Critics of anarcho-capitalism sometimes assume that communal or worker-owned firms would be penalized or prohibited in an anarcho-capitalist society. It would be more accurate to state that while individuals would be free to voluntarily form communitarian organizations, the anarcho-capitalist simply doubts that they would be widespread or prevalent. However, in theory an "anarcho-capitalist" society might be filled with nothing but communes or worker-owned firms, so long as these associations were formed voluntarily (i.e., individuals joined voluntarily and capital was obtained with the consent of the owners) and individuals retained the right to exit and set up corporations or other profit-making, individualistic firms.

The criminal essence of the State is found in the means that it uses, not in the services that it performs. Certain goods and services are essential to life, but it is not imperative that they be provided by the State. People individually or together in associations will provide for their own needs. History amply demonstrates that people provide the goods and services that they need and desire. Keeping time is one of those essential services that, fortunately, was never controlled to any great extent by the State. If it had been, private clocks and wristwatches probably would have never evolved, or if they had, they would have been exorbitantly expensive. Timekeeping, precisely because it was primarily left in private hands, has today evolved to a high art. State intervention would only have impeded its progress. If people had been raised with the idea that the State should be responsible for keeping time, it would be difficult for them to imagine how the free enterprise system would provide people with digital clocks and the many other gadgets people have to assist them in telling time.

The roots of copyright lie in censorship. It was easy for state and church to control thought by controlling the scribes, but then the printing press came along and the authorities worried that they couldn't control official thought as easily. So Queen Mary created the Stationer's Company in 1557, with the exclusive franchise over book publishing, to control the press and what information the people could access. When the charter of the Stationer's Company expired, the publishers lobbied for an extension, but in the Statute of Anne (1710) Parliament gave copyright to authors instead. Authors liked this because it freed their works from state control. Nowadays they use copyright much as the state originally did: to censor and ban books -- or their publishers do, who have gained a quasi-oligopolistic gatekeeper function, courtesy copyright law.

In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. If the road between two villages is impassable, the peasant says: -- "There should be a law about parish roads." If a park-keeper takes advantage of the want of spirit in those who follow him with servile observance and insults one of them, the insulted man says: -- "There should be a law to enjoin more politeness upon park-keepers." If there is stagnation in agriculture or commerce, the husbandman, cattle-breeder, or corn speculator argues, "It is protective legislation that we require." Down to the old clothesman there is not one who does not demand a law to protect his own little trade. If the employer lowers wages or increases the hours of labour, the politician in embryo exclaims, "We must have a law to put all that to rights," instead of telling the workers that there are other, and much more effectual means of settling these things straight ... In short, a law everywhere and for everything! A law about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put a stop to all the vices and all the evils which result from human indolence and cowardice.

There is a battle shaping up in the world - a battle between the forces of archy - of statism, of political rule and authority - and its only alternative - anarchy, the absence of political rule. This battle is the necessary and logical consequence of the battle between individualism and collectivism, between liberty and the state, between freedom and slavery. As in ethics there are only two sides to any question - the good and the evil - so too are there only two logical sides to the political question of the state: either you are for it, or you are against it. Any attempt at a middle ground is doomed to failure, and the adherents of any middle course are doomed likewise to failure and frustration - or the blackness of psychological destruction, should they blank out and refuse to identify the causes of such failure, or the nature of reality as it is.

The state pretends that all its demands, however arbitrary, are moral obligations, even though those demands rest on force. If it were confined to demanding only what decent people do anyway -- refraining from murder, robbery, et cetera -- it might be bearable. But it never stops with reasonable moral demands; at a minimum, even the most "humane" and "democratic" states use the taxing power to extort staggering amounts of money from their subjects. The predatory tendency of the state is inherent and expansive, and nobody has found a way to control it. No control can long withstand the monopolistic "right" to demand obedience in every area of human activity the state may choose to invade. Systematized force -- which is all the state really is -- follows its own logic. Legal forms, moral rhetoric, and propaganda may disguise force as something it is not. The idea of "democracy" has persuaded countless gullible people that they are somehow "consenting" when they are being coerced.

