The New Libertarian Manifesto

Preface to the First Edition

The basic form of new Libertarianism arose during my struggle with the Libertarian Party during its formation in 1973, and Counter-Economics was first put forward to the public at the Free Enterprise Forum in Los Angeles in February 1974. New Libertarianism has been propagated within and without the libertarian movement and its journals, most notably New Libertarian magazine, since then.

More importantly, the activism prescribed herein (especially Counter-Economics) has been practiced by the author and his closest allies since 1975. Several “anarchovillages” of New Libertarians have formed and reformed.

Just once, wouldn’t you like to read a manifesto that’s been practiced before it’s preached? I wanted to.

And I did it.

Samuel Edward Konkin III October 1980

Preface to the Second Edition

An agorist publication ought to be judged most severely in the free marketplace. Sure enough, the first edition of New Libertarian Manifesto has been sold out and a second edition, taken up by a fresh entrepreneur looking for profit with his ideology, is with you, the reader. The market’s judgment, to my pleasant surprise, is that NLM is the most successful of my many publications.

In the realm of ideas, two years is a fairly short time. Nevertheless, attacks on NLM have begun in Left-Center Libertarian publications and one such student network newsletter berated errant chapters for switching allegiance to “that flake, Konkin” only last month. Essays and articles on Counter-Economics and agorism appear in more and more non-Left (or non-agorist - yet) libertarian publications.

A truly encouraging sign is the emergence of many Counter-Economic entrepreneurs in the Southern California area (and a few scattered around North America and even Europe) who embrace and distribute NLM. An agorist “industrial park” has been condensing quietly in Orange County between these two editions.

This continuing gratification is not idly enjoyed. It has inspired the author to continue the dialogue in two issues of a theoretical journal based on NLM, the writing of Counter-Economics (see footnote 3, chapter III), and the planning of a theoretical magnum opus, as Das Kapital was to the Communist Manifesto, undoubtedly to be titled Agorism.

As for continuing to practice what I preach and expanding on the practice, I may add to the end of the First Preface...

And I’m still doing it.

Samuel Edward Konkin III

February 1983

Statism: Our Condition

We are coerced by our fellow human beings. Since they have the ability to choose to do otherwise, our condition need not be thus. Coercion is immoral, inefficient and unnecessary for human life and fulfillment. Those who wish to be supine as their neighbors prey on them are free to so choose; this manifesto is for those who choose otherwise: to fight back.

To combat coercion, one must understand it. More importantly, one must understand what one is fighting for as much as what one is fighting against. Blind reaction goes in all directions negative to the source of oppression and disperses opportunity; pursuit of a common goal focuses the opponents and allows formation of coherent strategy and tactics.

Diffuse coercion is optimally handled by local, immediate self-defense. Though the market may develop larger-scale businesses for protection and restoration, random threats of violence can only be dealt with on the spot ad hoc.

Organized coercion requires organized opposition. (An excellent case has been made many times by many thinkers that such organization should remain skeletal at best, fleshing out only for actual confrontation, in order to prevent perversion of the defenders into an [16] agency of aggression.) Institutional coercion, developed over the millennia with roots of mysticism and delusion planted deep in the victims’ thinking, requires a grand strategy and a cataclysmic point of historical singularity: Revolution.

Such an institution of coercion, centralizing immorality, directing theft and murder, and coordinating oppression on a scale inconceivable by random criminality exists. It is the Mob of mobs, Gang of gangs, Conspiracy of conspiracies. It has murdered more people in a few recent years than all the deaths in history before that time; it has stolen in a few recent years more than all the wealth produced in history to that time; it has deluded - for its survival - more minds in a few recent years than all the irrationality of history to that time. Our Enemy, The State. [2]

In the 20th Century alone, war has murdered more than all previous deaths; taxes and inflation have stolen more than all wealth previously produced; and the political lies, propaganda, and above all, “Education” have twisted more minds than all the superstition prior; yet through all the deliberate confusion and obfuscation, the thread of reason has developed fibers of resistance to be woven into the rope of execution for the State: Libertarianism.

