Expected objections and FAQ

If you made it through Parts 1–3, you’ve seen a pretty aggressive claim:

What we call “capitalism” is a state–corporate complex built on monopolies.
A genuinely free market would look very different from that.
Moving in that direction is desirable, even if it’s hard.

This page is for the big, recurring “yeah but what about…” worries:

human nature and chaos
public goods and safety
power and abuse
labels (“isn’t this just communism / anarcho-capitalism?”)
transition and realism.

Human nature & chaos

Won't people just be selfish and screw each other over?

Short answer: they already do, under every system. The real question is what structures reward it, contain it, or make it costly.

Capitalism doesn’t abolish selfishness; it channels it through state-backed monopolies and giant firms. State socialism doesn’t abolish selfishness either; it just concentrates power in a bureaucracy.

Freed markets don’t assume people are saints. They assume:

people are a mix of selfish and cooperative,
people respond to incentives,
and people build norms and institutions to protect themselves.

The point is to remove the giant, legally protected leverage points (the four monopolies, corporate shields, centralized states) that let one person’s selfishness scale into a global problem.

You still get conflict and bad behavior. You also get:

more ability to walk away from bad deals,
more need to maintain a reputation,
and more experimentation with ways of cooperating that don’t rely on a distant hierarchy to punish everyone else.

Without a state, don't you just get warlords and mafia rule?

Warlords are what you get when you combine:

concentrated violence,
concentrated wealth,
and communities that can't exit or defend themselves.

Modern states and corporations already tick a lot of those boxes. They’re just larger, better branded warlords with official letterhead.

A freed-market, anarchistic society pushes in the opposite direction:

Decentralized power: no single institution has a legal monopoly on violence.
Exit options: it's easier to leave abusive setups and join or form others.
Polycentric defense: overlapping community defense, mutual aid, insurance, and conflict-resolution systems instead of “one army, one police force, one boss”.

Could local bullies still try to take over? Of course. But it's harder to run a mini-state when:

you can't lean on national law and police,
people have more economic independence,
and neighboring communities aren't locked into obeying the same center.

If everyone can just say no, doesn't everything fall apart?

“Everything” already does fall apart, just more slowly and more politely:

climate, infrastructure, public health, basic trust.

The assumption behind this question is that:

order only exists because there’s a central authority forcing people to cooperate.

In reality, almost all the order in your life comes from:

norms,
mutual expectations,
contracts,
and decentralized systems (markets, families, professional networks, open-source communities, etc.).

The argument here is: if you remove the rigged monopolies and central choke points, that bottom-up order has more room, not less.

Public goods & safety

Who keeps buildings from falling down without state building codes?

Today, building safety comes from a mix of:

engineering knowledge and professional standards,
building codes and inspectors,
insurance companies refusing to cover bad designs,
and people suing when things go wrong.

Only some of that is state-run.

In a freed-market, anarchistic setting, you’d still have:

engineering associations publishing standards,
insurers refusing to cover unsafe construction,
rating and certification organizations,
and communities that simply won't hire builders with a bad safety record.

The difference is:

there’s no single monopoly code-writing authority,
and no state shielding big developers from consequences because they’re “too important”.

You don’t get zero risk. You get a world where “we’ll build it cheap and pray” is harder to sustain when insurance, reputation, and peer review all punish that.

What about really dangerous stuff, like nuclear plants?

High-risk tech needs high standards, regardless of ideology.

In a freed-market order, you’d expect:

very few actors willing to take on extreme, long-duration risks if they are personally exposed to liability,
insurers that are obsessive about safety, because one incident can wipe them out,
specialized technical associations whose entire job is to vet designs and practices.

If a community really wants a nuclear plant, they have to:

persuade insurers, engineers, and neighbors that the design is sound,
internalize the costs and risks instead of dumping them on everyone else via national policy.

That’s not a detailed blueprint. But it’s enough to see that “no state monopoly” doesn’t equal “no standards”.

Who builds and maintains roads, infrastructure, and utilities?

Even today, a lot of this work is already:

contracted out,
operated by private or quasi-private entities,
or heavily funded and maintained at local levels.

