WEBVTT NOTE Samuel Edward Konkin, III: The New Libertarian 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.680 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.680 --> 00:00:12.920 Jeff Rigenbach. 3 00:00:12.920 --> 00:00:18.680 A few weeks ago, in remembering the libertarian career of Vince Miller, I called my listeners 4 00:00:18.680 --> 00:00:25.040 attention to a particular group of libertarians, those born between the late 1930s and the 5 00:00:25.040 --> 00:00:37.320 I called this group the first generation of modern libertarians. 6 00:00:37.320 --> 00:00:42.480 The first libertarians who, if they became interested in ideas when most people do in 7 00:00:42.480 --> 00:00:48.640 their teens, would have found some sort of libertarian movement already in place to help 8 00:00:48.640 --> 00:00:54.640 guide them to the ideas and the people they'd probably be most glad to learn about, a movement 9 00:00:54.640 --> 00:01:00.640 A movement that could help make sure they could find the classics of libertarian thought in cheap, reliable editions. 10 00:01:00.640 --> 00:01:10.640 A movement that could help make sure new libertarian works of importance were published and made available to as wide an audience as possible. 11 00:01:10.640 --> 00:01:19.640 The natural leaders of this first generation of modern libertarians, those with the talent, the charisma, the vitality, the drive, 12 00:01:19.640 --> 00:01:31.640 To move, figuratively speaking, to the front of the group and attract attention to themselves and their accomplishments, these natural leaders began to emerge during the 1970s. 13 00:01:31.640 --> 00:01:38.640 The 1970s and 80s was a heady time in the history of the modern libertarian movement. 14 00:01:38.640 --> 00:01:44.640 The movement had just experienced a massive increase in population, virtually all at once. 15 00:01:44.640 --> 00:01:52.400 Suddenly, there were at least two or three times as many libertarians in the world as there had been only a few years earlier. 16 00:01:52.400 --> 00:01:56.800 Suddenly, libertarians were everywhere, or so it seemed. 17 00:01:56.800 --> 00:02:03.400 Suddenly, mainstream publishers were interested in issuing new hardcover books about libertarianism. 18 00:02:03.400 --> 00:02:09.760 In 1970, from Bob's Merrill came Radical Libertarianism by Jerome Tuccioli. 19 00:02:09.760 --> 00:02:16.540 In 1973 came The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, and For a New Liberty by Murray 20 00:02:16.540 --> 00:02:23.040 Ann Rothbard, and How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Brown. 21 00:02:23.040 --> 00:02:27.400 Suddenly there were dozens of libertarian publications on the market. 22 00:02:27.400 --> 00:02:32.320 There was a joke going around at the time that defined libertarians as people who earned 23 00:02:32.320 --> 00:02:35.880 a living by selling magazine articles to each other. 24 00:02:35.880 --> 00:02:40.620 It's true that most of these publications had a circulation of no more than a few hundred 25 00:02:40.620 --> 00:02:46.800 at best, and they looked decidedly amateurish when placed next to conservative or liberal 26 00:02:46.800 --> 00:02:49.000 publications of that era. 27 00:02:49.000 --> 00:02:54.960 It wasn't until around 1980 that the movement had maybe three or four professionally designed 28 00:02:54.960 --> 00:03:00.040 magazines that reached a readership of ten thousand or more and wouldn't have looked 29 00:03:00.040 --> 00:03:05.080 out of place next to National Review or the New Republic on a newsstand. 30 00:03:05.080 --> 00:03:09.800 But even in the days when they were still typeset on typewriters and bound with a single 31 00:03:09.800 --> 00:03:15.260 staple in the upper left-hand corner of page one, they contained some outstanding writing 32 00:03:15.260 --> 00:03:18.180 and some compelling ideas. 33 00:03:18.180 --> 00:03:22.060 This was before the internet, remember, before email. 