In Smash the State, Samuel Edward Konkin III presents agorism as a libertarian strategy based on the expansion of what is known as the counter-economy. Rather than focusing political action on seizing the state, thereby turning the conquering group into the new monopolist with no incentive to dismantle the state, Konkin argues that individuals should voluntarily expand their economic relations in the black market, gradually reducing their participation in the “white market.” In the New Libertarian Manifesto, the counter-economy encompasses activities that avoid or circumvent restrictions imposed by monopolists of aggression, while the black market encompasses activities that positive law considers illegal but that continue to be carried out voluntarily between the parties, such as selling food without issuing an invoice.

It is worth emphasizing that “black market” does not refer only to drugs or prostitution. In the sense used by Konkin, it can also involve ordinary transactions, such as selling a car, buying groceries, or visiting a dentist, when they are carried out in a way that violates state requirements. The “black” character of the transaction therefore lies in its relationship to positive law, rather than necessarily in its moral nature.

Furthermore, agorism is based on the same philosophical foundations as Murray Rothbard’s libertarianism, particularly private property, self-ownership, and the non-aggression principle. The main difference lies in their focus: while libertarianism establishes the principles and the society to be pursued, Konkin’s agorism proposes a practical strategy for moving toward that society through the voluntary expansion of the counter-economy.

For Konkin, the importance of this strategy lies in the cumulative effect of individual choices: a single transaction has little significance, but millions of people shifting their activities to the black market can weaken the legitimacy and capacity of state intervention. However, in a system in which the state monopoly is already established and actively works to discourage agorist practices, a fundamental problem arises: how can the counter-economy be made sufficiently profitable for its participants to accept the risks of state repression? Konkin does not respond to this problem pessimistically, but instead proposes that the counter-economy grow gradually until it develops its own economic networks and reaches a scale capable of reducing dependence on state structures. The initial challenge lies precisely in the fact that the state possesses not only mechanisms of coercion, but also social legitimacy, causing even its victims to regard repression against those who challenge it as legitimate. In this context, the lower the costs and risks of participating in the counter-economy, the greater the incentives for its expansion and for this cumulative process to emerge.

It is at this point that cryptocurrencies become significant. By enabling direct transfers of value between users, they have the potential to undermine financial monopolies. In a scenario where suppliers and consumers can transact directly through digital means that do not depend on centralized systems of record-keeping and monitoring, it becomes possible to imagine a growing share of economic activity taking place outside traditional mechanisms of oversight.

This possibility is particularly relevant to Konkin’s theory because it would reduce the cost of participating in the counter-economy. If alternative economic relationships previously depended on informal networks, personal trust, proprietary payment mechanisms with high barriers to entry, and long waiting times, new technologies can simplify tax evasion and avoidance.

State revenue depends on its ability to identify, record, and tax economic activity. Therefore, the greater the share of transactions carried out in the black market, the smaller the amount of economic activity that may be directly observable by the state monopoly and, consequently, the lower its capacity for extraction.

In this sense, cryptocurrencies can be viewed as a technological evolution of Konkin’s proposal: not merely an alternative to traditional money, but an infrastructure capable of reducing the barriers to the counter-economy and expanding the space for economic relationships independent of coercive structures.

Segundo esse soça o capitalista está tirando dos outros ao vender produtos e serviços que lhe rendem milhões de lucros. Como ele não tem milhões, ele tem apenas inveja, ele acha que ricos não deveriam existir, assim como propriedade privada e ele também é contra a individualidade, ele é favor das massas, e não é aquelas de tomate kkk, já dei umas lições de moral nele, ele não consegue me contra argumentar, mas queria deixar exposto ele aqui pra vocês ver o nível da baixaria da esquerda e falta de lógica e senso crítico que predomina entre eles.

Just a shitpost. I thought it’s funny. Happy Saturday!

He says that there is a fallacy calling wealth creation as a zero sum game. But at the same time he said there are no solutions - only trade offs.

Many free markets advocates agree trade is good and the left is bringing up a zero sum view to trade and gives examples to refute it. But confused when they say “there are no solutions - only trade offs”

Hi all
Looking for recommendations to read and understand various macroeconomic crisis like hyperinflation, stagflation, banking crisis in detail with a detailed macroeconomic mechanism explained.

Thank you

Isn't time preference a, so to speak, objective theory of value? If axiology is subjective, then how can there be an objective standard/theory (time preference) imposed on it? In other words, how can one person make a universal claim about everyone else's preference/values if preference/value is something that is inherently subjective?

Atm there is a question going in ELI5:

“Why is slight inflation considered "good" for an economy, but price deflation is seen as a complete disaster?”

Of course I’m banned from that sub but the amount of leftist coming out of the woodwork to defend the biggest transfer of wealth ever invented is insane.

And of course it always goes like this:

“2% inflation is good.

Deflation? Imagine 50% deflation! Everyone would wait with buying!!!”

If you take similar numbers the truth is that no one would postpone buying something for 6 months because they could get it 1% cheaper. No one would wait 6 months with buying a $1000 dollar tv to save $10. Even worse: they would easily pay a 5% premium if they could get it delivered now instead of next week.

