TL;DR
The standard objection to a stateless order is that a decent majority can’t handle a minority of defectors without one body holding power over everyone. That assumes peace exists only because an enforcer makes people keep it. It doesn’t: people keep to what they believe without a badge behind it, and the cost of defecting can be put on the defector by refusal and restitution, with no body over everyone.
- Conviction needs no badge. The decent majority already keeps the peace unforced, and a group that holds a belief and owns the means to act on it acts on it with no law behind it, as the big studios did when they rebuilt their own product around a belief the audience didn’t ask for (the precedent, below).
- Exclusion is private enforcement. Declining to hire, sell to, lease to or host someone puts the cost of breaking the terms on the one who broke them. The order doesn’t need everyone to be decent. It needs the cost of aggression to land on the aggressor.
- Incentives already point there. Sound dealing pays, so the belief carries its own cost. A belief that costs its holders money needs someone to keep paying for it.
- Communities already pass it on. Self-governing communities have taught their code to their children for centuries and enforced it by refusal alone. They show that members’ conduct toward each other needs no state.
What it claims
Put at full strength, the objection is this: most people are decent, but some will defect, and the decent majority can’t be relied on to restrain them, to pay for restraining them, to keep paying when it costs money, or to pass the restraint on to their children. Only a standing enforcer with power over everyone handles the minority.
That bundles four claims, each with its own answer:
Individuals. Some will aggress, and the decent majority can’t be relied on to stop them, so peace needs a force behind it.
Free riders. Even where most are decent, someone has to pay to deal with the minority, and everyone would prefer it be someone else.
Incentives beat principle. Conviction is cheap talk. When it costs money, money wins.
Generations. A community might hold for one generation. Norms erode, so stability needs a backstop that doesn’t depend on belief.
The one premise under all four
The decent majority can’t be relied on to handle the defecting minority. Only one body with power over everyone can.
Each claim above describes a risk: defectors, free riders, temptation, decay. What turns a risk into a demand for a state is the premise that the peace is made by the enforcer rather than kept by the people. The objection doesn’t ask what the enforcer is made of. He is one of the same people, with the weapons, and loses nothing when he’s wrong.
The premise fails in four places. The rest takes them in turn.
1. Conviction needs no badge
Walk down any street in any country. Almost nobody is stealing from the shops, and no officer is in sight. Police are few and arrive after the event, and a small force can’t compel a large population that doesn’t already go along with it. So the decent majority the objection grants is not a fantasy. It is the ordinary condition of most people, most of the time, and every state order already runs on it.
The objection also hides who the enforcer is. If the majority can’t be relied on, the men chosen to supervise it are drawn from that same majority, and are then handed the weapons and the right to take. Their errors cost them nothing (Skin in the game).
Now the precedent: the culture-war overhaul of big-studio entertainment, where studios and publishers rebuilt stories, casts and ratings around a belief the audience didn’t ask for, with no law behind it. Nobody passed a law making Disney rewrite Snow White, and nobody could have fined it for leaving the story alone. The people with the budget and the platform believed something, and no regulator compelled them. The film grossed less worldwide than it cost to make, and that loss fell on the firm’s owners, not on a regulator. The belief lasts as long as the people holding it, and whoever backs them, keep paying. Their belief is false. That’s the point: if a false belief can organise what big studios make with no state behind it, a true one doesn’t need a state either.
Individuals: “Left to themselves, people won’t keep the peace”
“Maybe they just thought it would pay.” Then the precedent shows less about conviction, and the argument doesn’t lean on it. It still shows that owners coordinated a choice at scale with no law compelling it. The case for the stateless order rests on the logic of the next two sections, not on the studios’ motives.
“A belief that costs money dies.” It lasts exactly as long as the people holding it, and whoever backs them, keep paying, and what a person keeps paying for shows what he values (Revealed Preference). The cost falls on those who chose to carry it, not on a regulator or a third party.
Bottoms out at: Economics: Incentives, since the enforcer the objection relies on is made of the same people with none of the loss.
2. Exclusion is private enforcement
Take a landlord who renews leases only for tenants who don’t steal, don’t defraud and pay what they owe. He isn’t relying on everyone’s virtue. He is relying on his own door. It’s a bouncer, and bouncers already exist.
Every owner decides whom he hires, sells to, leases to and hosts (private property). Withdrawing is the whole toolkit, and withdrawing isn’t Aggression. That is also how a community enforces anything: contracts with known terms (Contracts), and a known consequence for breaking them. The cost of breaking the terms lands on the one who broke them. That’s all enforcement ever had to do.
So the order doesn’t need everyone to be decent, or even to be converted. Those who meet the terms stay, and those who don’t, leave or get shut out.
Anyone who holds a belief with conviction and owns the means to act on it refuses to deal with those who break its terms. Aim that same refusal at theft and fraud, and a neighbour who breaks a contract hears no, that’s not what we do here from everyone on the block, because they hold the same conviction. A community that won’t tolerate aggression isn’t weaker for being intolerant. It’s the mechanism.
Individuals: “Some will still defect”
“Defectors will still exist.” Yes. Every order has them, the state’s included. The one who invades is the aggressor, and he owes restitution to the person he harmed, including what the defence cost (Liability and Restitution), enforced by the victim and whoever he has hired to defend him. A state doesn’t remove defectors. It adds one party who may take from everyone else and is exempt from the rule (Mixed Law).
