I think I need to clarify something about my recent "We live in an ancap dystopia" threads, which seem to confuse people.

Namely, we have a different idea of what a "Government" is.

An awful lot of people seem to have a very broad idea of what a "government" is.

It would appear all they need is for something to say "I am the government" and to hold elections for representatives and collect taxes and that qualifies as a government in their mind.

I'm rather more strict than that.

Being rather influenced by Thomas Hobbes and thus a great believer in the Big Chungus theory of State, for me to recognise a government as legitimate, it also needs to be sovereign.

What do I mean by sovereign?

I mean that it has absolute power over everyone and everything within its territory. That if anyone or anything within said territory starts fucking with it, they can go and ruin their day and nothing can stop them.

This is just flat out not the case anywhere in the west. There is a vast accumulation of treaties and legal precedent which make multinational corporations more sovereign over the territories where they do business, than the governments of those territories.

It is so bad in some places that the government is explicitly legally forbidden from meddling in corporate affairs and is, in black and white, merely the publicly funded enforcement arm for corporate policy.

So, I shall ask: If you have countries in the west where the government is either de facto or explicitly simply a crowdfunded service provider for multinational corporations, how else can you describe such a state of affairs, than an AnCap Dystopia?

Yes, I appreciate that is not the end result you were sold on, when you signed up to be an AnCap. Consider the possibility those selling you on it were either unable to see this is how it would end up, or just maliciously lying to you.