You don't need to make the corporations more benigh, just as you don't need the government to be benigh to function. Ancap society with corporations running it would look like an oligarchy, except without a formal "power" - they'd be ruled by the leaders of the corporations who would bicker and struggle among themselves. Corporations would provide their more reliable and necessary workers with healthcare, housing, access to luxuries. Proles would be expendable and live in shit conditions, but that has never been a problem and did not automatically render a society dysfunctional.CrateriaA wrote:Indeed. It makes me wonder though. Had corporations far less incentive to screw over their workers for profit and/or mass production, how might an anarcho-capitalist society that revolved around them exist?Stas Bush wrote: Right-wing anarchists can do that too, if they openly acknowledge they are going to rely on corporations and allow corporations to dominate the society, creating an alternate mechanism to ensure stability. However, they're so high on their "we're anti-corporatist! corporations are evil manifestations of the state!" horse that they basically squander their only strong argument: that corporations as huge hierarchical structures can replace the nation-state and its various branches.
What is scary about anarcho-capitalism is not how "crazy" it is, oh no. It is the fact that it is more or less workable, except not in the way anarcho-capitalists like to imagine or talk about it in their propaganda.
Corporations would take care of law enforcement as well; of course, this would mean a certain problem, and a lot of areas except corporate property protection won't be really cared about at all (like I said, more valuable workers would be protected as "corporate property" which in an ancap world they indeed are). So law enforcement would shrink to the dream of libertarian philosophers: protection of private property. Except of course with a caveat: the private property would be protected according to one's buying power. Megacorporations, rich shareholders, managers, skilled staff would see to the protection of their property very well. The rest - not so much, because they wouldn't be able to afford the "services" of such protection. Retirement will be a problem for many, except the rich/skilled.
I am not sure an anarcho-capitalist system with corporations is going to "fail" - it will work. It will be ugly and repugnant, for a person like me, but it is pretty clear that corporations can replace the government. They have enough resources.
