The state ends up protecting nobody and wasting everyone's money, growing like a tumor, until gradually the entire house of cards collapses into full-blown socialism with much of the population starving and the government scrambling to cover up the atrocities it's caused.
Yeah, that's people being people for you.
"Protecting nobody." This is false. Institutions of government protect your rights and liberties (though that's slowly eroding too). They may not necessarily protect your corporeal person and you most likely have to rely on yourself for protection (JFL @ calling 911, instead of reaching for your weapon), but they will protect your natural rights. Even you can acknowledge that it's important to have some concrete body of government that (enforcibly) protects your abstract rights.
"Wasting everyone's money." This is, unfortunately, true. There is a lot of bloat and financial mismanagement. This is an argument against government expenditure practices, rather than the general case of spending money for society's benefit. NSA's annual black budget isn't there to make sure that I can walk the streets safely at night and not get robbed, it's there to protect the state's security interests against foreign governments and non-government actors seeking to destabilize the state's power, which, unfortunately, don't necessarily extend down to the individual level. So yes, there's plenty of wasted money. That's more of a feature of corruption and authoritarianism than it is of the concept of government.
No, you've got it all wrong. High intelligence (I shouldn't have used the term IQ) in a population inevitably results in capitalist behavior in the form of private property, free trade, and minimalist government. There is no launch pad. Only idiots require a launch pad.
How does it do that exactly? You will inevitably run into situations like the free rider problem where intelligent and rational actors will exploit the situation for their own benefit and all other actors will know what's happening. So in order to prevent being exploited, the others will behave rationally. The equilibrium strategy will then lead to a negative-sum outcome where you have to make a decision to lose less, instead of losing more.
Launch pad here means you need a stable base, an existing skeleton to work from and add to. How do you create an ancap system ex-nihilo (from nothing)? Just what is the step-by-step? And don't start with step 1 being, "remove the government." Suppose there is nothing of the sort to begin with.
Because people are smart enough to realize when others are trying to manipulate the system to gain power. And they step in and prevent it, in the form of social shaming, boycots, etc. This works with a high enough general intelligence level.
Social shaming? Boycots? Smart enough people? One of those three doesn't belong in the group.
The more intelligent people selfishly exploit that to gain power to begin with, because they see a flaw that they can exploit. But let's assume that everybody is equally intelligent and can immediately spot the flaw being exploited by one to gain power and react to that. What you end up with is a series of game-theoretical Mexican standoffs, where the first person to make a move forces everybody else to act and by not acting (opening fire) you end up getting hurt with the chance that another might survive the outcome. So the rational thing to do when one person opens fire is to shoot.
So who's going to take the economic loss and work towards fixing the flaw? Who's going to bear the cost? Everybody? Hey, wait a minute, that's-YOU CAN'T FORCE ME TO PITCH IN!
Then you don't pitch in and splinter off. We do, and gain some benefit from that situation. What do you think happens 200 years down the line from this fork in the road? Right, you get groups with their own agreements and rules on how to do things that benefit everyone in that special group, or nobody does anything and everybody incurs some individual cost, except all at once.
The situation you're describing is only made worse by introducing government into the equation.
The situation I'm describing is realistically what would happen in "real ancap." Some individuals will seek growth. This may mean partnerships, companies etc. They will acquire more resources, provide more services and/or products, and have more employees (all through private, free-market agreements and negotiations). This naturally resembles a form of tribalism. People will naturally tend to collect into groups, and all groups, whether they're united by ideology or the pursuit of profit, will have some leader at the helm (the CEO in this case).
This process of growth can occur in parallel for many other individuals. You may end up with a Pepsi-Coke situation where you have two main groups, or you may end up with an Amazon situation, where it has no rival. In both cases the process tends towards group formation with a leader. You will then have everybody else who is dependent on what this primary group (or two main groups) provides. This becomes terribly reminiscent of corporate feudalism. In fact, that's exactly what it becomes.
I almost wish you lived several hundred years just so we can could run this ancap experiment somewhere just so I could show you that this is what humans will eventually with such initial conditions.
Again, government doesn't solve this. It merely exacerbates it.
How does it exacerbate this? If you have money to pay for your own private army and your neighbor doesn't, nor does your neighbor provide any useful benefit to you in the form of special services or access to resources you need, you can - on a whim - decide that his property would look better as your garden. So you send your soldiers to tell your neighbor to leave. His options are: 1) comply, 2) fight (and live, given impossible odds, even if he's a cross between John Wick, John Rambo, and Robert McCall), 3) do nothing and die.
And you see this as potentially a more stable and prosperous society?
Privatization of such things as public security ripens it for exploitation. It's profit-driven, so it incentivizes things like mercenaries helping encourage or facilitate war so that business booms for them. If they're the only game in town, it's a rigged game. How is this different from government? Governments' raison d'être is not inherently profit, unlike a private body (corporation).
The cost is foregone economic growth, and economic growth is by definition the only thing that should matter to anyone.
Economic growth being the be all and end all for everyone? What?
You're going to have to justify this claim.
Well, real ancap hasn't been tried, but unlike real communism, it really does work. This is empirically proven if you look at the historical evidence, as the freer countries on the continuum have always produced absurd amounts of wealth and human flourishing while the more socialist ones have always ended in mass starvation and despair.
What historical evidence? You're arguing pro ancap as a superior alternative to classic democratic government, but then you're comparing it to socialist governments? What? "Guys, apples are the best fruit. They taste so much better than celery."
Because capitalism benefits ugly men enormously and punishes simping and white-knighting.
OK. I still don't see how this contributes to the discussion we're having, but whatever.