34 00:03:22.060 --> 00:03:27.060 There were more libertarians than ever before, or so it seemed, but if you wanted to be in 35 00:03:27.060 --> 00:03:32.600 touch with them, you had to rely on the U.S. mail, whichever branch of the telephone monopoly 36 00:03:32.600 --> 00:03:38.920 was nearest to where you lived, and simple old-fashioned going out and pressing the flesh. 37 00:03:38.920 --> 00:03:43.940 This third option was not equally available everywhere, of course. 38 00:03:43.940 --> 00:03:47.680 Libertarians tended to gravitate towards certain metropolitan areas. 39 00:03:47.680 --> 00:03:53.120 New York was the major center of libertarian social and intellectual activity until sometime 40 00:03:53.120 --> 00:03:58.420 in the early 1970s, when the focus of the movement shifted to Los Angeles. 41 00:03:58.420 --> 00:04:04.060 For a few years in the late 70s and early 80s, you might say the focus shifted again, 42 00:04:04.060 --> 00:04:06.060 this time to San Francisco. 43 00:04:06.060 --> 00:04:11.300 The next shift in the mid-1980s was to Washington D.C. and environs. 44 00:04:11.300 --> 00:04:16.500 Though by now the movement had grown by a few more leaps and bounds and was becoming 45 00:04:16.500 --> 00:04:23.420 polycentric, New York, L.A. and San Francisco retained their status as libertarian centers, 46 00:04:23.420 --> 00:04:28.020 while Washington added itself to the steadily growing list. 47 00:04:28.020 --> 00:04:33.580 Humans who grew up in small towns or in cities that weren't libertarian centers often picked 48 00:04:33.580 --> 00:04:38.580 up and moved to one of the libertarian centers in search of the kind of social life they 49 00:04:38.580 --> 00:04:41.940 wanted but simply couldn't find where they were. 50 00:04:41.940 --> 00:04:47.580 In the libertarian intellectual and social scene in Los Angeles in the early 70s, everybody 51 00:04:47.580 --> 00:04:49.580 was from somewhere else. 52 00:04:49.580 --> 00:04:57.220 In my first year in Los Angeles, 1972 and 1973, three of the most personally important 53 00:04:57.220 --> 00:05:05.720 The people I met were Roy A. Childs, Jr., who had come to L.A. from Buffalo, New York via Washington, D.C. in vicinity, 54 00:05:05.720 --> 00:05:13.720 George H. Smith, who had come to L.A. from Tucson, Arizona, though as an Air Force brat he'd grown up all over, 55 00:05:13.720 --> 00:05:21.720 and Lou Rollins, who was originally from Wyoming, but had at least had the decency to grow up in L.A. and in Virens. 56 00:05:21.720 --> 00:05:28.080 In the libertarian centers there were endless activities, parties, lectures, supper clubs, 57 00:05:28.080 --> 00:05:29.740 meetings of every sort. 58 00:05:29.740 --> 00:05:36.000 In Los Angeles in the early to mid 1970s, you seldom saw an entire week go by without 59 00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:41.920 at least one opportunity to get together with local and visiting libertarians, especially 60 00:05:41.920 --> 00:05:47.640 if you were willing to drive a few miles across town or even into a neighboring county. 61 00:05:47.640 --> 00:05:52.480 This state of affairs continued after the advent of the age of the internet, but the 62 00:05:52.480 --> 00:05:55.560 frequency of the events began to fall off. 63 00:05:55.560 --> 00:06:01.160 A week could now go by without at least one opportunity to get together with local and 64 00:06:01.160 --> 00:06:03.160 visiting libertarians. 65 00:06:03.160 --> 00:06:09.240 Maybe even a few weeks could go by, but seldom as much as an entire month. 66 00:06:09.240 --> 00:06:14.580 The institutions we think of today as the major institutions of the libertarian movement 67 00:06:14.580 --> 00:06:17.280 were founded in the 70s and 80s. 68 00:06:17.280 --> 00:06:24.380 The Cato Institute in San Francisco in 1977, the Reason Foundation in Santa Barbara about 69 00:06:24.380 --> 00:06:32.560 85 or 90 miles north of Los Angeles in 1978, in 1986 or thereabouts the Reason Foundation 70 00:06:32.560 --> 00:06:39.480 moved to Los Angeles, and the Mises Institute in the southern college town of Auburn, Alabama 71 00:06:39.480 --> 00:06:41.640 in 1982. 