Maybe people who contribute could be invited to special safety classes to learn to defend themselves and their homes, which might help to reduce their home insurance rates.
7. Bundle services — The private supply of firearms guarantees a private good, namely protection of an individual’s property. But the vast distribution of firearms also provides some measure of public good like national defense. Dispute resolution organizations (DROs) might very well require the purchase of a bundled national defense service in order to receive their full protection. Some DROs might try undercutting the cost of bundled services; however, they would likely have a fairly diminished reputation as a result, causing more trusted DROs to be less willing to have reciprocal agreements with them. The cheapskate DROs would find their dispute costs increasing as a result, and would have to raise its rates near those of the more reputable DROs anyway. I mentioned lighthouses as a classic case of a public good. Well, this was a way lighthouses owners overcame the problem of free riders by also operating the docks near their lighthouses. Navigation to their docks became safer In turn, their docks got more business. So it can be more profitable to bundle a public good with a private good.
8. Advertising — Sponsorships are also a popular way of funding public goods. The broadcast television signal is interrupted by commercials, for example. Organizations could even broadcast that they financially support defense services. At sporting events, prize promotions are often funded privately so that a sponsor receive some public goodwill. This would likely also be the case for a widely desired good like national defense.
9. Donut model — Before fully transforming into a stateless society, a nation could gradually free itself in a pattern of increasing concentric circles until the point of reaching its border. This way, a stateless society could more gradually transition away from statism. In the meantime, the stateless inner ring could begin experimenting with other funding models to see which work best.
10. Lottery — Lotteries have been used by governments to fund education budgets and all sort of other spending. I am sure there would exist other lotteries for people to gamble their money, but one that’s profits were invested in a public good might garner more appeal. A lottery could be used in conjunction with another funding methods to get even wider appeal.

I am sure there are lots of different approaches to public goods. The reason more solutions have not been developed is because the states historically have always monopolized the service. Imagine if the government began regulating beauty as a public good, which it conceivably is, and taxed people who did not meet some quantitative standard. You might see some initial improvement in the attractiveness of a population, but those government standards would begin to erode to meet the majority’s demands. After a few generations, people would be asking themselves how they could ever find a partner without government-run matchmaking.

• “Providing for the Common Defense” by Charles Peña
• “The Myth of Public Goods” by Mark Davis
• “Funding Public Goods: Six Solutions” by Roderick T. Long

While anarchy may be viewed as a Utopian state, so long as a single individual wishes to undermine the rights of their (sic) neighbor, the response will always be a de facto government. As soon as you have de facto government, you will have those that will advocate that the role of that government extends out into providing services that are viewed to be not efficiently achieved individually.

I think that is a fair point. I like rules, and those rules need some governance to be implemented. If that is called a government or a dispute resolution organization, I don’t mind. It’s like when Frederic Bastiat said just because he does not want the state to raise grain that does not mean he wants to go hungry. I don’t agree it is necessary for a single organization to claim a monopoly by force on the enactment and enforcement of rules that others must follow. That is an imposition of a positive non-consensual obligation on the individual.

The knock that a stateless society is utopian because it is believed neither practical nor achievable is commonplace. Yet, we wouldn’t say that a law against murder is utopian even though no one thinks it could prevent all murders. And if I am at fault for holding grand, immaculate goals for what is possible in this world, that is how I would rather spend my short time on Earth.

Total liberty as a function of society is therefore not achievable and the degree of liberty achievable is reliant on the morality of those that control government’s decisions.

I think the breakdown begins in our meaning of liberty. For me it is simple, the absence of coercion. Hayek and Rothbard differed on the meaning of coercion, but that is a much simpler disagreement than trying to divine the meaning of 200-year-old colloquial phrases in the constitution. When I speak of complete liberty, I don’t mean that everyone in society lives in peace. That is probably unattainable given human history. However, it is the norm that most individuals live a condition of complete liberty with one another every day. I only seek to abolish those institutionalized usurpers of our liberty — when people are ready for it.

Another interesting point raised is who controls the government. I contend that the actual reason for establishing a state is for a tiny minority to impose its will on the majority. I’ll explain my thinking below because it ties into how a stateless society might resolve conflicts between different legal standards, an important point of concern.

“… it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

To advance a state of anarchy is to advance that man has another alternative for the protection of life, liberty and property. Time and time again, man has come to the conclusion that only laws will protect and therefore has rightfully rejected anarchy.

No genuine consent can be given, as Lysander Spooner argued and I cited before, just as a payment of taxes and voting is done under duress.

