The State is a Maginot Line

I saw this article this morning and thought we might continue our discussion of the agora and its importance in our struggle for liberty. Kyle is a good friend, and a member of my FSW family - as well as a contributor to The Price of Liberty.


The State is a Maginot Line
By Kyle Bennett

Samuel Edward Konkin’s great insight was that smashing the state is not a prerequisite to achieving freedom, but is a consequence of it. The usual political formulation is this:

Choose freedom -> Get a lot of people together -> smash the state -> have free markets -> build wealth

Konkin saw that it could instead go like this:

Choose freedom -> have free markets -> get a lot of people together -> build wealth -> smash the state

He saw that the key difficulty is the stages “have free markets” and “build wealth.” The problem with waiting to do that until the state is smashed is that it leaves us no means to actually smash the state. Parties and activists have tried numerous methods to do so: asking the state to smash itself via protesting and voting, violent demonstrations, sabotage, withdrawing from commerce altogether to deprive the state of resources, and hiding one’s resources from the state’s grasp.

snip-

“Counter” economics does not just mean anti- the state’s economics, it also means other than the state’s economics. And while we are building resources to smash the state, we are also building the social and market structures that will prevail once the state is gone.

If we wait to build those structures only after the state is gone, we risk opening the door to opportunists ready and willing to impose their own social and market structures, from the top down. By having those structures already in place, having been tested and honed to be resilient against the most powerful enemy we know, we leave no chaotic and dangerous transition period in which our newly found freedom can be usurped by late-comers.

Kyle has put a finger on a major argument so many have had to a completely free market, "anarchist" solution - the idea that the "warlords" would fill in the vacuum left by central government. And we all probably know how real that threat may be. But the creation of sound free market practices NOW, even "under the radar," seems to offer more hope than I'd ever considered to fill that vacuum before it even occurs.

Now, that's what I call encouraging!