72 00:06:41.640 --> 00:06:46.640 In 1982 a town like Auburn was significantly isolated. 73 00:06:46.640 --> 00:06:51.500 You didn't encounter very many libertarians in a place like that, much less any of the 74 00:06:51.500 --> 00:06:54.700 intellectual leaders of the libertarian movement. 75 00:06:54.700 --> 00:06:59.700 But the day was not far off when, because of the internet, it no longer mattered where 76 00:06:59.700 --> 00:07:02.800 one was, geographically speaking. 77 00:07:02.800 --> 00:07:08.820 One could be anywhere, if one was connected and one knew how to make use of the internet. 78 00:07:08.820 --> 00:07:11.100 But I get ahead of my story. 79 00:07:11.100 --> 00:07:17.300 What we regard today as the major institutions of the libertarian movement, Cato, Reason, 80 00:07:17.300 --> 00:07:22.300 Mises, were much smaller in those days and much more modestly funded. 81 00:07:22.300 --> 00:07:27.900 Their ability to do good libertarian works was therefore much more limited, as was their 82 00:07:27.900 --> 00:07:34.500 ability to offer opportunities for young libertarians who wanted to become full-time libertarian 83 00:07:34.500 --> 00:07:40.940 and Intellectuals, or otherwise make a career of working to advance the cause of individual 84 00:07:40.940 --> 00:07:41.940 liberty. 85 00:07:41.940 --> 00:07:47.260 Yet, there were those who chose to try to make such careers for themselves even if they 86 00:07:47.260 --> 00:07:51.340 were unable to find institutional support for their efforts. 87 00:07:51.340 --> 00:07:56.860 One such was a young man from western Canada, not all the way west, mind you, not British 88 00:07:56.860 --> 00:08:02.820 Columbia out on the Pacific coast, a bit farther inland than that, in the westernmost of what 89 00:08:02.820 --> 00:08:05.920 What Canadians call the Prairie Provinces. 90 00:08:05.920 --> 00:08:09.160 His name was Samuel Edward Conkin III. 91 00:08:09.160 --> 00:08:15.900 He was born in Saskatchewan 63 years ago this month, on July 8, 1947. 92 00:08:15.900 --> 00:08:21.700 He grew up in Edmonton, in the neighbouring Prairie Province of Alberta, and got his undergraduate 93 00:08:21.700 --> 00:08:28.100 education at the University of Alberta, where he first became involved in political activism, 94 00:08:28.100 --> 00:08:32.120 serving as head of the Young Social Credit League on campus. 95 00:08:32.120 --> 00:08:37.180 The Young Social Credit League was a student group allied with the politics of the Social 96 00:08:37.180 --> 00:08:44.520 Credit Party, a minor Canadian political party founded in Alberta in the mid-1930s and based 97 00:08:44.520 --> 00:08:51.240 on the theories, first published in the 1920s, of the British engineer and economist C.H. 98 00:08:51.240 --> 00:08:52.240 Douglas. 99 00:08:52.240 --> 00:08:57.240 Douglas was what Murray Rothbard used to describe as a money crank. 100 00:08:57.240 --> 00:09:03.240 He believed, Douglas that is, that government could enrich and invigorate the economy by 101 00:09:03.240 --> 00:09:07.160 giving away money to both producers and consumers. 102 00:09:07.160 --> 00:09:16.040 Clearly, in 1967, at the age of 20, Samuel Edward Conkin III had not yet discovered libertarianism. 103 00:09:16.040 --> 00:09:18.920 He would do so in short order, however. 104 00:09:18.920 --> 00:09:24.040 He had already discovered the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein, and when the mass market 105 00:09:24.040 --> 00:09:30.540 paperback edition of Heinlein's 1966 novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, was published 106 00:09:30.540 --> 00:09:37.420 in 1968, Sam picked up a copy as quickly as he could manage it and sat down to read. 107 00:09:37.420 --> 00:09:44.120 This new Heinlein tale, in which colonists on the moon, Luna, stage a libertarian revolution 108 00:09:44.120 --> 00:09:49.820 against the tyranny of politicians on earth, captured Sam's imagination in a way none of 109 00:09:49.820 --> 00:09:52.620 