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Many of the actual problems with Anarcho-Capitalism as a system for organizing human activity can be traced to the concept of Negative Externalities. The incentive structure created by Capitalism in general leads to exploitation of free resources, and often times individuals acting in their own best (short-term) interest results in the Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons. Factory Farms They say when you're not the customer, you're the product. That's certainly true of farm animals. They are slaughtered to be sold to people for food. The milk and eggs they produce are sold as well. So what happens? Well, very simply, Capitalism on its own will cause exploitation of animals on a massive scale. Billions of animals are raised in ever more cramped conditions, forcibly inseminated and fed antibiotics. Little birds have their beaks cut off so they don't peck each other as they wallow in their own shit and filth. Now, they spend their whole life in these conditions. This is the epitome of coersion. And why has it become like this? Because those farms which take these measures can sell meat and dairy for a lower price than the ones which don't. In the market, many people want the cheaper sausage, however it was made. So there is a growing demand for factory farm output. Not only that, but the farmers form organizations to boost demand for their products such as the National Dairy Checkoff. They do this without government. Remember those "Got Milk" commercials? How about "Got Milk from a cow that barely moves and is fed hormones"? OK, maybe you can make some ethical contortions by simply excluding animals from ethical considerations, saying only humans matter. Certainly then you can claim that it's immoral to use any type of force to prevent factory farms from operating. When Capitalism takes its course, people will often choose the cheaper milk / meat, e.g. at McDonalds or KFC. Capitalism doesn't care about morality. And by excluding animals from considerations, you don't have to, either. In Europe, factory farms are banned, but that is an act of government, i.e. force. There is no way to do it within Capitalism. If you buy up all the factory farms and liberate all the animals (like they did with slaves, let's say) someone else can just start another farm and sell meat cheaper than you. So you don't get rid of this through Capitalism, because it results in cheaper goods. The only way is to band together as a society and use force to ban it. Antiobiotic Resistance But of course, externalities aren't just limited to animals. The factory farms figured out that antibiotics can make animals fatter and bigger, therefore bring more money. Once again, Capitalism selects for those farms which do such a thing. And now, as a result, this has accelerated the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. So here's a Negative Externality that can affect MILLIONS OF PEOPLE on a scale not seen since antibiotics were invented. Thanks Factory Farms. Now are we going to somehow take them to court and extract some sort of reparations? By now it's a bit too late. Perhaps it was better to have banned this from the start, and use inspectors and force to make sure it's not done in the first place. And that wonderful State Capitalist system of government-granted Patents of the Pharma community has failed to produce antibiotics at a quick enough pace. Meanwhile, other branches of Science and Open Source Software where people freely contribute to a snowball of knowledge has eclipsed for-profit companies like Microsoft and Brittannica. Wikipedia has way more than Britannica. Linux runs even on toasters while Windows runs only on a particular architecture, because they owned the closed code and didn't need to make it for any other. Imagine if drugs were developed on an open source ecosystem instead of a for-profit patent-fueled Pharma one. Prisoners A similar dynamic appears with private prisons. The prison that spends the least on each inmate, and works them to the bone, would make more money. And instead of the National Dairy Checkoff, they simply pay local courts to send them more kids, or lobby for minimum sentencing laws. Again, these situations would only be worse if we had MORE private prisons, because more people will care about saving a buck than about the welfare of prisoners. In Everyday Commerce One can say that Anarcho-Capitalism are a Wolf and a Fox (or a Wolf and a Lamb) deciding that another Lamb is for dinner. When A and B make an agreement (e.g. that A will employ B), you can focus on their voluntary choice to make that agreement. But what you don't see is all the other people C who face the consequences (e.g. B is a manufacturer of a robot, and C was a local worker who used to be employed). So when C makes an agreement with D, they are coming from the situation that was created by all the transactions where C had to face the externality. Therefore, even on a grand scale, Anarcho-Capitalism can be quite coercive to many people. (And is one reason why societies have instituted Welfare schemes or Unconditional Basic Income). Working Class Families Capitalism works well to distribute money to people when employers value their employees. Your grandfather's generation worked at a Corporation for decades, and one breadwinner was able to support a whole suburban household, complete with cars, kids etc. Loyalty went both ways, and your grandfather even got a pension after retirement. Today, we are over 5x more productive per capita (inflation-adjusted GDP divided by number of people) and yet the Working Class hardly has the same earning power. Today, both parents have to work long hours just to pay the rent or mortgage for the exact same suburban house and car and kids. For a majority of the population, Jobs have become 2 year stints and are moving further to a gig economy where each worker is totally replaceable. Most manufacturing has been automated, so the demand for human labor in those sectors has gone down. That's why rent has become so much higher. Now look at the incentive structure for the family. The resource is time and attention to your spouse. The dad gets a nice offer to earn 90% of what the grandfather used to earn (in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars). He goes and trades his