ABSTRACT
If one holds, as libertarians do, that market provision of goods and services tends to be both more just and more efficient than governmental provision, it is a natural next step to inquire whether the state is necessary or desirable at all. The libertarian anarchist project of dispensing with the state has deep roots in the classical liberal tradition, with thinkers like Étienne de la Boétie, John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Thomas Hodgskin, and Herbert Spencer all making contributions. The first liberal thinkers to describe how competitive market mechanisms might take over the functions of the state were the economists Jean-Baptiste Say and Gustave de Molinari. Their approach was later revived, first by the pro-market but anti-capitalist individualist anarchists of nineteenth-century America such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, and later by twentieth-century anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman. Some of the standard criticisms of free-market anarchism (won’t security firms battle? won’t justice go to the highest bidder? what should be done with criminals? what about foreign invasion?) are addressed, including those of Robert Nozick. Finally, the way in which right-wing and left-wing versions of free-market anarchism today both depart in significant ways from the standard model of competing security firms is explained.