I do think there is another process, the marketplace, which serves as the bridge among differing people. I understand the appeal to moderation, that some government is necessary to protect our liberties. However, just because something has existed for a long time does not mean it is valid. And even if it were valid, there would be no reason for it to be implemented by force unless those who did not agree were using force. Slavery was considered a natural part of the human condition, too, for thousands of years. We wouldn’t say the slaves approved of slavery just because there had always been slaves. I mean, what’s with all the whips and chains? The fact that the majority of people believe something is irrelevant as well. After all, it is no coincidence they support government since most everyone went to the same 12-year indoctrination camps to stunt their imagination and curiosity in favor a deference to authority.

Better yet, I don’t understand how it is accurate to say that the majority of people believe laws are necessary to protect them. There are laws to prohibit stealing, to take property by force or the threat thereof. But some are given an exemption to steal and call it taxation. Max Stirner said, “The State’s behavior is violence, and it calls its violence ‘law’; that of the individual, ‘crime.’ ” If laws are our means of protection, then why are those with grossest history of abuses not governed by them? The state conclude that stealing is both morally necessary and emphatically evil. The state is hypocrisy, for it allows a tiny minority to steal but punishes the masses for the same behavior.

If that is the way people choose to live, saying morality is relative and not universal, who am I to say they shouldn’t? But the state is about imposing one set of values over others. If the argument is that might makes right, then I don’t understand how a state is necessary either. The costs of maintaining the state and checking its growth is terribly expensive and a waste of resources to impose it by force if most everyone supports it. The state is actually composed of a number of special interests minorities seeking to impose their own values on others. They could never exercise control without it. Bastiat said as much: “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.” The foolhardy thing is that everyone thinks they are getting the best of everyone else.

Libertarians are also a tiny minority, so why haven’t they gotten their way? First, for libertarians to gain control that would mean that everyone else would have to relinquish theirs. Liberals would have to give up their economic planning schemes and social welfare experiments. Conservatives would have to stop imposing their own cultural preferences on everyone. So there is a lot of resistance to libertarianism. Second, most importantly, strict libertarians have no power to lend to others. Electoral politics works like a buddy system, where enough people support each other’s projects to get them all passed. Strict (principled) libertarians aren’t willing to do this, so they never get traction. That is why electoral libertarianism, even with all the evident failures of government, has made no material progress as the state marches on. Libertarianism proper has made measured progress, meanwhile, in the areas of education and circumventing the controls of government.

A Possible Solution for Conflicting Legal Norms in a Stateless Society

It is important to recall that under today’s conditions, the state subsidizes aggression with taxes on consensual behavior like earning an income or trading goods. For example, wars are very costly and they are financed with money from income taxes or through Federal Reserve debt. If only the neo-cons who supported the Iraq war had to pay for it, they might have a little more humble and judicious foreign policy. However, they get to shift the costs on everyone else, including future taxpayers. That is why you see a steady escalation in the size of government. Only a few thousand might benefit from a post office in rural Kansas, but legislators work in concert to support each other’s projects and everyone pays for them. Then, they are left to create subsidiary laws to finance their plunder and restrict competitors.

The way I imagine a stateless society functioning is that people would join dispute resolution organizations (DROs) for their protection and see to it that their contracts are honored. You might even have after-the-fact DROs that provide assistance only once coercion has occurred. One concern is that people might contract with DROs that are really aggressive. They hunt down people with little or no evidence of guilt, go after political enemies, and cause general mayhem in the community. Basically, they would act like every other government.

The important point to remember is that DRO policies are just some means to an end. Each policy provides a cost and benefit of implementing. If you’ve got a bunch of extraneous policies that you want to impose, then someone has to be paid to enforce them. In a stateless society, people who want to practice aggression will face the full expense of that decision. An additional burden of enforcing excessive or aggressive policies is going to the lack of reciprocal relationships with other DROs willing to enforce them. The reason e-mail is a valuable services is because service providers have adopted the same protocol standards necessary to transmit messages across servers. So the more people who use it, the more value the service provides — like how credit cards can dispense cash around the world in local currencies. This could be true for dispute resolution. If a DRO is so burdensome that other DROs are unwilling to deal with it, then its customers are limited to confidently trading with the number of people in the same DRO. This will not immediately dissuade all DROs from implementing highly onerous regulations, but the price mechanism will limit their reach. A framework to this could be reputation rating services and insurance providers. There really is no telling with the dynamism of the market system. How this might come about is up for debate. Might it come about by supplanting the government policing apparatus, as agorism prescribes? Or might it come about through the gradual dissolution of government as its credibility is shattered? A lot of it is speculation, which is necessary to evolve beyond institutionalized coercion.

It makes sense to assume that most people don’t favor using open violence against others, so they would not support DROs that did either. If I am assuming wrong, then a government won’t help because those same people who favor aggression will most likely control it. In fact, it would be worse because the victims would in some way be forced to fund their own oppression. It’s an easy trap to be caught in. If we can’t think of a way to resolve conflicts consensually, then we need immaculate violence to obliterate conflicts. The truth is we don’t need it, no more than slaves needed their masters.