Wikipedia:Today's featured article/September 9, 2005



Anarcho-capitalism is a socio-economic ideology based on the idea of individual sovereignty (or "self-ownership"), an unlimited right to private property, and a prohibition against initiatory coercion and fraud, with contracts between sovereign individuals being the basis of law. From this is derived a rejection of the state (an entity claiming a territorial monopoly on the use of force) and the embrace of absolute laissez-faire capitalism. Anarcho-capitalists would protect individual liberty and property by replacing a government monopoly that is involuntarily funded through taxation, with private and competing businesses. The philosophy embraces stateless capitalism as one of its foundational principles. The first well-known version of anarcho-capitalism to identify itself with this term was developed by Austrian School economists and libertarians Murray Rothbard and Walter Block in the mid-20th century as an attempted synthesis of Austrian School economics, classical liberalism, and 19th-century American individualist anarchism. While Rothbard bases his philosophy on natural law, others, such as David Friedman take a pragmatic consequentialist approach by arguing that anarcho-capitalism should be implemented on the basis that such a system would have superior consequences than other alternatives.

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