Hi @spetey. I understand this isn't easy to intuit. But thankfully law and its enforcement doesn't require a state. State, in this context means (something like) a territorial monopoly on the right to initiate violence and ultimate decision making authority. The best works I've seen talking about the provision of (polycentric) law under stateless conditions are David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom - I made an illustrated summary video here:
And Micheal Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority is great too.
Faced with the alternative of 133 pages, I opted for the video after all! It was quite fascinating and gave me a much better glimpse into how anarchists think it might be a better system, thank you. I was especially intrigued by the idea of, in effect, doing price discovery on my legal values: "I am firmly opposed to all torture, but I guess I could go with the Rights Enforcement Agency (REA) that tends to contract with arbitration courts that allow torture to death, if it saves me $7,566 a year ... but not if it saved me only $7,528!"
I still have major hesitations, though perhaps those too have answers. I'll sketch them here in order from least to most worrisome. Maybe I'll try to make a separate post on them.
Anyway I have more to think about, thank you. Though I still think anarchism would be even worse than the imperfect system we have now, I have a better idea of why some think otherwise.
Thanks for the link! I hope to watch someday (though I'd generally rather read than watch a video, myself). Meanwhile I have to wonder how these laws are enforceable if there's no threat of punishment (backed by an ability to follow through that does seem to imply violence if necessary) behind them.
There are threats of violence against would-be property rights violators. There's a free PDF version of a previous edition of TMOF here: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
Do not underestimate the effects of ostracizism: if Mises and Friedman boycotted the logs that Ben sells until the gate issue is resolved and also told people they will have reservations about trading with people who use Ben's logs, Ben's life becomes increasingly hard to manage while tolling the river because he will lose business and acceptance in the town. Also the concept of DROs or dispute resolution organizations is one that is just recently beginning to be explored.