I tend to agree with this assessment from the “Sovereign Counties” site.
Anarcho-capitalism is a contradiction in terms. The system presumes a state enforcing exclusive entitlement to productive means. Competing security agencies, enforcing these entitlements and only these entitlements, constitute a state.
Anarcho-communism as usually described is not stateless either.
County sovereignty, or free association through local autonomy, does not claim to be strictly stateless, but it is closer to anarcho-communism than anarcho-capitalism. Inalienable self-ownership assumes a state enforcing the right. County boundaries and non-aggression between counties also assume a state, but the powers of this state can be distributed among the counties.
County sovereignty permits as much or as little capitalism as free people want. Anarcho-capitalism coercively stacks the deck in favor of capitalists with hereditary title in perpetuity. The capitalists are vassals of a state, and their state invariably expands their privilege through rent-seeking.
I don’t have any problem with people calling themselves “anarcho-capitalist” but political decentralization automatically implies economic decentralization. Bye, bye central banking, currency monopolies, patents/intellectual property/copyrights, land monopolies, corporate personhood, corporate welfare, “public-private partnerships,” limited liability laws, subsidies, government contracts, loans, guarantees, bailouts, purchases of goods, price controls, regulatory privilege, grants of monopolies, protectionist tariffs and trade policies, bankruptcy laws, military intervention to gain access to international markets and protect foreign investments, regulating or prohibiting organized labor activity, eminent domain, discriminatory taxation, ignoring corporate crimes and countless other forms of state-imposed favors and privileges. Even on the local level, many of these kinds of features exist which have the collective effect of centralization control over wealth, property, and resources.