Where the State divides and conquers its opposition, Libertarianism unites and liberates. Where the State beclouds, Libertarianism clarifies; where the State conceals, Libertarianism uncovers; where the State pardons, Libertarianism accuses.

Libertarianism elaborates an entire philosophy from one simple premise: initiatory violence or its threat (coercion) is wrong (immoral, evil, bad, supremely impractical, etc) and is forbidden; nothing else is. [3]

Libertarianism, as developed to this point, discovered the problem and defined the solution: the State vs the Market. The Market is the sum of all voluntary human action. [4] If one acts non-coercively, one is part of the Market. Thus did Economics become part of Libertarianism.

Libertarianism investigated the nature of man to explain his rights deriving from non-coercion. It immediately followed that man (woman, child, Martian, etc.) had an absolute right to this life and other property - and no other. Thus did Objective philosophy become part of Libertarianism.

Libertarianism asked why society was not libertarian now and found the State, its ruling class, its camouflage, and the heroic historians striving to reveal the truth. Thus did Revisionist History become part of Libertarianism.

Psychology, especially as developed by Thomas Szasz as counter-psychology, was embraced by libertarians seeking to free themselves from both state restraint and self-imprisonment.

Seeking an art form to express the horror potential of the State and extrapolate the many possibilities of liberty, Libertarianism found Science Fiction already in the field.

From the political, economic, philosophical, psychological, historical and artistic realms the partisans of liberty saw a whole, integrating their resistance with others elsewhere, and they came together as their consciousness became aware. Thus did Libertarians become a Movement. The Libertarian Movement looked around and saw the challenge: everywhere, Our Enemy, The State, from the ocean’s depth past arid outposts to the lunar surface in every land, people, tribe, nation - and individual mind. Some sought immediate alliance with other opponents of the power elite to overthrow the State’s present rulers. [5] Some sought immediate confrontation with the State’s agents. [6] Some pursued collaboration with those in power who offered less oppression for votes. [7] And some dug in for long-term enlightenment of the populace to build and develop the Movement. [8] Everywhere, a Libertarian Alliance of activists sprang up. [9]

The State’s Higher Circles were not about to yield their plunder and restore property to their victims at the first sign of opposition. The first counter- attack came from anti-principles already planted by the corrupt Intellectual Caste: Defeatism, Retreatism, Minarchy, Collaborationism, Gradualism, Monocentris and Reformism - including accepting State office to “improve” Statism! All of these anti-principles (deviations, heresies, self-destructive contradictory tenets, etc.) will be dealt with later. Worst of all is Partyarchy, the anti-concept of pursuing libertarian ends through statist means, especially political parties.

A “Libertarian” Party was the second counter-attack of the State unleashed on the fledgling Libertarians, first as a ludicrous oxymoron [10], then as an invading army. [11]

The third counter-attack was an attempt by one of the ten richest capitalists in the United States to buy the major Libertarian institutions - not just the Party - and run the movement as other plutocrats run all the other political parties in capitalist states. [12]

The degree of success those statist counter-attacks had in corrupting libertarianism led to a splintering of the Movement’s “Left” and the despairing paralyzation of others. As disillusionment grew with “Libertarianism,” the disillusioned sought answers to this new problem: the State within as well as the State without. How do we avoid being used by the State and its power elite? That is, they asked, how can we avoid deviations from the path of liberty when we know there are more than one? The market has many paths to production and consumption of a product, and none are perfectly predictable. So even if one tells us how to get from here (statism) to there (liberty), how do we know that’s the best way?

Already some are dredging up the old strategies of movements long dead with other goals. New paths are indeed being offered - back to the State. [13]

Betrayal, inadvertent or planned, continues. It need not.

