Anarchy May Be Hazardous to Your Health

Kelly Weill reports in the Daily Beast:

John Galton and his girlfriend Lily Forester had finally made it. On a March 2017 evening, the young American couple sat on their balcony above Acapulco, Mexico, counting their blessings. They'd recently moved into a big house on a mountainside and were eyeing an ambitious push into the artisanal bong business.

Galton and Forester were anarcho-capitalists who slipped U.S. drug charges worth 25 years in prison, they said in a YouTube video that night. They'd hopped the border and resettled in what Galton called one of the world's "pockets of freedom," a community billed as a libertarian paradise.

Almost two years later, Galton was murdered.

The subhead of the article is, "A bitcoin millionaire created a haven for 'anarcho-capitalists' in Mexico. When one of his followers was killed, he said it was just the cost of doing business."

What is an anarcho-capitalist, anyway?

Anarcho-capitalists ("ancaps") believe in dismantling the state and allowing unchecked capitalism to govern the world in its place. Even within the small anarchist world, ancaps are fringe. Anarchists typically describe their movement as inherently anti-capitalist. Their philosophy describes anarchy as the rejection of hierarchical structures, which they say capitalism enforces. Anarcho-capitalists, meanwhile, see money as a liberating force. They promote a variety of libertarian causes like using cryptocurrency, legalizing all drugs, and privatizing all public institutions like courts and roads. The movement reveres the novelist Ayn Rand, whose work outlines a philosophy of radical selfishness and individualism. Her best-known character, an idealized capitalist named John Galt, appears to have inspired Galton's name.

This is one more example of why one-dimensional left-right models of political ideology are so often inadequate.

Utopian visions often involve ignore part of human nature. Government was invented for good reasons. While the scope of government may be debated among reasonable people, getting rid of it altogether is a completely crackpot notion.

And for anarcho-capitalists who stay in the city permanently, vacation has to end sometime. Berwick's old real-estate sites might have advertised paradise in Acapulco, but the reality was something different, Mike [a former resident speaking on condition of anonymity] said.

"After the first Anarchapulco, quite a few people moved down there, which became the core of this community. They were a mix of varying idealists, anarchists, heavily into drugs and partying and all that. That was the core of the group," Mike said. "You don't get a particularly nice, functioning community. Over time, the community's broken up and splintered off about a dozen times."

Mike said he grew worried about his physical safety. The city was notorious for murders; armed robbery and cartel extortion were a fact of life, he said. But Berwick and others make frequent reference to the ease of living in the city.

"At one point quite a large crowd came, but they were extremely naive," Mike said. "Jeff was always saying publicly that Acapulco's not dangerous, that you can do anything, nothing will happen to you. People believed him."

And for some, belief in a crackpot notion can be fatal.

Anarchy May Be Hazardous to Your Health curated from Crime and Consequences Blog