“Someone who doesn’t care about being shunned.” He still needs a place to stand, a supplier, a lease and a buyer, and each of those is an owner who can say no. If he invades anyone, he meets defence and restitution. Nothing beyond that is needed.
Free riders: “Someone else pays for the policing”
“Deterring a thief protects the neighbours too, and they didn’t pay.” An owner who locks his shop, screens his tenants or pays his insurer is protecting his own property, and he bears that cost because the property is his. That a neighbour benefits is a by-product, not a debt. Nobody is owed protection by a third party, and a man who gains from another’s expense without invading anything of his hasn’t aggressed (Physical Integrity vs Value). Where neighbours want more protection than one owner would buy alone, they can contract for it, on terms, and the ones who decline are simply outside the arrangement. The cost of any actual invasion lands on the invader, who owes restitution for it. The only way to make everyone pay for protection regardless is to compel them, which is the state’s answer, and compelling payment is taking.
Bottoms out at: Economics: Incentives → Rights, since an owner decides who uses what and withdrawal invades nothing → Equality, since the state is the one party exempt from the rule everyone else is bound by.
3. Incentives already point there
Whatever moved the studios, a belief that costs its holders money needs someone to keep paying for it. A community built on the non-aggression principle has the easier problem: the belief and the incentive point the same way.
Voluntary exchange and sound money compound the wealth of everyone who practises them. A man who deals honestly gains trading partners, a reputation and cheaper insurance. A man who defrauds loses all three. Nobody in a community built on this has to choose between holding the line and getting rich, as anyone does whose belief costs him money. Every year someone holds the line, he’s better off for it.
Incentives beat principle: “When it costs money, money wins”
“Defecting pays in the short run.” Aggression pays only when it lands on someone who can’t answer. Here the victim is an owner with a contract, an insurer and neighbours who’ll close their doors to the defector. His gain comes back as restitution, and then he loses everyone who would have traded with him. The structure makes defection cost the defector, which is the opposite of what the objection needs.
Bottoms out at: Economics: Incentives → Action.
4. Communities already pass it on
The community half of the objection also has an existence proof, with a limit. The Amish, the Hutterites and the Hasidic communities have run privately governed, internally coherent codes for centuries. They teach them to children as plain common sense, and they enforce them without police. Amish shunning is nothing but members declining to trade, share meals or associate with someone who broke the terms.
These communities live inside a state, so they don’t show a stateless country running. What they show is narrower: that members’ conduct toward each other, meaning the code, the discipline and the settling of disputes between members, needs no state to hold. That is exactly the part the objection says can’t be done.
Generations: “Norms erode”
Why does the code survive each generation? A child raised inside doesn’t experience a rule he’s obeying. It’s what a transaction is, as Shabbat isn’t an imposition to a Hasidic child. A child brought up on honest dealing, arbitration and money that doesn’t depreciate by design would meet fiat money the way anyone meets a neighbouring custom they’d never practise: why would anyone live like that. He was never taught anything else, and anyone who doesn’t want the deal can walk away.
“They live inside a state that protects them.” Whatever the state does to them or for them is outside the question. How members treat each other, and what they do to one who breaks the terms, is theirs.
“Shunning is coercion, and the child never chose.” Declining to associate touches nobody’s body or property, so it isn’t aggression. The child is not owned by the community (Self-ownership). He leaves when he’s able. And violence or neglect toward a child is aggression like any other (The Non-aggression Principle), whoever commits it.
“Some will leave, and it decays.” Leaving is the system working. The community is whoever stays and meets its terms. Nothing in the order requires universal membership.
Put it together and the stateless case is stronger than either precedent. A belief that costs money needs someone to keep paying. The Amish hold theirs partly through deliberate material austerity. A community built on homesteading, free exchange and sound money doesn’t have to choose piety over prosperity.
Bottoms out at: Economics: Action → Rights.
Where they go next
Pressed on all four, the people pushing the objection pivot. Each pivot is the premise again.
“Those communities are small. It won’t scale to a country.” That assumes a single rule over everyone, which is the premise again. The order is many such arrangements trading with each other. Each needs to work only for its own members. Disputes between arrangements are disputes between owners: an invasion is answered by liability and restitution, and no arrangement holds a claim over another’s members.
“What about the person nobody will deal with?” One owner’s refusal isn’t everyone’s. Being refused by one is the ordinary condition of every person. To say someone is owed a deal is to say he owns part of another man’s property.
“That’s just a majority imposing its beliefs.” Nobody is made to enter, and nobody’s property is touched. A group setting the terms for its own property isn’t a majority deciding over everyone’s (Democracy).
“The precedent you picked is destroying culture.” It isn’t being endorsed. It’s being used as proof of something narrower: a belief held with conviction organises behaviour and enforces itself by refusal, with no state needed.
That’s the whole dispute in one line: people who hold a belief and own the means to act on it already keep it up without a badge, and the objection needs them not to.
Sources
- The Numbers, Snow White (2025) — production budget and worldwide gross
- Amish America, on shunning — Meidung as the daily avoidance that follows excommunication