In a freed-market setup, you’d see a mix of:

Cooperative / community ownership of local infrastructure,
User-funded associations (like road or utility co-ops),
Federated agreements between regions that share networks.

The key shift is: users and local communities have more direct control and more alternatives, instead of one distant bureaucracy making all decisions for them.

What about pandemics and big, coordinated public health problems?

Large-scale risks need large-scale coordination. Removing a state monopoly on coordination doesn’t remove the need; it changes how it happens.

Likely ingredients in a freed market:

independent epidemiology and research networks (already a thing),
federated health associations that can issue recommendations and standards,
mutual-aid and insurance arrangements that create incentives to follow those standards,
contractual expectations: venues, carriers, and communities can require certain precautions as a condition of interaction.

Will everyone cooperate perfectly? No. They don’t now either. The question is whether information can move faster, and whether decisions are made closer to the people actually affected, instead of filtered through political theater.

Power, abuse & vulnerability

What about people who can't 'just start a co-op' — disabled people, children, elders?

Any serious vision has to have an answer for people who:

can’t be “independent” in the narrow, heroic sense,
need sustained support,
or are subject to guardianship (kids, people with certain disabilities, etc.).

Two honest points:

No system fixes vulnerability. There will always be people who need care.
Centralized systems are often terrible at caring for them, even when they claim the opposite.

In a freed-market / anarchist direction, the answers are messy and plural:

Dense mutual aid networks instead of top-down welfare bureaucracies.
Community and family structures that have more time and resources because less of everyone’s life is eaten by rent, debt, and precarity.
Specialized care co-ops and associations where people pool resources and labor to support those who need it.

None of this is automatic. It’s an area where culture, ethics, and deliberate institution-building matter a lot. But it’s not obvious that “let a distant bureaucracy sort it out” is the high bar to beat.

What if my local community is oppressive or abusive — isn't that worse without a state above it?

Local communities can be awful: racist, sexist, homophobic, cultish. Anarchists have always known this.

The question is: when your town or subculture sucks, what tools do you have?

In a centralized system, often:

local elites + state power = very hard to challenge,
moving away is economically expensive and legally complex,
the bigger state often sides with local power if it’s convenient.

In a more decentralized, freed-market setup, you want:

More exit options: easier to move, easier to find other communities and institutions that will take you in.
Competing jurisdictions / associations: if one “justice system” is captured by abusers, others can arise.
Networks of solidarity that can intervene across local boundaries.

There’s no guarantee. But concentrating power at the top doesn’t magically make your town good; it just adds another layer of power that can go wrong.

Labels & ideologies

Isn't this just communism with extra steps?

Definitions here are messy, but:

State communism / Marxist-Leninism:
central party and state control most major production,
markets are heavily suppressed or abolished,
planning is political.

What I’m describing:

keeps markets and voluntary exchange,
pushes ownership and control toward workers, users, and communities,
removes legal privileges that let passive owners and bureaucrats rule from above.

That’s a tradition often called:

libertarian socialism,
anarchism (especially mutualism / left-market anarchism),
or “freed-market anti-capitalism”.

So: it shares communism’s critique of exploitation, but rejects the idea that a centralized state is the way out.

Isn't this just anarcho-capitalism?

Super important distinction.

Most versions of anarcho-capitalism:

accept existing property titles and big fortunes as basically legitimate,
treat any challenge to those titles as aggression,
and imagine a stateless world where those owners simply hire private security instead of using police.

What I’m arguing for:

directly questions the legitimacy of much existing property, especially land, monopolies, and fortunes built on the four monopolies,
focuses on dismantling those monopolies and privileges first,
expects firms to be smaller, flatter, more worker-run on average.

In short: this is not “let Amazon write the laws instead of Congress.” It’s “make it hard for anything like Amazon-as-we-know-it to exist.”

Isn't this just 'better regulated capitalism'?

Regulating capitalism assumes:

the basic structure (wage labor, landlordism, monopoly-friendly IP, giant firms) is legitimate,
the state is mostly a neutral referee,
our job is to tweak the rules around the edges.