Although I sincerely believe that a stateless world would be better than the present world in countless ways, such as better health, greater wealth, and enhanced material well-being, I am not a libertarian anarchist primarily on consequentialist grounds, but instead primarily because I believe it is wrong for anyone–including those designated the rulers and their functionaries–to engage in fraud, extortion, robbery, torture, and murder. I do not believe that I have a defensible right to engage in such acts; nor do I believe that I, or anyone else, may delegate to government officials a just right to do what it is wrong for me–or you or anyone–to do as a private person.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Liberty, not the daughter of order, but the mother of order.

Anarchy is precisely the reverse of chaos. Libertarian anarchists contend that the free market is the best way to produce a peaceful and prosperous social order.

Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.

The State lives by its very existence on the two-fold and pervasive employment of aggressive violence against the very liberty and property of individuals that it is supposed to be defending.

From its origins, the state has been the instrument by which priest-kings, latifundia owners and slave masters, feudal landlords, and capitalists have lived off the labor of the producing classes. In the nineteenth century, with the birth of a large-scale consciousness of this history of class exploitations, the first deliberate movements arose to seize the state and govern in the name of the exploited. But when these workers’ parties came to hold state power, they immediately became a new ruling class. Because that’s all state power is good for: Robbery and exploitation.

"The best offense is a good defense" may be effective strategy in war and various competitive sports to decide winners and losers. But this offense-defense terminology is misleading with reference to free market competition. Voluntary exchange is neither a game nor a war; it is a form of cooperation between buyer and seller to their mutual advantage -- as each one determines advantage. So, the rule of the market would run more like this: "He gains most who serves best." A businessman's profits are a measure of his efficiency in the use of scarce and valuable resources to satisfy the most urgent wants of consumers. Having competed successfully in the market, a property owner seeks to preserve his gains. But the market continues to insist: "He gains most who serves best." In other words, the way to preserve your gains is to keep on serving consumers efficiently; that's the only protection of property the market can offer.

When it is remarked, that the prosperity of every nation is in an inverse proportion to the power and to the interference of its government, we may be almost tempted to believe the common opinion, that governments are necessary and beneficial, is one of those general prejudices which men have inherited from an ignorant and a barbarous age, and which more extensive knowledge and greater civilization will show to be an error full of evil.

To a very significant degree, the economic system we have now is one from which peaceful, voluntary exchange is absent. An interlocking web of legal and regulatory privileges benefit the wealthy and well connected at the expense of everyone else (think patents and copyrights, tariffs, restrictions on banking, occupational licensing rules, land-use restrictions, etc.). The military-industrial complex funnels unbelievable amounts of money--at gunpoint--from ordinary people's pockets and into the bank accounts of government contractors and their cronies. Subsidies of all kinds feed a network of privileged businesses and non-profits. And the state protects titles to land taken at gunpoint or engrossed by arbitrary fiat before distribution to favored individuals and groups. No, the economies of the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia, at least, aren’t centrally planned. The state doesn’t assert formal ownership of (most of) the means of production. But the state's involvement at multiple levels in guaranteeing and bolstering economic privilege makes it hard to describe the economic system we have now as free.

Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, by rewarding ingenuity, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most effectively and most economically: while, by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world.

The theoretical connections between individualist anarchism and liberalism seem obvious. While liberalism called for individual liberty and a limited state, individualist anarchism called for individual sovereignty and no state. In economics as well as in politics, individualist anarchism seemed to be the logical extreme of liberalism. George Bernard Shaw put this succinctly: “laissez-faire, in spite of all the stumblings it has brought upon itself by persistently holding the candle to the devil instead of to its own footsteps, is the torchbearer of Anarchism.” However, this picture is too simplistic for several reasons. First of all, socialism was at least as influential as liberalism on the character of individualist anarchism, particularly in terms of economics.

Liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part.

Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order with anarchy.

Every time you reach an agreement by consensus, rather than threats, every time you make a voluntary arrangement with another person, come to an understanding, or reach a compromise by taking due consideration of the other person’s particular situation or needs, you are being an anarchist -- even if you don’t realize it.

By definition an anarchist is he who does not wish to be oppressed nor wishes to be himself an oppressor; who wants the greatest well-being, freedom and development for all human beings. His ideas, his wishes have their origin in a feeling of sympathy, love and respect for humanity: a feeling which must be sufficiently strong to induce him to want the well-being of others as much as his own, and to renounce those personal advantages, the achievement of which, would involve the sacrifice of others. If it were not so, why would he be the enemy of oppression and not seek to become himself an oppressor?

