ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the dichotomy between market and state reveals the tensions and the contradictions within this approach that ultimately lead to problems. They are the lack of acknowledgement of collective action as a legitimate way of establishing and enforcing individual rights; the failure to recognise rights and law as a pre-condition of the market; and the dichotomising of human nature in such a way that only very good people can operate in a market environment. The idea that government can remedy the problems caused by the growth of big business became a powerful model in the minds of some Americans, one that co-exists with and stands in direct opposition to the Free Market model, allowing Americans to manoeuvre culturally between either extreme as necessary. The anarcho-capitalist Free Market model reveals a great deal about the way in which extreme anti-authoritarianism results in a hyper-individualism that undermines even the anarcho-capitalists' own professed view of human nature.
