The 5th Empire - CHAZ

The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) is a newly established anarchist area in which the state has been substituted by voluntary policing and government. It remains to be seen how successful this will be, but I suspect it will end badly. It came about in the wrong way and is therefore wide open to all sorts of problems.

Expelling a police force from an area doesn't in itself usher in voluntary interaction among people. It leaves a power vacuum open for grabs. There's no guarantee that the power vacuum will be filled with liberty minded people. It may as well be filled by gangsters and war lords, eager to set up a dictatorship.

The correct way around this would have been for the residents and business owners in the area to have hired private security ahead of the expulsion of the police force. In that way, there would be no ambiguity as to legal arrangements.

Private legal arbitration should also have been established ahead of the expulsion. The assumption that people will automatically adopt the arbitration method promoted by the anarchists is naive, and unlikely to work. Would be dictators are not going to abide by anyone's rules but their own. Having more or less invited such people into the area, the anarchists are likely to find themselves voiceless in their newly established free state.

While it's still possible that everything ends well for the anarchists, it's more likely to end in tears. Anarchy is best established organically with the gradual replacement of government institutions. Instead of direct confrontation, we discretely sidestep the system. We use private arbitration and private security, and stay away form the banking system as much as possible.

By Brian Gomes Bascoy - https://www.flickr.com/photos/peramides/49990329077/, CC BY 2.0, Link