As a society grows without bound, how can a monolithic government hope to serve the needs of the people equally? Sheer efficiency will dictate that the needs and rights of the majority will be respected while the edge cases are ignored or oppressed. A state is necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution. A stateless society may not be capable of providing the “services” that we have all come to expect from the Nanny State, but it is also incapable of putting a boot to your throat. Which, in the end, is far more important.

While inequality is a fact of existence, wealth was not a tabula rasa for elitism; it meant merely that there was more to share.

I am not speaking of the Noble Savage. Such a creature never existed, and ‘harmony’ as so many like to hold onto never existed. But, humans did understand their relationship to the world, and in general respected it (and when they did not, the offenders were usually killed. Harsh, perhaps, but when someone kills more than they can eat, it compromises the security of *everyone’s* food source).

Law as we know it changed all that. State-laden societies are only possible when two things are true:

1. The populace believes the law to be a real object, not one we merely invent for our convenience.

2. The populace believes ‘the state’ to be a real entity, also not one we merely invent for our convenience.

Both these are the consequence of one simple fact: Humans have a large enough brain that our ability to abstract allows us to believe that our concepts are as real as the rocks and trees around us. When we can conceive of our abstractions as concrete objects, we become as imprisoned to them as a criminal in jail.

Stateless societies ARE possible.. but not for us, not anymore. We’re too big, now. To far away from those we’d govern. No mutual self interest.

“At one time, Williamson was commissioned by the president of the Republic of Texas to go to a distant county to hold a term of court. As was so often the case in nineteenth-century Texas, the county was divided into factions that spent most of the time cutting each other’s throats. No courts had been held for years. The citizens had recently convened a meeting in which they adopted a resolution stating that no court should be held (afraid no doubt, of the numerous indictments for murder that would be forthcoming). When Judge Williamson took the bench, a lawyer rose up and read the resolution. When asked by the judge to cite authority for such a resolution, the lawyer pulled a Bowie knife, laid it on the table, and said, “This is the statute which governs in such cases.”
Judge Williamson, quick as lightning, drew his long pistol and, in an unmistakable tone, replied, “And this is the constitution which overrides the statute.” [8]

from texasranger.org

There is also the issue of pollution of our oceans that I have not yet seen adequately addressed by any fellow anarcho-capitalist.

But I too am willing to give it a shot and see how it might work, since I agree with Jefferson when he said, “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”