While no one can predict the sequence of steps which will unerringly achieve a free society for free-willed individuals, one can eliminate in one slash all those which will not advance Liberty, and applying the principles of the Market unwaveringly will map out a terrain to travel. There is no One Way, one straight line graph to Liberty, to be sure. But there is a family of graphs, a Space filled with lines, which will take the libertarian to his goal of the free society, and that Space can be described.

Once the goal is fixed and the paths discovered, only the Action of the individual to go from here to there remains. Above all else, this manifesto calls for that Action. [14]

Agorism: Our Goal

The basic principle which leads a libertarian from statism to his free society is the same which the founders of libertarianism used to discover the theory itself. That principle is consistency. Thus, the consistent application of the theory of libertarianism to every action the individual libertarian takes creates the libertarian society.

Many thinkers have expressed the need for consistency between means and ends and not all were libertarians. Ironically, many statists have claimed inconsistency between laudable ends and contemptible means; yet when their true ends of greater power and oppression were understood, their means are found to be quite consistent. It is part of the statist mystique to confuse the necessity of ends-means consistency; it is thus the most crucial activity of the libertarian theorist to expose inconsistencies. Many theorists have done to admirably; but we have attempted and most failed to describe the consistent means and ends combination of libertarianism. [1]

Whether or not this manifesto is itself correct can be determined by the same principle. If consistency fails, then all within is meaningless; in fact, language is then gibberish and existence a fraud. This cannot be over- emphasized. Should an inconsistency be discovered in these pages, then the consistent reformulation is New Libertarianism, not what has been found in error. New Libertarianism (agorism) cannot be discredited without Liberty or Reality (or both) being discredited, only an incorrect formulation.

Let us begin by sighting our goal. What does a free society look like, or at least a society as free as we can hope to achieve with our present understanding? [2]

Undoubtedly the freest society yet envisioned is that of Robert LeFevre. All relations between people are voluntary exchanges - a free market. No one will injure another or trespass in any way.

Of course, a lot more than statism would be to be eliminated from individual consciousness for his society to exist. Most damaging of all to this perfectly free society is its lack of a mechanism of correction. [3] All it takes is a handful of practitioners of coercion who enjoy their ill-gotten plunder in enough company to sustain them - and freedom is dead. Even if all are living free, one “bite of the apple,” one throwback, reading old history or rediscovering evil on his own, will “unfree” the perfect society.

The next-best-thing to a free society is the Libertarian society. Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty (Thomas Jefferson) and it may be possible to have a small number of individuals in the marketplace ready to defend against sporadic aggression. Or large numbers may retain sufficient knowledge and ability to use that knowledge of basic self-defense to deter random attacks (the coercer never knowing who might be well versed in defense) and eliminate the profitability of systematic violence initiation.

Even so, there remain two problems inordinately difficult for this system of “Anarchy with spontaneous defense.” First is the problem of defending those who are noticeably defenseless. This can be reduced by advanced technology to people who are quadriplegic morons (assuming that won’t be solved by sufficient technology) and very young children who require constant attention anyways. Then there are those who for a brief time go defenseless and the even rarer cases of those who are overwhelmed by violence initiators wishing to test their skills against a probably weaker foe. (The last is most rare simply because of the high risk and low material return on investment.)

Those who need not - and should not - be defended are those who consciously choose not to be: pacifists. LeFevre and his disciples need never fear some Libertarian will use methods they find repugnant to defend them. (Perhaps they can wear a “dove” button for quick recognitions?)

Far more important is what to do with the violence initiator after defense. The case in which one’s property is violated successfully and one is not there to protect it comes readily to mind. And finally, though actually a special case of the above, is the possibility of fraud and other forms of contract violation. [4]

These cases may be settled by the primitive “shoot-out” or socially - that is, through the intervention of a third party who has no vested interest in either of the two parties to the dispute. This case is the fundamental problem of society. [5]

Any attempts to force a solution against the wishes to both parties violate Libertarian principle. So a “shoot-out” involving no risk to third parties is acceptable - but hardly profitable or efficient or even civilized (aesthetically pleasing) save to a few cultists.

