Somalia is the great objection to libertarianism — why, these people live in a government-free paradise! You should want to move there! Etc.
For one thing, the paradise didn’t last long: there’s a central government and a central bank operating in Somalia just fine today, and various governmental entities kept spreading throughout the country over the past decade or so. They weren’t always strong enough to be obeyed, though — hence Somalian “anarchy.”
So what was this “anarchy” really like? On the Tom Woods Show today I asked Ben Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, to comment on all this in light of his work on Somalia. Listen in!