time for that money, leaving less of it for his kids and wife. Now the mom wants nicer things for her kids – or perhaps a career of her own in the new shiny office workplace (not your grandfather's workplace) – and goes to work as well. So, even less attention for the kids. The kids are sent to public school, and the grandparents are put into nursing homes. Who wins from this? The kids don't, the grandparents don't, unless you count "professionals" taking care of them to be a step up from their own family. But the economy is booming and growing! The GDP is higher than it was before. Yet the time people spend with their kids and elderly is a negative externality. It's given up entirely organically through voluntary exchanges. And that affects how our society functions. Induced Demand Induced Demand is the phenomenon when more of a good being produced leads to greater consumption of that good. For example, constructing more lanes on a highway can actually make traffic worse, and vice versa. Malthus argued that as food becomes more available, people have more children, and pretty soon each person is right back to the same amount of food and material wealth as before. Since the 1950s it appears that we've been able to escape this "Malthusian Trap", but we may just have staved it off and are now living on a credit card. See below. In Capitalism, of course, the producer and the consumer both have incentives to keep increasing production until all the supply is exhausted. This can lead to really scary planet-wide effects for both us today and our children and grandchildren. Desertification As farmers use land to its maximum capacity, prices fall, and farmers acting in their own short-term self interest push harder, extracting as much as they can from the land, in order to keep making what they're making. The result is a total collapse of the land's ability to sustain food. Now crops barely grow and soil starts blowing away like dust. You could have seen this in the Dust Bowl preceding the Great Depression, and the Government paid farmers to NOT PLANT for a while, something that would not have happened if everyone just did what's in their own self interest. We know this because now the situation has been replicated all around the world. Now, far from reducing desertification, we have increased it at a rate beyond anything before. In China, for example, the Gobi desert is growing every year. In Africa, farmland that was once arable is now desert. In fact, the UN estimated back in 2006 that this will lead to a migration of 20 million people from Africa – and this was way before Angela Merkel's policies Collapse of Ecosystems Colony collapse disorder threatens wild bees. There are far less insects than before. Sure, it's nice that commercial beekeepers were able to keep the bees alive – this is one argument for private ownership of animals to prevent extinction. But, the extinction could very well have been a Negative Externality from unsustainable human activities. Certainly this can be said about overfishing or the extinction of species at an unprecedented rate. Is it a coincidence that this is the age of the most widespread Capitalism? It has certainly led to prosperity, but at the expense of consuming everything around it. Including finely tuned ecosystems. Fossil Fuels In the last 70 years, we are living in a time of the highest concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans, in MILLIONS OF YEARS. The cause is obvious: humans have released a lot of the CO2 trapped far underground in oil, gas etc. through burning them in our machines. As with the animals, proponents of fossil fuels need to engage in constant public contortion to deny simple data observations as a conspiracy by government scientists. They point to all the good that has been achieved with fossil fuels. They say Earth has been warm in the past. That's true, Earth has had both Greenhouse and Icehouse periods where palm trees grew near the poles, although evidence seems to show that during the Greenhouse periods, the areas below, say, Chicago, were uninhabitable by warm-blooded animals, certainly by humans. Going outside would be like going into a 170 degree fahrenheit sauna, the same sauna that has a warning not to be there for more than a couple hours. So are all those people living at those latitudes (including many developing prices) just "collateral damage" and are we gonna pay for our Negative Externality by dumping a few air conditioners their way? Or if their cities get flooded, are there gonna be private court cases to finally trace the causation to the people who contributed to this 20 years ago ... is that really the best way to deal with these problems? But of course, the greenhouse effect isn't the only problem with pollution. The constant smog from 19th century London, or 20th century New York, looked like this. Human cognition starts to suffer in a stuffy room with poor ventilation because of a buildup of CO2 to 1000 ppm or more. Right now the global ambient concentrations are already around 400 ppm, nearly one half of that. In some areas, it's worse. Summary Let's sum up. Has Capitalism brought us unprecedented prosperity? Well, technological innovation did (one can argue it could have proceeded even faster with open source software, science, collaboration instead of competition etc.) But let's say it was pure Capitalism. At what cost? The competition has led to negative externalities which are really hard to remedy using Capitalism alone. More of the same will simply make MORE negative externalities. Capitalism is resilient and resistant to messing with making products cheaper and more available, by any purely Capitalism-based means. But don't be fooled, there are externalities everywhere: Billions of animals at Factory farms suffering so meat and milk can be cheaper and more plentiful Desertification of farmland Pollution of the air and oceans Overfishing, collapse of ecosystems like the rainforest or lake Baikal Working class works harder and longer for less money Capitalism is a good system for certain things, but it is not a panacea. Negative Externalities exist. Induced Demand exists. These need to be recognized and addressed on a societal level, and not praying to the invisible hand to somehow make sure we survive the consequences of our ever-increasing unsustainable consumption.