The solution then requires a judge, “Fair Witness” or arbitrator. Once an arbitrator to a dispute or judge of an aggression has performed judgment and communicated the decision, enforcement may be required. (Pacifists may choose arbitration without enforcement, by the way.)

The following market system has been proposed by Rothbard, Linda and Morris Tannehill, and others; it need not be definitive and may be improved by advances in theory and technology (as this author has already done). At this stage of history, it seems optimal and is presented here as the beginning working model.

First, always leaving out these who choose not to participate, one insures oneself against aggression or theft. One can even assign a value to one’s life in case of murder (or inadvertent manslaughter) which may range from the taking of the violence-initiator’s life to taking replaceable organs (technology willing) to restore life to the payment to a foundation to continue one’s life’s work. What is crucial here is that the victim assigns the value to his life, body and property before the mishap. (Exchangeable goods may simply be replaced at market rate. See below.)

A finds property missing and reports it to the insurance company IA. IA either through another division or through another division or through a separate detective agency (D) investigates. IA promptly replaces the object to A so that loss of use of good is minimized. [6] D Now may fail to discover the missing property. In that case, the loss to IA is covered by the premiums paid for the insurance. Note well that in order to keep premiums low and competitive, IA has a strong incentive to maximize retrieval of stolen or lost goods. (One could wax eloquent for volumes on the lack of such incentive for monopoly detection systems such as State police forces, and their horrendous social cost.)

IF D does discover the goods, say in B’s possession, and B freely returns them (perhaps induced by reward), the case is closed. Only if B claims property right in the object also claimed by A does conflict arise.

B has insurance company IB which may perform its own independent investigation and convince IA that D erred. Failing that, IA and IB are now in conflict. At this point, the standard objections to market anarchy have been brought up that the “war” between A and B has been enlarged to include large insurance companies which may have sizeable protection divisions or contracts with protection companies (PA and PB). But wherein lies the incentive for IA and IB to use violence and destroy not only its competitor’s assets but surely at least some of its own? They have even less incentive in a market society long established; the companies have specialists and capital tied up in defense. Any company investigating in offense would become highly suspect and surely lose customers in a predominantly Libertarian society (which is what is under discussion).

Very cheaply and profitably, IA and IB can simply pay and arbitration company to settle the dispute, presenting their respective claims and evidence. If B has rightful claim, IA drops the case, taking its small lose (compared to war!) and has excellent incentive to improve its investigation. If A has rightful claim, the reverse is now true for IB.

Only at this point, when the matter has been fully contested, investigated and judged, and still B refuses to relinquish the stolen property, would violence occur. (B may have only been bothered so far as being notified of IB’s defense on B’s behalf, and B may have chosen to ignore it; no subpoena could be issued until after conviction.) But PB and IB step aside and B must now face a competent, efficient team of specialists in recovery of stolen property. Even if B is near-mad in his resistance at this point, he would probably be neutralized with minimum fuss by a market agency eager for a good public image and more customers - including B himself some day. Above all, PA must act so as not to invoke anyone else or harm other’s property.

B or IB is now liable for restoration. This can be divided into three parts: restitution, time preference, and apprehension.

Restitution is the return of the original good or its market equivalent. This could be applied even to parts of the human body or the value set on one’s life.

Time preference is the restitution of the time-use lose and is easily determined by the market rate of interest which IA had to pay to immediately restore A’s property.

Apprehension is the sum of the cost of investigation, detection, arbitration and enforcement. Note how well the market works to give B a high incentive to restore the loot quickly to minimize apprehension cost (exactly the opposite to most statist systems) and to minimize interest accrued.

Finally, note all the built-in incentives for swift, efficient justice and restoration with a minimum of fuss and violence. Contrast this with all other systems in operation; note as well that in parts all this system has been tried successfully throughout history. Only the whole is new and exclusive to Libertarian Theory.

This model of restoration has been spelled out so specifically, even though it may be improved and developed, because it solves the only social problem involving any violence whatsoever. The rest of this Libertarian society can be best pictured by imaginative science fiction authors with a good grounding in praxeology (Mises’ term for the study of human action, especially, but not only, economics.)