The freed-market anarchist view here is:

the basic structure is not neutral: it’s built on enclosure, monopolies, and upward redistribution baked into law,
some regulations genuinely protect people, others entrench monopolies,
the goal is to replace the underlying structure over time, not just patch it.

That doesn’t mean “no reforms ever.” It means we care about which direction they push.

Transition & realism

How do we get from here to there without a magic revolution?

Honestly: there is no script.

You can think of change happening on three overlapping layers:

Story – how people explain their own lives: is capitalism “the end of history” or just one rigged system among others? Changing this is slow but foundational.
Counter-institutions – co-ops, mutual aid, community finance, free knowledge projects, etc. They don’t abolish capitalism, but they carve out zones where its rules bite less.
Harm-reduction fights – reforms that reduce suffering and buy time, without confusing them for liberation.

There’s no “Stage 1: do X, Stage 2: utopia.” There’s just:

more people seeing the machine clearly,
more people building alternatives where they can,
more people refusing apathy when small wins are on the table.

What can I actually do that isn’t just vibes?

Depends on your situation, skills, and risk tolerance.

Some directions that fit this worldview:

Lowest lift
Talk to someone you trust about the difference between markets and capitalism.
Share one example that made something click for you (phones, insulin, printers, right-to-repair, etc.).
Medium lift
Join something local that pushes against one of the four monopolies: a co-op, credit union, tenant union, repair collective, open-source project.
Support harm-reduction campaigns where you live: right-to-repair, zoning reform, tenant protections, etc.
Higher lift
Help start or strengthen a counter-institution: co-op, mutual aid network, community land project, free-knowledge initiative.
Create your own explanations (videos, zines, talks, tools) that translate these ideas into your community’s language.

None of that guarantees “victory.” But it changes what you’re cooperating with, and that’s not nothing.

If you want to shrink the state, what happens to welfare, public services, and protections?

This is the place where a lot of anarchist / libertarian talk turns ugly fast, so I want to be very clear.

There are two very different ways to “shrink the state”:

Smash the floor, leave the ceiling.
Cut welfare, public services, and basic protections.
Leave banking cartels, landlordism, IP monopolies, corporate welfare, and bailouts mostly intact.
Call the resulting cruelty “freedom”.
Strike down the ceiling and expand the floor.
Attack the legal privileges that let wealth and power concentrate (the four monopolies, subsidies, bailouts, “too-big-to-fail” protections).
At the same time, expand people’s real security through co-ops, mutual aid, community care, free knowledge, etc.
Only talk about rolling back state welfare after people are no longer structurally dependent on it to survive.

The first is the usual neoliberal playbook. The second is closer to a Tucker–Chomsky synthesis:

Benjamin Tucker: focus on smashing monopolies and unearned privilege – the ceiling.
Noam Chomsky (when he talks about policy): defend and improve welfare and basic protections for ordinary people while concentrated power still exists – the floor.

From this perspective:

“Deregulation” that makes it easier to pollute, bust unions, or shred the safety net while banks and landlords stay privileged is not a step toward freed markets.
The early targets should be:
corporate welfare and subsidies,
bailouts and special protections,
IP overreach and repair restrictions,
barriers that lock co-ops, small producers, and mutual finance out of markets.
Meanwhile, social supports (welfare, public healthcare/education, etc.) are seen as messy but necessary crutches in a world where people have already been dispossessed.

In a long-run freed-market vision:

As land monopoly, banking privilege, and IP cages disappear,
as co-ops, mutual aid, and community institutions actually work,
the need for centralized welfare genuinely shrinks.

At that point, “withering away” the state’s safety net can mean:

handing functions to institutions controlled by the people who use them,
rather than just dropping people into a rigged “free market” and telling them to swim.

Pulling the welfare floor out first, while the monopoly ceiling is still in place, is not anarchism. It’s just a more honest name for austerity.

Ask your own question

No FAQ can anticipate every “yeah but what about…” that a curious or skeptical person will have.

Ask a different question here, such as

“What happens if someone wants to build a nuclear plant in this system?”
“How would structural engineering firms work without government inspectors?”
“What about climate change and global coordination?”
“What if a co-op turns into a new hierarchy — what checks exist then?”