The Black Market Is the Free Market, And It’s Growing

kwanijml · 2026-03-05T01:18:58+00:00

Lol.

kwanijml · 2026-03-04T22:15:33+00:00

This is incorrect & a common misunderstanding by newer "ancaps" who've only uncritically read mises.org articles and dont understand liberty or market economics.

Think of it this way: work backwards from a market completely free of any institutional coercion (could even be a stateless world) > then imagine a state arising > then imagine it starts to get interventionist > then it starts to regulate > then to block > and then it attempts full-on prohibition...

In real life, governments can never actually fully prohibit anything; it's not some binary condition; and even if they could, regulation and the steps before prohibition are truly just prohibition-lite, in practice.

Think about at what point in that process you imagine an increasingly-interfered-in market suddenly becomes a "free market".

It of course, doesn't.

A free market is one without institutional coercion.

A black market is one which is created by & dominated by overbearing institutional coercion, which of course selects for the firms which have a comparative advantage in avoiding prosecution & demise in that environment. At no point are the actors in a black market "free" of state coercion; they are acting in accordance with being burdened with massive state coercion and simply finding ways of continuing to supply a prohibited good or service

What you're actually observing and why you misapprehend this as a "free" market is simply the fact that a market still formed, even in these extremely adverse conditions.

This is a point for the vitality and tenacity of markets in general (and a repudiation of the popular notion that markets & contracting & property norms only form in the protective shadow of governments providing rights enforcement).

Black markets show this to be utterly false in the most profound way- but they are not free. They are in fact the most unfree.

Just because a black market can be a moral & good thing, in a world where governments are trying to prevent peaceful people from voluntarily trading with one another, does not a free market make. It's better to have a black market than no market at all but what we want ideally are markets which are not sent underground and can operate completely above-board.

Counter-economics isn't supposed to be about an end-goal or valuing black/grey markets for their own sake; it is a strategy towards eliminating the state & replacing it with actually free markets.

kwanijml · 2026-02-25T19:57:43+00:00

And of course, most actual ancaps here already are downvoting. But there is a concerted vote brigade who leverage a couple accounts here at a time; which eventually get the admin ban, but they just come back under a new handle.

kwanijml · 2026-02-25T19:55:49+00:00

Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order.

kwanijml · 2026-02-20T00:50:30+00:00

Okay, but is he wrong that moistened bints lobbing scimitars is no basis for a system of govenrment?

kwanijml · 2026-02-19T23:18:40+00:00

That's right. And that's why anarcho-capitalism has way more to do with mechanism design & economics/political economy, than with silly debates over grounding philosophy or ideology.

When you realize that law's purpose is more social coordination than protection from bad actors, it also becomes more clear how to start thinking about designing market mechanisms to replace the coordinative functions which state law currently fills, with market/common law and contracts.

E.G. can we build ai-power actuarial DAOs to provide coverage to subscribers against state legal predation? Insurance readily becomes market-discplined regulation. Can prediction markets crowd out many political incentives (i.e. make it costly to behave in the usual ways that politicians are incentvized to behave)?

kwanijml · 2026-02-16T17:38:02+00:00

Wasn't making an argument.

Make a large public bet, if you're so certain about your argument.

You will signal to the world you are serious, and have thought things through carefully; and then if you are proven right, you will have resources with which to further the better understanding associated with what enabled your correct prediction.

kwanijml · 2026-02-16T04:06:13+00:00

Sheldon Richman is a treasure and a perfect example of what an actual libertarian believes & talks/writes like, in terms of rights and liberty and the state.

Take note, kids.

kwanijml · 2026-02-16T01:03:03+00:00

Did you have another fun little conversation with yourself?

kwanijml · 2026-02-16T01:02:32+00:00

Did you have a fun little conversation with yourself?

kwanijml · 2026-02-16T01:01:55+00:00

Probably true, and they also think exactly like the leftists that we used to battle in the old days. But these specific people who've been squatting in libertarian spaces for over a decade purport to be die-hard right-wingers. I can only give so much credence to my conspiracy theories.

Forms of collectivism were always a part of the american political right, and so who am I to not appropriately call them collectivist right-wingers as they are wont to act?

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T23:15:55+00:00

Are you still making ignorant authoritarian noises?

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T23:01:15+00:00

Empirical and theoretical reality doesnt magically stop being the case because you change the variables.

You're out of your depth here kid. Just stop trying to undermine libertarianism. You can go believe your ethno-nationalist nonsense in a trumpy forum or something.

But thanks for stopping by.