Some hallmarks of this society - libertarian in theory and free-market in practice, called agorist, from the Greek agora, meaning “open marketplace” - are rapid innovations in science, technology, communication, transportation, production and distribution. A complementary case can be made for rapid innovation and development in the arts and humanities to keep up with the more material progress; also, such non-material progress would be likely because of total liberty in all forms of non-violent artistic expression and ever-more rapid and complete communication of it to willing recipients. The libertarian literature extolling these benefits of freedom is already a large body and growing rapidly.

One must conclude this description of restoration theory by dealing with some of the arcane objections to it. Most of these reduce to challenges to ascribing value to violated goods or persons. Letting the impersonal market and the victim decide seems most fair to both victim and aggressor.

The latter point offenses some who feel punishment is required for evil in thought; reversibility of deed is not enough for them. [7]

Though none of them has come up with a moral basis for punishment, Rothbard and David Friedman in particular argue for the economic necessity of deterrence. They argue that any percentage of apprehension less than 100% allows a small probability of success; hence, a “rational criminal” may choose to take the risk for his gain. Thus additional deterrence must be added in the form of punishment. That this also will decrease the incentive for the aggressor to turn himself in and thus lower further the rate of apprehension is not considered, or perhaps the punishment is to be escalated at ever-faster rates to beat the accelerating rate of evasion. As this is written, the lowest rate of evasion from state-defined crimes is 80%; most criminals have better than 90% chance of not being caught. This is within a punishment- rehabilitation system where no restoration occurs (the victim being further plundered by taxation to support the penal system) and the market is banished. Small wonder there is a thriving “red market” in non-State violence initiation!

Even so, this criticism of agorist restoration fails to note that there is an “entropy” factor. The potential aggressor must put the gain of the object of theft against the loss of the object plus interest plus apprehension cost. It is true that if he turns himself in immediately, the latter two are minimal - but so are the costs to the victim and insurer.

Not only is agorist restoration happily deterrent in a reciprocal relation with compliance, but the market cost of the apprehension factor allows a precise quantifiable measurement of the social cost of coercion in society. No other proposed system known to this time does that. As most libertarians have been saying, freedom works.

Nowhere in agorist restoration theory do the thoughts of the aggressor enter into the picture. The aggressor is assumed only to be a human actor and responsible for his actions. Furthermore, what business is it of anyone else what anyone thinks? What is relevant is what the aggressor does. Thought is not action; in thought, at least, anarchy remains absolute. [8]

If you sit up in shock to find I have crashed through your picture window, and then made sure everyone will continue to live, you don’t particularly care if I tripped and fell through while walking by or I engaged in some act of irrational anger jumping through or even whether it was a premeditated plan to distract protectors across the street from noticing a bank heist. What you want is your window back pronto (and the mess cleared). What I think is irrelevant to your restoration. In fact, it can be easily demonstrated that even the smallest expenditure of energy on this subject is pure waste. Motivation - or suspected motivation, which is all we can know [8] - may be relevant to detection and even to prove plausibility of the aggressor’s action to an arbitrator if there may be two equally probably suspects, but all that matters for justice - as a libertarian sees is - is that the victim has been restored to a condition as identical as possible to pre-harm. Let God or conscience punish “guilty thoughts.” [9]

Another objection raised concerns what will be done about violence initiators who have paid their debt (to the individual, not “society”), and are “free” to try again - with greater experience. What about recidivism, so prevalent in statist society?

Of course, once one is marked as an aggressor, one will probably be watched more closely and thought of first when a similar crime is committed. And while work-camps may be used to repay restitution in a few extreme cases, most aggressors will be allowed to work in relative freedom on bond. Thus no “institutions of criminal higher learning” like prisons will be around to educate and encourage aggression.

