This book is a treatise on the achievement of voluntary governance – rendered in the metaphor of the map of a road trip: where we’ve been, where we are, what lies upon the road ahead. It provides a systematic treatment of the principles, foundations and resulting conclusions, for a theory and practice of voluntary governance. (More information is provided below, including the Table of Contents.)

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The world of voluntary governance is one in which all human relationships – of association, exchange or otherwise – are based upon voluntary commitment. Since no one is forced to act contrary to his will, so, obviously no one can require another to act thus. So, as humans tend to live together, thus tend to need some institutions for decision and rule making to establish the terms of living together, freedom must apply to these practices too. This is not a world without governance, but one in which all governance is undertaken voluntarily.

 

The treatise traces the route of voluntary governance through its initial emergence in the discovery of the benefits of trade among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It examines the rollback of freedom with the rise of the state and its various self-justifying guises, since the agricultural revolution right up to the present. An objective vantage point for assessing those developments is established through the theoretical grounding of human freedom in natural and customary law and the philosophy of human action. Responses to all the standard obfuscations that glorify and gloss over the coercive character of the state and the misguided vilification of markets are systematically delineated. The treatise concludes with some insights into vital practical considerations of how best to move toward a world free of coercion and violence, founded on voluntary association and mutually beneficial exchange.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Loading up the Car

 

The Road So Far

Evolutionary Origins

Comparative Advantage

Murder and Plunder

Trading to Leverage Comparative Advantage

The First Fork in the Road?

The Agricultural Revolution and the Bandit State

States of the State: supreme, bureaucratic, sovereign, national and welfare

Paths along the back roads: historical alternatives to the state

 

You Are Here

The Sovereign State Today

Trespass

Steal

Counterfeit

Extort

Kidnap and confine

Kill

 Statist Democracy and the Arithmetic of Tyranny

The Divine Right of Majorities

The Democratic Majority Doesn’t Add Up

The Double Standard of the Competency Paradox

Beyond the Nirvana Fallacy

Glamour Nationalism, the People’s Romance with the Collective and Plato’s Cave

 

The Road Ahead: Laying the Foundations, Part I

Synthetic a Priori Reason

Natural Law, Human Action and Property

1) Living human beings are energy Amplifiers

2) All human action is the product of exchanges intended to achieve higher ranked subjective preferences

3) The human individual is uniquely and exclusively responsible for and entitled to the fruits of his or her action

Property and Voluntary Governance

What are Markets, Really?

Markets: an abstract description

Markets: a more concrete illustration

Complex Adaptive Systems

What is Voluntary Governance?

Voluntary

Governance

Voluntary Governance and Markets

 

A Scenic Detour

A Little Speculative Fiction

Peter and the Communitarians

Paul and the Individualists

Mary and the Fusionists

Justice as Voluntary Governance

But can it Work: Three Criticisms

Recreating the State?

Regression to Warlords?

Plutocracy?

 

Anticipating some Roadblocks

The State has “always” existed so surely it’s necessary/natural/inevitable (take your pick)

Monopoly

Collective Action Problems and Market Failure

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Principal-Agent Theory

Externalities

State Failure?

Do Markets Create Poverty and Destroy Resources?

Markets, Poverty and the Snapshot Fallacy

Dispelling Statist Misrepresentations of Growth

But, what about…Let’s say, the children?

 

The Road Ahead, II: Strategic Forks

1(a) Elections – working from within

1(b) Elections – working from without

Reform 1: State employees cannot be allowed to vote

Reform 2: Wards of the Public Purse cannot be allowed to Vote

2. Issue-based Campaigns

3. Nullifying the State

Constitutional Nullification

Jury Nullification

4. Riding the Wave of State Crisis Management

5. All roads begin and end with education

 

The Homestretch

The Last Line of Holdout

Tit-for-Tat

Commitment Mechanisms

End of the Trip

 

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