Anarcho-Capitalism is a dream, not a reality
Protect from who?
The story that Dr. Holcombe starts off with, is a perfect antidote for the problem with having the defense of our property and lives controlled by wealth rather than law. In our current society we are supposed to be assured that when an officer or someone with authority performs an action that action is ok because the voters decided to elect people that made those laws. If the action is unlawful then the officer or authority figure would face legal repercussions that the people have decided through proxy to establish as punishment for the breach of trust. In an anarchist society the only incentive for a defense agency to keep you safe is the goal of keeping your business or preventing bad PR from occurring which could harm their business. As such if it would cost an excessive amount of money to protect you from certain things the business would rather cut their losses and lose you as a client than spend the cash to save you if they would not be able to recuperate their losses from you. If you become too big of a problem they could target you themselves in order to insure that you wouldn’t spread any information about how they failed to uphold their end of the deal. This is what happens in a society where wealth is the driving factor for every business or service rather than legal repercussions. The reason that our laws work well in most cases is because they have the entire threat of the U.S. government or the individual state government behind them. When we break the law we know that if we refuse they will send more and more resources after us until eventually we cave and are caught/killed. This is not true in an anarchist society as the defense agency or business that you pay could decide to stab you in the back and you have no one to go to as other companies won’t want to step in and pay the necessary amount for the previous company to back off. This is seen in some fashion with insurance companies. If there was not a law preventing insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions then they all would decline anyone that had one. The same could be said for defense agencies not wanting clients that already have problems.
Common property
Another problem with the idea of anarchy of social services and common properties. A perfect example of this would be the internet and all that it goes with. In order to even operate on the internet new regulations and rules need to constantly be implemented for computer hardware and software in order to prevent wide scale blackouts or the entire U.S. internet system failing due to lack of coordination. It is impossible for multiple companies to work together and create a system for the internet for a long period of time. The internet is very fragile and requires that every single computer identify and communicate in the same way or else the redundancy that it relies on to function will fail. We have seen that if a company does not get exactly what they want, they will hold their customer’s hostage. For an example just look at Blue Cross Blue Shield and the appalling actions they have taken in regards to stillwater medical. Oklahoma State University has agreed to a long term contract with BCBS and uses it to provide insurance to all of its students and faculty. This means that you will still have insurance on campus but if your ailment is unable to be taken care of by OSU’s rather limited resources then you must go all the way to OKC to get needed treatment because BCBS doesn’t like the deal they got.
Monopolies
A foundational pillar of the anarchist argument is that there will be competition for services and that a single or a couple services will not completely take over the market. This is just an inherent lie that can’t be farther from the truth. In today's world we have laws and policies designed to stop companies from becoming monopolies or controlling too much of the market share. These are needed for a reason as it is an inbuilt trait of humanity to constantly try to get more than what we currently have. Companies will always look for more money and power no matter what it takes to get said assets. We have seen this extremely recently with jet blue attempting to buy spirit airlines. This was somewhat stopped by the biden administration as it used to say that this would condense too much of the market into too few companies. This is because it was shown that when only one runs over the other the cost of airfare rises exponentially with less competition. Some people think that this would cause others to just start another business to compete with the bigger corporations but fail to realize the problems with such a plan. A company just starting needs to have the capital to get the equipment at all which eliminates the majority of people. Secondly the existing company or companies can just drop their prices in the area underneath the competitor and sustain a loss that is compensated from other areas or just with a large bank account and run the competition out of business before returning to previous prices. This has been done before and even caused the U.S. government to step in and different chains from driving out small business owners.