The distinguishing characteristic of a highly efficient and accurate system of judgment and protection will be that it will occupy a negligible fraction of an individual’s time, thought or money. One can then argue that we have not portrayed 99% of the agorist society at all. What about elimination of self-destruction (which Libertarianism does not deal with), space exploration and colonization, life extension, intelligence increase, interpersonal relations and aesthetic variations? All that really can and need be said is that where present-man must spend half or more of his time and energy serving or resisting the State, that time-energy (physicist definition of action) will be usable for all other aspects of self-improvement and harnessing of nature. It takes a cynical view of humanity indeed to imagine anything but a richer, happier society.

This then is a sketch of our goal and detailed picture or enlarged focus on the aspect of justice and protection. We have the “here” and the “there.” Now for the path - Counter-Economics.

Counter-Economics: Our Means

Having detailed our past and statist present and glimpsed a credible view of a far better society achievable with present understanding and technology - no change in human nature needed - we come to the critical part of the manifesto: how do we get from here to there? The answer breaks into two naturally - or maybe unnaturally. Without a State, the differentiation into micro (manipulation of an individual by himself in his environment - including the market) and the macro (manipulation of collectives) would be at best an interesting statistical exercise with some small reference to marketing agencies. Even so, a person with a highly sophisticated decency may wish to understand the social consequences of his or her acts even if they harm no other.

With a State tainting every act and befouling our minds with unearned guilt, it becomes extremely important to understand the social consequences of our acts. For example, if we fail to pay at tax and get away with it, who is hurt: us? The State? Innocents? Libertarian analysis shows us that the State is responsible for any damage to innocents it alleges the ‘selfish tax-evader’ has incurred; and the ‘services’ the State ‘provides’ us are illusory. But even so, there must be more than lonely resistance cleverly concealed or ‘dropping out?’ If a political party or revolutionary army is inappropriate and self-defeating for libertarian goals, what collective action works? The answer is agorism.

It is possible, practical, and even profitable to entrepreneur large collections of humanity from statist society to the agora. This is, in the deepest sense, true revolutionary activity and will be covered in the next chapter. But to understand this macro answer, we must first outline the micro answer. [1]

The function of the pseudo-science of Establishment economics, even more than making predictions (like the Imperial Roman augurers) for the ruling class, is to mystify and confuse the ruled class as to where their wealth is going and how it is taken. An explanation of how people keep their wealth and property from the State is then Counter-Establishment economics, or Counter- Economics [2] for short. The actual practice of human actions that evade, avoid and defy the State is counter-economic activity, but in the same sloppy way ‘economics’ refers to both the science and what it studies, Counter- Economics will undoubtedly be used. Since this writing is Counter-Economic theory itself, what will be referred to as Counter-Economics is the practice.

Mapping and describing all or even a significantly useful part of Counter- Economics will require at least a full volume itself. [3] Just enough will be sketched here to provide understanding for the rest of the manifesto.

Going from an agorist society to a statist one should be uphill work, equivalent to a path of high negative entropy in physics. After all, once one is living in and understanding a well-run free society, why would one wish to return to systematic coercion, plunder, and anxiety? Spreading ignorance and irrationality among the knowledgeable and rational is difficult; mystifying that which is already clearly understood is nearly impossible. The agorist society should be fairly stable relative to decadence, though highly open to improvement.

Let us run backwards in time, like running a film backward, from the agorist society to the present statist society. What would we expect to see?

Pockets of statism, mostly contiguous in territory, since the State requires regional monopolies, would first appear. The remaining victims are becoming more and more aware of the wonderful free world around them and ‘evaporating’ from these pockets. Large syndicates of market protection agencies are containing the State by defending those who have signed up for protection- insurance. Most importantly, those outside the statist pockets or sub- societies are enjoying an agorist society save for a higher cost of insurance premiums and some care as to where they travel. The agorists could co-exist with statists at this point, maintaining an isolationist ‘foreign policy’ since the costs of invasion of statist sub-societies and liberation would be higher than immediate returns (unless the State launches an all-out last aggression), but there is no real reason to imagine the remaining victims will choose to remain oppressed when the libertarian alternative is so visible and accessible. The State’s areas are like a super-saturated solution ready to precipitate anarchy.