Philosophers have spent at least 2,500 years trying to produce a good theory of government authority--that is, of the duty to obey the law. But basically all their attempts to justify government authority stink, and stink badly. Every major theory of authority has big gaping holes and is subject to devastating objections. If, after 2,500 years, super-smart people can't produce a decent justification of authority, perhaps government authority is a myth. Perhaps there's no duty to obey the law after all.

Defending the continued existence of the state, despite having absolute certainty of a corresponding continuation of its intrinsic engagement in robbery, destruction, murder, and countless other crimes, requires that one imagine nonstate chaos, disorder, and death on a scale that nonstate actors seem incapable of causing. Nor, to my knowledge, does any historical example attest to such large-scale nonstate mayhem. With regard to large-scale death and destruction, no person, group, or private organization can even begin to compare to the state, which is easily the greatest instrument of destruction known to man.

But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

Despots reward compliance with more oppression.

The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.

As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.

The advantage of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources - labor, capital and human ingenuity - in a manner that can't be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner.

Anarchy is defined, not as the absence of all physical compulsion, but absence of physical compulsion of the non-aggressive. Individuals would not be left to do as they choose. They would be left to do as they choose only within certain limits,--those of equal freedom. Criminals or invaders would be restrained or punished by voluntary organizations for defence, and only non-aggressive persons would be exempt from interference.

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

Libertarians have often dreamed of escaping the tyranny of the State; some have sought to do so by seeking refuge in distant and uninhabited lands where they could live in solitary hermitage or in small communities held together by the principle of voluntary association and mutual aid. But historians know that such experiments seldom survive in peace for long; sooner or later the State finds and confronts them with its instinctive will to violence, its mania for coercion rather than persuasion, for compulsion rather than voluntarism. Such has been the fate of the Mormons and Mennonites, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Amish people, among others.

If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never entrust that instruction to any government; for the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat.

Freedom is threatened from two ends, the right and left. The idea of liberty really does represent a third way, a path lit by the hope in the kind of civilization that can be built not from the top down but from the bottom up, not through the force of power but by voluntary associations of regular people who aspire to live better lives.

The individualistic or philosophical anarchists favor the abolition of 'the State' and government of man, by man. They seek to bring about a state of perfect freedom of anarchy.

Ever reviled, accursed, ne’er understood, thou art the grisly terror of our age. “Wreck of all order,” cry the multitude, “Art thou, and war and murder’s endless rage.” O, let them cry. To them that ne’er have striven the truth that lies behind a word to find, to them the word’s right meaning was not given. They shall continue blind among the blind. But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure, thou sayest all which I for goal have taken. I give thee to the future! Thine secure when each at least unto himself shall waken. Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest’s thrill? I cannot tell—but it the earth shall see! I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will not rule, and also ruled I will not be!

One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another ... We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.

Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? ... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

What, then, is legislation? It is an assumption by one man, or body of men, of absolute, irresponsible dominion over all other men whom they can subject to their power. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to subject all other men to their will and their service. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to abolish outright all the natural rights, all the natural liberty of all other men; to make all other men their slaves; to arbitrarily dictate to all other men what they may, and may not, do; what they may, and may not, have; what they may, and may not, be. It is, in short, the assumption of a right to banish the principle of human rights, the principle of justice itself, from off the earth, and set up their own personal will, pleasure, and interest in its place. All this, and nothing less, is involved in the very idea that there can be any such thing as human legislation that is obligatory upon those upon whom it is imposed.

The average man, on being told that the anarchist would abolish all governmental restraints, not unnaturally concludes that the proposition involves the removal of the restrictions upon criminal conduct, the relinquishment of organized defence of life, liberty and property... But such interpretations are without any foundation. The anarchists emphatically favor resistance to and organized protection against crime and aggression of every kind; it is not greater freedom for the criminal, but greater freedom for the noncriminal, that they aim to secure; and by the abolition of government they mean the removal of restrictions upon conduct intrinsically ethical and legitimate, but which ignorant legislation has interdicted as criminal.

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy - which is their own population.

When men set up an imaginary Authority armed with force, they destroy all opportunity to exercise their natural freedom.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Among the political ideologies generally considered to be of continuing significance, anarchism alone has never been implemented. Perhaps its rigors are too strong and its advocates are too weak. That it is still considered worth studying is testimony to its intellectual credibility, particularly its single-minded emphasis on individual liberty.

Slaves and master do not make a society; "free and equal" beings do.