What is "anarcho-capitalism"

n. A philosophy that advocates the individual self-ownership, the elimination of slavery and of the state, and the provision of all socially-beneficial governmental services by self-regulating free market competitors and mutual aid societies.

Anarcho-capitalism is a political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favor of individual sovereignty, private property, and free markets. Anarcho-capitalists believe that in the absence of statute (law by decree or legislation), society would improve itself through the discipline of the free market (or what its proponents describe as a " voluntary society").

In an anarcho-capitalist society, law enforcement, courts, and all other security services would be operated by privately funded competitors rather than centrally through compulsory taxation. Money, along with all other goods and services, would be privately and competitively provided in an open market. Therefore, personal and economic activities under anarcho-capitalism would be regulated by victim-based dispute resolution organizations under tort and contract law, rather than by statute through centrally determined punishment under political monopolies.

Various theorists have espoused legal philosophies similar to anarcho-capitalism. The first person to use the term, however, was Murray Rothbard, who in the mid-20th century synthesized elements from the Austrian School of economics, classical liberalism, and 19th-century American individualist anarchists Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker (while rejecting their labor theory of value and the norms they derived from it). A Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist society would operate under a mutually agreed-upon libertarian "legal code which would be generally accepted, and which the courts would pledge themselves to follow." This pact would recognize self-ownership and the non-aggression principle (NAP), although methods of enforcement vary.

Anarcho-capitalists are distinguished from minarchists, who advocate a small night-watchman state limited to the function of individual protection, and other anarchists who may seek to prohibit or regulate the accumulation of property and the flow of capital.