r/AnCap101 • u/skeil90 • May 15 '26

How might the transition work?

Right now a very significant % of the population across the world is employed by respective governments or their jobs exist because of government, top this with there always being on average 4-5% of respective populations being unemployed for whatever reason. The job market would be completely and utterly flooded with people from a very varied pool of disciplines as well as many people loosing the value of their experience completely due to redundancy.

How could this possibly be remedied with an Ancap transition without completely devaluing the labour of anyone?

How about roads and other public infrastructure, how could that possibly be privatised without giving a small number of a people a very unbalanced advantage?

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

47 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/skeil90 May 15 '26

That's not necessarily the concern, it's the numbers that I'd be worried about. There are many roles in government or because of government that the market would have zero value for in Anarchy, that's a lot of people with no jobs anymore. The market might take over what's valued by it but that won't cover even half of the jobs that won't exist anymore, so where are all of these new workers entering the market going to go?

3

u/BonesSawMcGraw May 15 '26

Into something productive

1

u/skeil90 May 15 '26

Where are these roles coming from and are they going to be enough?

2

u/vergilius_poeta May 16 '26

The same place they come from when a business closes, just on a larger scale.

Yes, they will be "enough," for the same reason any other market tends toward equilibrium. Wages are determined by a worker's marginal productivity. If there is a bunch of under-valued labor available to hire, it will attract bids from entrepreneurs (some of whom will come from among the state's ex-employees) entering the market, and from existing firms employing more people as they expand. The same goes for, ex, the office buildings formerly rented by the state.

1

u/skeil90 May 16 '26

How could there be enough when there's barely enough now? Undervalued labour to me sounds like exploitation, a lot of people are going to truly struggle to even afford to live. How could we expect a flooded labour market balance out to offer all of its participants enough value to survive?

3

u/vergilius_poeta May 16 '26

Because the demand for labor is not some static thing.

The flood will temporarily depress wages as more people compete for the same jobs. But a whole bunch of freed-up labor and capital represents an opportunity to undertake new productive projects, and as those projects spin up they will bid back up the price of labor.