Law
This foundational AnCap law forbids the initiation of force, fraud, or coercion against person or property.
What is the Non-Aggression Principle?
Anarcho-capitalism specifically rejects this institution while retaining private property and markets.
What is the State?
This common claim asserts that only the state can provide roads, courts, or police because the market will under-produce them.
What is the free rider problem?
This is what I will do if Westin is ever able to live *that* down
What is Coercion?
According to Mises, this is the fundamental axiom: humans act purposefully to remove felt uneasiness.
What is Human Action?
In a free society, this private, competing system of rules and dispute resolution replaces monopoly state courts.
What is polycentric law?
These competing firms would provide protection, security, and arbitration in a stateless society.
What are Private Defense Agencies?
Bastiat exposed this error: the belief that destruction creates net economic benefit by forcing spending.
What is the broken window fallacy?
Mises used this term for the pure logic of human action that forms the foundation of Austrian economics.
What is Praxeology?
This Austrian insight states that value is subjective and determined by individual rankings of ends, not by labor or cost.
What is Subjective Theory of Value?
Under Rothbardian pure libertarian law, this is the maximum a victim may demand from an aggressor: the full value of what was taken plus compensation for associated costs and uncertainty.
What is the Proportionality Principle?
or
Two-teeth-for-a-tooth Principle?
or
Mirror Principle?
This term describes a society ordered solely by voluntary interactions and free markets, without rulers.
What is Voluntaryism
Anarcho-Capitalism is also acceptable
Critics of free markets often invoke this to claim unregulated common resources will inevitably be depleted, ignoring private property solutions.
What is Tragedy of the Commons?
Hayek’s preferred word for the extended order of voluntary exchange and coordination through prices.
What is Catallactic Order
or
Catallaxy?
Mises demonstrated that without private property in the means of production, this becomes impossible, leading to economic chaos.
What is the Economic Calculation Problem?
In the most rigorous AnCap legal philosophy, this is why a person cannot sell himself into permanent slavery: the will is inalienable and any such contract is void as a contradiction.
What is the inalienability of the will (or body-will dualism)?
Friedman and others pointed to this place and system as a historical example of functioning polycentric law without a central state.
What is the Icelandic Commonwealth?
This fallacy can assume that because the state currently provides a service, only the state can provide it, ignoring historical private alternatives.
What is the "seen vs unseen" fallacy?
This term, popularized by Rothbard, describes the complete separation of security, law, and defense from the state so that they are provided exclusively on the free market.
What is the privatization of force (or total privatization of protection)?
This law of praxeology holds that as the supply of a good increases, the value of each additional unit decreases to the actor.
What is the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility?
This theory, developed by Williamson Evers and Rothbard, holds that contracts transfer titles to property rather than create binding obligations to perform future actions.
What is Title-Transfer Theory (of Contract)?
Hoppe argued that this specific class of people (those who live off taxation and regulation) has a structural incentive to expand the state, making any “limited government” inherently unstable.
What are the members of the state apparatus (or the ruling class/tax-consumers)?
This sophisticated error claims that because private defense agencies might occasionally fight each other, a single territorial monopolist of force is therefore necessary and preferable.
What is the “war of all against all” (or private defense leads to chaos) fallacy?
This Misesian term refers to the historical, psychological, and interpretive understanding of concrete human actions and ends, as distinct from the pure a priori science of praxeology.
What is thymology?
In pure praxeological reasoning, time preference explains interest: people value present goods more highly than future goods of the same kind.
What is the pure time-preference theory of interest?