En un intercambio privado de correos Kantor acusa a los anarco-capitalistas de caer en un razonamiento circular al defender la producción privada de ley y orden. Con su permiso copio su comentario (énfasis suyo):
Los derechos de propiedad deben existir y estar bien definidos para que exista el mercado. No puede haber un "mercado" de derechos de propiedad (seguridad y Ley) porque precisamente el mercado es "donde" se hacen intercambios de bienes y servicios cuyos derechos de propiedad ya están bien establecidos. El mercado no puede regular la existencia y defensa de los derechos de propiedad, porque estos son condicion previa para que haya mercado. Por eso el anarquismo forma parte de esas teorias que ni siquiera llegan a ser equivocadas, porque directamente no tienen sentido.
El problema es que Kantor no está pensando en términos marginales: el mercado existe o no existe, y los derechos de propiedad están bien establecidos (leyes) o no lo están en absoluto. En la fábula de Kantor primero se establecen bien los derechos de propiedad de la nada, y luego la gente hasta ahora de brazos cruzados empieza a producir y a comerciar. Por el contrario, lo que sucede es que el comercio y la protección de los derechos de propiedad se desarrollan al unísono, progresivamente, pues las normas no se crean en ningún vacío, sino que surgen conforme se necesitan, se demandan y se respetan.
Walter Block contesta a la misma objeción en su réplica (pdf) a Randall Holcombe:
Are people who argue for ordered anarchy guilty of circular reasoning? Not a bit of it. No more so, leastways, than those who maintain that any other good or service can be supplied by the market.
Take food, for example. I go out on a limb and hereby claim that free enterprise is capable of supplying groceries. Aha, says Holcombe, if he consistently pursues the “logic” of the argument above: “But no farmer would grow much of anything if his property rights were not reasonably secure. And without food, it would be impossible for anyone to supply the defense necessary to plant and harvest in the first place! Neither government nor private protection agencies can make their rounds unfed. To assume they are not starving is to argue in a circle.”
In this manner, any (important enough) good or service (food and defense, as we have seen, but also money, metals, or labor) can be shown not to be economically viable, by private or government provision. For none of these things can be supplied in a vacuum. Not a one of them can be offered by anyone unless still other instrumentalities are in place. Money or copper cannot be created by anyone, private or public, unless there is at least a minimal amount of food, order, etc.
Holcombe is here guilty of the failure to think marginally. This is the source of the famous “diamond-water paradox.” Of course, if all protection is assumed away, the prospects for food, etc., are dim. In similar manner, without any food, no protection can take place. Matters look quite different, however, in the absence of these Herculean assumptions.
Roderick Long también responde a este planteamiento en su excelente ponencia Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections:
Another popular argument, also used often by the Randians, is that market exchanges presuppose a background of property law. You and I can’t be making exchanges of goods for services, or money for services, or whatever, unless there’s already a stable background of property law that ensures us the property titles that we have. And because the market, in order to function, presupposes existing background property law, therefore, that property law cannot itself be the product of the market. The property law must emerge – they must really think it must emerge out of an infallible robot or something – but I don’t know exactly what it emerges from, but somehow it can’t emerge from the market.
But their thinking this is sort of like: first, there’s this property law, and it’s all put in place, and no market transactions are happening – everyone is just waiting for the whole legal structure to be put in place. And then it’s in place – and now we can finally start trading back and forth. It certainly is true that you can’t have functioning markets without a functioning legal system; that’s true. But it’s not as though first the legal system is in place, and then on the last day they finally finish putting the legal system together – then people begin their trading. These things arise together. Legal institutions and economic trade arise together in one and the same place, at one and the same time. The legal system is not something independent of the activity it constrains. After all, a legal system again is not a robot or a god or something separate from us. The existence of a legal system consists in people obeying it. If everyone ignored the legal system, it would have no power at all. So it’s only because people generally go along with it that it survives. The legal system, too, depends on voluntary support.
