It prompted me to write this
Voting With Your Feet Won’t Work
The libertarian anarchists claim that they do not advocate for a complete anarchy, where there’s no structure. They say that they want to allow groups of people to create societies of different kinds, which would then compete to attract residents much like startups compete for customers. If some society has bad laws, people will just leave it, and it will collapse much like a failed startup. Thus, only societies that have a good set of laws will remain, and the ideal kind of governance would be found pragmatically through experimentation.
This approach, if it worked, would answer two concerns voiced by the libertarians: (1) the belief that there’s no objective legal system, since what’s good for one person may be bad for another, and (2) if there was some good system of laws, and watchers are appointment to enforce it, then who watches the watchers?
The first concern is not valid. Ayn Rand developed a philosophy of Objectivism which proves that laissez-faire capitalism is that ideal political system. No experimentation is necessary, we know what’s needed. Still there’s variability of how capitalism is implemented: what is in the Constitution, what is the voting process, what are the government branches (senate, parliament, ministers), how are the judges selected, who gets to become a citizen and part of the electorate, how is the government funded, etc.. Thus, having two countries both of which are laissez-faire, one may be better than the other, and the idea is that people will “vote with their feet” by moving to the better country.
The second concern, namely, of how to deal with corruption is more interesting, and the American Founding Fathers answered it with the ingenious Checks and Balances idea. But anarchist libertarians seem to ignore this, and instead bank on the fact that people would exit a corrupted political society. Preventing people to exit, would be breaking the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) on which a libertarian society is based.
Therefore, the topic of this essay is why it’s not going to work: in practice it will be impossible to leave, at scale, a badly functioning society. The bad society will remain a populated hell hole. And instead of the competition between societies creating a winning better society, the result will be the creation of many bad societies with nowhere to run to, even if one could exit.
I think it’s a combination. Also, dumping trash is expensive. I had a u-haul of trash and I paid $160 USD to dump it. This high cost is indicative that there’s a lot more that happens to this trash afterwards. If it was easy, the price would drop.
A brilliant comp-sci professor told us once a story, that his friend approached him and asked if he (the professor) wants to join the garbage business. The professor laughed it off, but his friend made a lot of money running the business.