| | Steve: your post has some statements I do not fully agree with. Let me address my areas of agreement and disagreement one by one, your remarks in quotes:
"The government has the right to self-defense that is delegated to it by the people."
Governments don't have rights. Only individuals have rights. Governments have powers, allegedly granted to them by the alleged consent of the subjects they claim the power to rule. And governments aren't some disembodied thing, they are composed of individuals who each assert they have various powers over other individuals, and use other individuals to coerce obedience to their commands.
"But no one has to explicitly delegate a right to self-defense since anyone that is violating individual rights loses their own rights and is fair game for a government."
The right to self-defense is an individual right. If some random person walks up to me and claims that they have the power to enforce that right of self-defense for me, and demands cash for this "service" they offer, and are vague about how they intend to go about enforcing that power they claim to have, and don't bother to ask me if I agree with all these assertions, am I obligated to accept this offer whether I like it or not?
Now, what if this is not some random person, but a person carrying a gun and saying they are from an organization -- let's call it a "government" -- is this individual somehow different than the individual in the paragraph above?
Everyone has the right to delegate their natural right to self-defense. Anyone who is violating an individual's rights maintains all of their rights except for those rights they have ceded via this act of aggression. If you rob me of a stick of gum, you do not lose ALL your rights, you lose whatever rights I may need to trammel upon to defend my right to my property you have stolen. I do not, for example, have the right to pull out a gun and murder you in response to your act of gum-stealing.
So, anyone that violates my right does not lose all their rights, nor are they "fair game for a government". I have the right to defend my rights, either personally or via people I have specifically delegated that power of enforcing my rights to. Notice my deliberate use of "power" versus "rights" in the previous sentence -- the two are NOT interchangeable terms.
"We focus so much on the detail level of individual rights - on the single, specific act and how to treat it politically, that we overlook the importance of creating and maintaining the environment of stable, long-lived property rights that can be trusted to exist in the future."
Who is this collective "we" you are referring to? And what is this "environment"? If by "environment", you mean "government", those entities have a terrible track record on the "stable, long-lived" part, since the particular government entity that I have actually worked in and observed at painfully close range -- the Hawaii State legislature -- is composed of individuals who, with only a handful of exceptions, are dedicated to chipping away at and undermining our rights, bit by bit, session by session, however much they may rationalize their actions to themselves. Our federal government only appears to be marginally better.
"Our ability to flourish is to a large degree dependent on those rights-protection cultural structures."
Our ability to flourish is dependent to some extent on other individuals sharing our valuation of natural rights -- the "culture" and the "structure" you refer to are an artifact of the result of the summing up of those valuations, not the cause. If you could push a button that would instantaneously change all those individual values to the NIOF principles, the culture and the structures would almost overnight morph to comply with them. If the button pushing resulted in everyone having thoroughly statist values, the opposite almost overnight shift in the culture and structures would happen.
"Outsourcing versus hiring directly are just business decisions. Having and implementing an objective set of laws based upon individual rights is the job government must fulfill. And fulfilling that means creating and maintaining those aforementioned structures."
I must object to your use of "must" in "must fulfill". Who is going to enforce that "must"? There isn't a government on the earth anywhere, and never has been, that has had a purely objective set of laws. Some come closer than others. The actual governments on every level that impose their rule upon me right now all appear to be moving further away from such laws.
"By what right does an anarchist deny a minarchist government that is supported by voluntary contributions?"
To the extent that individuals given authority by that minarchist government try to violate the natural rights of an anarcho-capitalist, the A/C has the right to oppose that initiation of force (though they may find it prudent to yield to some or all of these usurpations due to not having sufficient firepower to resist). If the minarchist government does not violate the rights of the A/C, then the A/C should be content to let other minarchist individuals consent to be ruled by, and periodically have their rights violated by, the government those minarchists have given their consent to.
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"Minarchists such as [Tibor Machan] are libertarians with regard to all goods and services except those they arbitrarily label as “governmental.” Regarding those, they are socialists pure and simple, conceptually indistinguishable from their fellow socialists, in this one arena."