Run backward another step and we find the situation reversed. We find larger sectors of society under Statism and smaller ones living as agorically as possible. However, there is one visible difference: the agorists need not be territorially contiguous. They can live anywhere, though they will tend to associate with their fellow agorists not only for social reinforcement but for ease and profitability of trade. It’s always safer and more profitable to deal with more trustworthy customers and suppliers. The tendency is for greater association among more agorist individuals and for dissociation with more statist elements. (This tendency is not only theoretically strong; it already exists in embryonic practice today.) Some easily defendable territories, perhaps in space or islands in the ocean (or under the ocean) or big-city ‘ghettos’ may be almost entirely agorist, where the State is impotent to crush them. But most agorists will live within statist-claimed areas.

There will be a spectrum of the degree of agorism in most individuals, as there is today, with a few benefiting from the State being highly statist, a few fully conscious of the agorist alternative and competent as living free to the hilt, and the rest in the middle with varying degrees of confusion.

Finally, we step back to where only a handful understand agorism, the vast majority perceiving illusory gains from the existence of the State or unable to perceive an alternative, and the statists themselves: the government apparatus and the class defined by receiving a new gain from the State’s intervention in the Market. [4]

This is a description of our present society. We are ‘home.’

Before we reverse course and describe the path from statism to agorism, let us look around at our present society with our newly-acquired agorist perception. Much as a traveler who returns home and sees things in a new light from what he or she has learned from foreign lands and ways of life, we may gain new insights on our present circumstances.

Besides a few enlightened New Libertarians tolerated in the more liberal statist areas on the globe (‘toleration’ exists to the degree of libertarian contamination of statism), we now perceive something else: large numbers of people who are acting in an agorist manner with little understanding of any theory but who are induced by material gain to evade, avoid, or defy the State. Surely they are a hopeful potential?

In the Soviet Union, a bastion of arch-statism and a nearly totally collapsed ‘official’ economy, a giant black market provides the Russians, Armenian, Ukrainian and others with everything from food to television repair to official papers and favors from the ruling class. As the Guardian Weekly reports, Burma is almost a total black market with the government reduced to an army, police, and a few strutting politicians. In varying degrees, this is true of nearly all the Second and Third Worlds.

What of the ‘First’ World? In the social-democrat countries, the black market is smaller because the ‘white market’ of legally accepted market transactions is larger, but the former is still quite prominent. Italy, for example, has a ‘problem’ of a large part of its civil services which works officially from 7 A.M. to 2 P.M. working unofficially at various jobs the rest of the day earning ‘black’ money. The Netherlands has a large black market in housing because of the high regulation of this industry. Denmark has a tax evasion movement so large that those in it seduced to politics have formed the second largest party. And these are only the grossest examples that the press has been able or willing to cover. Currency controls are evaded rampantly; in France, for example, everyone is assumed to have a large gold stash and trips to Switzerland for more than touring and skiing are commonplace.

To really appreciate the extent of this counter-economic activity, one must view the relatively free ‘capitalist’ economies. Let us look at the black and grey markets [5] in North America and remember this is the case of lowest activity in the world today.

According to the American Internal Revenue Service, at least twenty million people belong in the ‘underground economy’ of tax evaders using cash to avoid detections of transactions or barter exchange. Millions keep money in gold or in foreign accounts to avoid the hidden taxation of inflation. Millions of ‘illegal aliens’ are employed, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Millions more deal or consume marijuana and other proscribed drugs, including laetrile and forbidden medical material.

And there are all the practitioners of ‘victimless crimes.’ Besides drug use, there are prostitution, pornography, bootlegging, false identification papers, gambling, and proscribed sexual conduct between consenting adults. Regardless of ‘reform movements’ to gain political acceptance of these acts, the populace has chosen to act now - and by so doing are creating a counter-economy.