AC and power

[xorbie]

I was going to make this a very long and well thought out post but basically I'm lazy.

Given: We have guns and money in our society.

Given: We want to move to AC society, but we theoretically still have guns and money (or wealth, if we decide to abandon the dollar... we still have things worth something to people).

How exactly are we to stop some group from having the same control over people that governments tend to now? The problem, as I see it, is that the government does NOT have a monopoly on coercion. It has a legal monopoly, but that means little without the power to enforce those laws, which by definition is the power necessary to coerce in the first place. Laws by themselves are meaningless. In some parts of the country/world, violent mobs have more power and more ability to coerce and "tax" citizens than the governments which theoretically rule over them. What is to stop this from happening in AC?

Just in the interest of intellectual honesty, I should say up front that I believe that strong culturally reinforced rules are necessary to some extent. I don't think AC people disagree, but I take issue with some of their cultural norms (i.e. libertarian morality).