I’m an admirer of Niccolo Soldo’s excellent substack, Fisted by Foucault, and on Saturday he does summaries and commentary on items that caught his interest in the recent past. This post will be in a similar vein.
Politics versus Anti-Politics
Many of us in the liberty movement are conflicted about political strategies to achieve increased liberty, versus the idea of “anti-politics”, where the emphasis is agorism or anarchist solutions outside of the structures of the state. I thought some comments in a recent Decentralized Revolution Podcast were on point, in that the multiple strategies for obtaining liberty are not mutually exclusive. If you are interested in agorism, maybe find and join a freedom cell in your local community. If you think political strategies are worth trying, join us in the LP Mises Caucus, as we’re focused on political activities, especially at the local level, while building a national movement that embraces nullification and secession. If you think achieving a libertarian majority in a geographic location is the best solution, consider a move to New Hampshire to support the Free State Project. There’s an appeal to agorism - counter-economics and black markets - that is undeniable, in that it intertwines markets and community building. Maybe you buy food from a local farmer in person using cash, precious metals or crypto. This is agorism. The No Way, Jose! podcast had a good debate between Dave Smith and Sal Mayweather on this topic. One of my critiques of agorism is it doesn’t solve the problem of “armed representatives of the State are here to shut down my raw milk operation”. Murray Rothbard argued that agorism doesn’t scale, which he pointed out in an obscure and interesting 1981 exchange between him and Samuel Edward Konkin III, the primary philosopher and advocate of Agorism. Rothbard:
So the Konkinian vision of black-market institutions growing, defending themselves and thus becoming the free-market anarchist society of the future collapses on this ground alone. Note that black markets are concentrated either in service industries or in commodities which are both valuable and easily concealed: jewels, gold, drugs, candy bars, stockings, etc. This is all well and good, but it still does not solve the problem: who will make automobiles, steel, cement, etc. How would they fare in the black market? The answer is that they don’t fare at all, just as they don’t fare in the independent contracting agora.
Konkin responds:
[W]e turn to Counter-Economics, admittedly the basis of agorism and the New Libertarian Strategy. Rothbard finds NLM neglecting the “white market”—yet there is one crucial point on which it is most definitely not neglected, here or in my other Counter-Economic writing. The agorist imperative is to transform the White into Black. Nothing could be clearer. To do so is to create a libertarian society. What else can a libertarian society mean in economic terms but removing market activity from the control of the State? Market activity not under control of the State is black market. Market activity under the control of the State is white market and we are against it.
You can find Rothbard’s arguments against agorism here, and Konkin’s rebuttal here.
Consider Power…
Austrian Economics does a masterful job of explaining markets, market mechanisms and even human behavior. With the exception of Hoppe, most libertarian philosophers and economists don’t spend a lot of time writing about or trying to understand power and the incentives behind it. If we don’t understand how political power works, then the challenge of breaking state power is impossible. There is a resurgence of interest in right-leaning media toward this topic, best exemplified by James Burnham’s exploration of European elite theory in his 1943 book The Machiavellians. Dave Smith and Auron MacIntyre had an excellent discussion of these issues on a recent episode of Dave’s podcast Part of the Problem (rumble link, too):
Quick Links
James Corbett - anarchist and erudite conspiracy realist - wrote a Bastiat-esque masterpiece about the joke that is the rule of law on his website, The Corbett Report. You can read the beginning, but the rest is behind a paywall for members of his website. James is worth supporting. He also has a substack but you’ll get his written articles only through his website.
Jeff Deist says goodbye as co-host of the Human Action Podcast and President of the Mises Institute.
I enjoy listening to smart people in conversation, and this episode of Tom Luongo’s Gold Goats ‘n Guns podcast fits the bill. He talks to Caitlin Long about her efforts to start a full-reserve bank, the Federal Reserve, Bitcoin, Davos and a bunch of other interesting stuff.