Guns

[Renton]

How would you solve the simple economic principle of making people pay back their debts if you don't have a state police? We live almost implicitly with the knowledge that our debts are final and we need to pay them back or the state reposses our stuff. How to enforce this? Go back to colonial times and let corporations recruit their own militia to ensure they get paid?

States do very little in enforcing debt collection. What little they do, they don't really need to do. When creditors give loans they either ask for collateral from the debtor or charge an interest rate, usually a combination of the two. Of course they have the right to take the collateral when the the debtor defaults on the debt, and there's no need for a state to enforce this. The collateral belongs to the creditor and is its property.

Credit would still exist even in a context of zero force, because there is still the system of credit ratings and interest rates based on that credit rating. Even if I could default on my loan with zero punitive consequences, I still have incentive not to do that because I don't want a low credit rating, and creditors have the option of denying loans to people with a history of not honoring debts. But that's an absolute worst case scenario. In a stateless society there would still be property rights and dispute resolution, suing, restitution etc. That can all exist in a voluntary society.