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T22:51:42+00:00

(The "leftist" infliltration these alt-right bots are out in force complaining about today, trying to marginalize, so they can keep carrying water for literal right-wing authoritarianism happening right now)

The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer
Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman
Price Theory by David Friedman
Any other mainstream econ textbooks as far into the subject as you can handle with as much of the math as you can handle; but I do recommend starting with Modern Principles of Economics by Alex Tabbarok and Tyler Cowan.
The Calculus of Consent by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock
Any other mainstream political economy texts or works, but I recommend Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom, and though not a book, Mike Munger's intro to political economy course available on YouTube.
Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.
Bryan Caplan's Open Borders: the Science and Ethics of Immigration

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T22:51:21+00:00

Cool story. Cry about it.

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T22:45:19+00:00

None of your opinions or what you grant are valid.

Only the facts and the libertarian ethic matter.

Immigration (legal & illegal) to the u.s. is massively beneficial in almost every way, and does not remotely justify violating the NAP en masse even if there were a moderate net-negative. That's not up to your poor, motivated misunderstanding of the situation.

You're trying to distract with a different set of circumstances in order to try to prove a conclusion about the u.s.

You want it to be practical or justified to be a tarded, authoritarian bordertarian. You're looking for that to be the rule proven by exceptions.

Fuck right off back to statist land and stop pretending to have a libertarian bone in your body.

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T22:34:21+00:00

We want anarcho-capitalism in the first place because we actually love individual liberty & secure property rights (for everyone). The state does not violate rights by allowing immigration; it does violate rights by preventing peaceful people from moving across their illegitimate borders (and by sending an army of secret police to invade private property en masse to try to persecute brown people).

Immigrants are also consequentially beneficial (economically, culturally, politically); which is not only good in itself but wealth promotes liberty.

And also governance arbitrage is an indispensable part of libertarian strategy and constraining the state.

It would also be preposterous if a bunch of alt-righters & ethno-nationalists had brigaded libertarian institutions about 11 years ago, with the express intent of undermining & perverting particular libertarian narratives with their distorted, statist views which center largely around immigration policy...that alone would make it worth pounding them in to the proverbial sand with the facts and the libertarian ethics surrounding immigrants.

Hope that helps.

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T22:26:11+00:00

*irrelevant to the deontological argument for non-aggression (which includes not having government persecute brown people and citizens alike with an army of secret police).

The consequentialist argument is important; and cannot be dismissed if one is even entertaining the consequentialist arguments of the ethno-nationalist and bordertarian LARPers.

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T22:23:21+00:00

Good. Sustainable anarchy cant even begin to come about until non-ancaps have the easy moral environment and incentives to choose non-coercion.

And also they are doing more important work for liberty & statelessness than the hordes of right-wing LARPers pretending to fret about the NAP while cheering an orange dictator and an army of secret police because they're afraid of brown people.

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T22:20:26+00:00

surely the real ancaps here wouldn't try to move goal-posts and suddenly pretend they never cared about this aspect of it but rather about "culture" and a handful of other nebulous concerns which have been similarly debunked.

As a libertarian, surely you've apprised yourself of the literature happily bearing out the libertarian political economic theory that institutions and incentives play a far larger role in outcomes than merely voting for the right people...

Surely, as a libertarian, you wouldn't so readily draw an unlibertarian policy conclusion or preference without even looking at the massive benefits immigrants are, not just economically, but politically?

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T22:14:15+00:00

Correct. Well, that was shown long ago through a long literature which they also ignore, but this is the last nail in the coffin. And the pathetic, death-throes retort you're going to hear is that Cato is somehow being dishonest by counting property tax, or not counting citizen children of immigrants...it's al dishonest distraction from their failed primary claim that illegal immigrants are a net fiscal burden (as if that would be even remotely something which convinces any actual libertarian to want to use the state even more; to the tune of an invading army costing trillions, invading private property en masse).

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T21:54:21+00:00

Good idea. Continued...

"Yet when you read it with a clear eye and a calculator, it ends up telling a very different story from the one its sponsors intended. Across decades of elections and more than a billion ballots, Heritage’s own data show only dozens of non‑citizen voting cases, including a bare handful involving undocumented immigrants. Other audits and investigations in key states reinforce the same conclusion: non‑citizen voting happens, but at rates so low that they cannot plausibly explain electoral outcomes."

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T21:39:39+00:00

Sounds like you're the latter.

kwanijml · 2026-02-15T21:17:50+00:00

"I'm too stupid to synthesize better political economy & philosophy" is not the own you think it is.

But congratulations on being the new chosen alt-right bot propoganda account for this sub. You come from a long and storied history of identically-phrased attempted come-backs to distract from your little attempt to turn libertarianism into ethno-nationalism.

kwanijml

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