Surrounded by glue

I've written a couple of times about the "surrounded property-owner" scenario as a reason to be skeptical of anarchocapitalism. Now my anarchocapitalist friend Todd Seavey has not only recognized that scenario but lived it (well, briefly, sort of).

Even girlfriend Helen asked me recently whether the possibility of a foe buying all the land around me to starve me constitutes coercion, if I’m for strict property rights, and I pooh-poohed the likelihood of the hypothetical — but the next day, as it happens, I heard the boss’s assistant where I work loudly freaking out at workmen in the hall who, with the permission of our building owners, were planning (in effect) to trap us inside the ACSH office for an hour while they spread super-strong glue all over the corridor — without advance warning — for construction purposes.

His principles remain mostly intact, however.