| | "Not trying to be rude Jim but I don't think you gave much of a definition at all."
No offense taken, John. In fact, I sanctioned your post. Excellent questions. Don't know if I have time to give as thorough a response to each of those questions as they deserve -- it's 5 am Hawaii time, and I'll need to start getting kids off to school soon -- but I'll try to start outlining an answer now.
I'm not talking about trying to reinvent the wheel and build a new system from scratch. That would be the height of folly. No one in their right mind would like to try that, unless they were in desperate straits.
Let's start with a historical example of a functioning anarcho-capitalist system on the federal/national level, though with some vestiges of government at a more local level. After the Declaration of Independence, the area of the American colonies had at least two and possibly as many as five systems of "governance" existing side-by-side in the same geographical area, and thus no monopoly of force, and thus a state of "anarchy", if you will. The British soldiers occupying parts of the colonies were under the direct rule of the British government. The British loyalist colonists still owed their allegiance to the Crown, and in their minds were still subjects of the Crown, but unless British troops were temporarily in their cities this relationship with a government was largely ephemeral and existed primarily in their heads. The colonists who were actively participating in the rebellion owed their allegiance to a collective ideal of an independent system of governance, but since there was no system of government yet, they were living in functional anarchy at a national level, even if locally they still had rules and codes of conduct more or less informally enforced. The colonists who didn't want to participate in the rebellion and didn't want to be governed by the Crown and lived in cities or towns had national-level anarchy, though again codes of conduct with their neighbors. And finally, the colonists living out on the verges of colonial civilization in what was then wilderness had pretty much a complete anarcho-capitalist system, where each person lived independently and enforced their rights, as they perceived those rights, using their personal firearms, and interacting with their neighbors and trading partners with an informal code of conduct where if you violated someone's rights, the aggrieved parties would have to work out an informal resolution, perhaps bringing allies into the mix if the two sides had difficulties settling their competing notions of justice.
Heinlein's great novel, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", explores some aspects of how anarcho-capitalism might work, including an example of a private adjudication of a dispute by a mutually agreed-upon arbiter.
At least one of Charles Stross' novels explores a society emerging into anarcho-capitalism, where the federal government is still trying to maintain control, but where computer technology has allowed more and more individuals to escape its control.
In short, I don't have all the answers -- in fact, the essence of anarcho-capitalism is that there is no central repository of definitive "answers" -- but quite a few individuals have nibbled at the edges of how to get there from here. I'm not claiming it is possible right now, but with the growth of computing power, essentially anarcho-capitalist structures like the Internet could incrementally take over functions now controlled by a central government.
Think of government as Swiss cheese, and anarcho-capitalism as the holes in the cheese, and imagine the holes getting bigger and bigger until, like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, even the smile vanishes.
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