I agree with you re. anarcho-capitalism. I think that a state is a prerequisite for capitalism.

But that doesn't mean you couldn't a) pare back the state to the bare minimum functionality (which doesn't include garbage collection, IMO) and fund it voluntarily.

> But that doesn't mean you couldn't a) pare back the state to the bare minimum functionality (which doesn't include garbage collection, IMO) and fund it voluntarily.

You could do that with the entity called “the state”, but that entity would no longer be the state or government, no matter what it was called. (It might be an arm of the real government, which might consist of entities voluntarily funding the “state” which themselves exercise coercive, in practice, extraction of wealth, or it might be an irrelevant figurehead.)

>However, the ancap vision of no government and everything done by "voluntary" contract has no meaningful basis in reality at this point

What about tribal societies?

I'm talking about larger groups of humans. Things are very different when you have only a few hundred humans or less. Dunbar's number[1] is an important factor here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Don't most people only have real social relationships with a few hundred people or less?

Of course, but I'm not sure what that has to do with governance structures of societies.