# Anarcho-Capitalism **Anarcho-capitalism** ("ancap") is the position that the state should be abolished entirely and every service it provides, including courts, police and defense, should be supplied by private firms competing in a market. [[Murray Rothbard]] coined the term and systematized the idea in the mid-20th century. He drew on the Austrian economics of [[Ludwig von Mises]] and on 19th-century American individualist anarchism. As a mass movement it is marginal. As an intellectual engine for the right, and now as a governing brand in Argentina, it is anything but. ## The lineage - **Rothbard** supplied the moral theory: taxation as theft, and the state as a criminal gang writ large. - **David Friedman**'s *The Machinery of Freedom* (1973) supplied the economist's version, asking how private law and defense agencies would actually work. - **[[Hans-Hermann Hoppe]]**'s *Democracy: The God That Failed* (2001) supplied the turn that matters for the modern right. He argued that monarchy beats democracy on anarcho-capitalist terms, and that "covenant communities" could physically remove those who reject their values. That book is the hinge between ancap and the [[Dark Enlightenment]]. - **The [[Mises Institute]]** (1982) became the movement's institutional home. ## How it joined the right In the early 1990s Rothbard and his allies pursued a "paleolibertarian" strategy. They deliberately fused ancap economics with cultural conservatism and anti-establishment populism, aiming at the kind of voter who later elected Trump. The [[Ron Paul]] newsletters of that era, with their racist content, came out of this strategy. It explains why an ideology that is anti-state in theory keeps turning up on the nationalist right in practice: the ancap wing hates the *welfare* state and the *administrative* state much more than it hates borders or police. ## Silicon Valley's version The tech right took the goal and dropped the politics. Instead of abolishing the state, it tries to **exit** it: seasteading, charter cities such as Honduras's [[Próspera]], [[Network State]] projects and cryptocurrency. [[Peter Thiel]]'s 2009 [[Cato Unbound]] essay is the manifesto for this, and the [[Thiel Sovereign Exit Portfolio]] is the practice. [[Curtis Yarvin]]'s neo-monarchism is Hoppe's argument without the libertarian packaging. ## In power: Milei [[Javier Milei]], Argentina's president since December 2023, calls himself an anarcho-capitalist and campaigned with a chainsaw. His government is the first real test of the ideology running a state. It has been a test of austerity and deregulation, not of abolition. His party, La Libertad Avanza, won the **Oct. 26, 2025** midterms with just over 40% of the vote, after Trump tied a promised $40 billion U.S. rescue package to the outcome. The result strengthened Milei's hand in Congress enough to sustain vetoes. Thiel's purchase of a Buenos Aires mansion in April 2026 is the tech right's bet on the project (see [[Thiel Sovereign Exit Portfolio]]). ## See also - [[Murray Rothbard]] · [[Hans-Hermann Hoppe]] · [[Ludwig von Mises]] · [[Mises Institute]] · [[Ron Paul]] - [[Libertarianism]] · [[Agorism]] · [[Crypto-Anarchism]] · [[Capitalism]] - [[Dark Enlightenment]] · [[Curtis Yarvin]] · [[Network State]] · [[Próspera]] · [[Patri Friedman]] - [[Javier Milei]] · [[Peter Thiel]] · [[Silk Road Darknet Market Timeline]]