Assuming free people could not create internet and electricity infrastructure is like an East German assuming free markets could not provide a Trabant alternative
So long as governments exist you will need to pass your data through government-controlled spaces. You may produce your own electricity, you may create your own wireless mesh WAN spanning a continent even, but that continent might contain the US, and the FCC will come knocking on doors and knocking down you signal towers. You cannot operate on any significant scale without touching on something under the regulatory jurisdiction of nation-states. This is not a problem of imagination, it's the current structure of power. East Germans undoubtedly both imagined and were often aware of Trabant alternatives outside of East Germany. But their dominant power structure did not easy allow for home grown competition.
We agree. Reread my comment - I said it was “just like” the similie.
Just like East Germans lived under forced government monopoly and regulations in the car market but most could dream of Benzes and BMWs, you and I can dream about a world where voluntary relationships replace government force in areas such as internet, conflict resolution, health insurance (where I live we only have government health care, and like for Trabants, there are long lines...), road management, and all other tasks government bureaucrats so selflessly have relieved us of
The same argument was surely made by slave owners since the beginning of history, but westerners managed to abolish slavery, and after that industry was invented
given that free people can't even fend off a bunch of garbage stealing bears I have little confidence that they can get an electricity grid running.
The East Germans were wrong to assume that central planning is very good, they weren't wrong to assume that public governance and central authority is pretty good, which it is.
If you follow to it’s end the principle that makes gifts moral but theft immoral, or sex moral but rape immoral, or work moral but slavery immoral, yes you reach “anarcho-capitalism”
You and I have a thread above where I replied why ethics must be universal if they exist - I welcome you to prove me wrong there, or to boldly argue that might is right!