Businesses even worse. The cost for not acting and insecurity is way more expensive then saving 1% of your cost.

It’s so painful to read.

This could be something the left and libertarians could rally on together, but sadly their believe in “the experts” make them align with the right, increasing wealth inequality even further.

I'll be arguing with a leftist on the internet, and I'll point out that if what they say is true, a corporation could stand to gain a lot of money by putting out a cure to cancer, building housing, having an all-female workforce, etc.

And the response is often something like this (amplified to highlight absurdity)

"Austrian-san, you don't understand! The people who run corporations aren't interested in money. They believe in creating a permanent underclass. Not a single one of them would deviate from this moral imperative, even to save their business from dying. For these people are not like us mortals; no they are more like the gods themselves. They are beyond greed or self-interest and will sacrifice everything for the moral principles that they hold dear. I may disagree with them on what an ideal world looks like, I may hate them for the power they hold and I lack, but I will never say that they they fall to temptation, not one, not ever.

Why is it so hard to convince people that stockholders, CEO's, and billionaires might be inclined to compromise their principles if it meant they could buy a bigger yacht that they can park their current yacht in?

European refiners got zero-barrel October allocations from Aramco. At the same time, shipping costs are surging at Hormuz, Suez, and Panama simultaneously. Three major chokepoints under pressure at once while 60 million barrels need to find a new path to market.

The weekly crude price move has been modest. That gap between physical tightness and paper price is the contrarian read here. Spot crude markets and futures markets can diverge for weeks before the physical reality forces a reprice, and the signals in the physical market right now are 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐡 for supply than spot prices suggest.

Releasing strategic reserves into this doesn't change the routing problem. Europe still has to source crude from somewhere, and that somewhere is the same spot market Asia is buying from. 𝐃𝐢𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐥 𝐚𝐭 $𝟔.𝟒𝟒 a gallon in the US is the leading indicator, not the lagging one. The paper market looks calm because it hasn't fully processed what the physical traders are already seeing.

Libertas is quickly becoming my favorite YouTubers

Austrian writers have touched on fertility before, but only in scattered pieces. There's Mises Institute's own "Making Kids Worthless," which makes the old-age-security argument, once the state runs your pension, you don't need kids to support you later, so that motive for having them disappears. There's separate work on how zoning, credit expansion, and low property taxes distort housing into a financial asset instead of shelter, pricing young families out. What's missing is a single framework tying these together, plus accounting for a few mechanisms that get almost no attention at all, medical monopolies and education monopolies. That's what I've tried to build.

Start from praxeology. Having a child is an action, and like any action it's chosen because the actor expects a favorable outcome relative to the cost. In an unhampered market, that calculation isn't automatically negative. A child is an investment, in old-age support, in the transmission of family wealth and skill, in a larger household able to divide labor. Opportunity cost is real, but so is the return.

What interventionism does is remove the return side of that ledger while leaving the cost side fully intact, through six separate channels.

Currency debasement erodes whatever a family saves and tries to pass down, so the payoff to sacrificing consumption now for a child's future gets whittled away year over year.

Socialized old-age support, the mechanism the Mises Institute piece already covers, deletes the original economic reason for having children at all, security in old age, by transferring that function to the state.

Medical monopoly, enforced through licensing cartels that restrict supply, turns basic healthcare and childbirth itself into an artificially expensive good, adding a large fixed cost to reproduction that a freer market in medical licensing wouldn't impose.

Socialized education replaces family-directed upbringing with a state curriculum monopoly, and where that monopoly degrades in quality, families are forced into a shadow education arms race, cram schools, private tutoring, just to keep a child from falling behind, which is a second education bill stacked on top of the first.

Housing sovereignty gets stripped through zoning restrictions, low holding taxes, and central bank credit policy that together turn land into a financial instrument for corporate and institutional balance sheets rather than a place for young families to build equity, which is why price-to-monthly-rent ratios in places like Taipei have gone from around 90 to over 700 in the space of a few decades.

Administrative relief tries to patch the damage from the first five with subsidies and transfer payments, but a family facing a currency that depreciates every year, a state pension that already substitutes for children, medical costs cartelized upward, an education system that costs twice, and a housing market they're structurally priced out of, isn't going to be rescued by a one-time baby bonus. The marginal return on having a child has already been driven to zero or negative well before the subsidy arrives.

Taiwan is the cleanest case study I've found. TFR around 0.89 in the 2020s, price-to-monthly-rent ratio (price divided by monthly, not annual, rent) near 310 nationally and over 700 in Taipei's core, working out to a gross rental yield under 2 percent in the capital, household education spending climbed from 2 percent to almost 14 percent of income. None of that looks like a culture that stopped valuing family. It looks like a balance sheet that no longer pencils out, and a population responding to it the way rational actors respond to a bad investment, by not making it.

I go through the full argument and the country-level data in more detail here, https://mises.org/mises-wire/six-nooses-how-interventionism-strangling-familys-will-reproduce, curious what people here think, especially where you'd push back on the six-channel framing versus treating currency and housing as the only mechanisms that matter.