My favorite thing about dumb as free market / neoliberal dumb asses don’t understand is that nations that actually invest in their population will win in the long term. Taking the money and running, while pulling up the ladder behind you will always have this result. We were doomed the moment the tax rate dropped below 90% for the top 10% of income.

The irony of ancaps is that what they want is a fundamental contradiction. Capitalism requires a powerful centralized nation state because it falls apart without one. I think that most ancaps do understand this and are being disingenuous on some level, either with others or themselves, and merely fantasize about collecting power in the chaotic years between disenfranchisement and the crash.

Slightly related but on my mind, this reminds me of anthropological studies on the origins of money. The story that money arose as a way to lubricate otherwise rigid and incompatible exchanges in so-called “barter markets” is a myth. In reality it seems that in all instances money actually arose as a punitive system of legal account in order to avoid the violence of blood libels (eg Alice killed Bob’s cow, to avoid Bob killing Alice the elders decree that one cow is worth 12 chickens and order Alice to give Bob 12 chickens. The elders write down these equivalent exchanges for future conflict resolution and a unit of account is the obvious next step). Ironically when modern anthropologists have gone looking for examples of barter markets they find none in antiquity or ancient times, they find them only in modern times and places where formerly capitalist or mercantilst populations got shut out of the wider economy for various reasons and suddenly had to make due without money. Rather than money arising from barter, barter is merely just what people who know money do when they suddenly have no money. TL;DR: Barter systems are largely a modern capitalist myth.