Heinlein's other books ever had. 110 00:09:52.620 --> 00:09:58.640 He was particularly fascinated by the views of the self-described rational anarchist, 111 00:09:58.640 --> 00:10:04.160 Professor Bernardo de la Paz, the intellectual leader of the rebels on Luna. 112 00:10:04.160 --> 00:10:10.560 So when in the summer of 1968 Sam Conkin moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he would start 113 00:10:10.560 --> 00:10:15.860 as a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in the fall, he was 114 00:10:15.860 --> 00:10:22.600 a former advocate of social credit, newly converted to libertarianism by Robert A. Heinlein. 115 00:10:22.600 --> 00:10:39.600 The questions were answered in short order too. His new roommate, another chemistry grad student named Tony Warnock, turned out to be a big fan of everything related to Ayn Rand. 116 00:10:39.600 --> 00:10:59.600 Through Warnock, Sam was introduced not only to the writings of Rand, but also to those of a couple of economists, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, and to those of Robert Lefebvre, the real-life anarchist philosopher on whom Robert A. Heinlein had based Professor Bernardo de la Paz. 117 00:10:59.600 --> 00:11:21.600 Warnock also steered Sam to the Wisconsin Conservative Club, and he found his own way with no trouble at all from there to the University of Wisconsin chapter of YAF, Young Americans for Freedom, the conservative student organization founded in 1960 on William F. Buckley Jr.'s family estate in Connecticut. 118 00:11:21.600 --> 00:11:25.600 Sam joined YAF during the fall term of 1968. 119 00:11:25.600 --> 00:11:35.600 Within a few months, he had been selected as a delegate to the organization's national convention in St. Louis in August 1969. 120 00:11:35.600 --> 00:11:42.600 As all the world knows by now, the young libertarians expelled from that YAF convention, 121 00:11:42.600 --> 00:11:48.600 along with the young libertarians expelled from the SDS national convention a month before in Chicago, 122 00:11:48.600 --> 00:11:56.600 in Chicago, became the nucleus of what Sam later called the Libertarian Population Explosion of 1969. 123 00:11:56.600 --> 00:12:02.600 At that YAF convention, Sam met Rothbard, Carl Hess and Dana Rohrabacher. 124 00:12:02.600 --> 00:12:11.600 Yes, I refer to the GOP congressman from Southern California, who is today indistinguishable from any other conservative Republican, 125 00:12:11.600 --> 00:12:18.000 But who was something else entirely 40 years ago, when he was, as Sam put it once in an interview, 126 00:12:18.000 --> 00:12:25.400 newly radicalized by Robert LeFave, who provided him with small funding to travel the country with his guitar 127 00:12:25.400 --> 00:12:35.000 and his libertarian folk songs from campus to campus, converting YAF chapters into libertarian alliances and SIL chapters. 128 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:41.200 At that YAF convention, Sam Conkin confirmed his new identity as a libertarian. 129 00:12:41.200 --> 00:12:52.200 Back in Madison, he schemed on how to get to New York, where he could build his new relationship with Rothbard and attend Mises' famous seminar at New York University. 130 00:12:52.200 --> 00:12:57.200 He transferred to NYU in the fall term of 1970. 131 00:12:57.200 --> 00:13:06.200 Almost upon his arrival at his new graduate school, he assumed the editorship of the NYU Libertarian Notes, a campus newsletter, 132 00:13:06.200 --> 00:13:08.200 The Theory of Money and Credit 133 00:13:36.200 --> 00:14:02.200 The Free Libertarian Party was polarizing libertarian strategic thought between those who believed political action could be used to achieve a free society, and those who believed political action was a betrayal of libertarian principle. 134 00:14:02.200 --> 00:14:21.760 Sam stepped up. 135 00:14:21.760 --> 00:14:27.320 When he saw the focus of the movement change from New York to LA in the early 70s, he followed 136 00:14:27.320 --> 00:14:28.560 it there. 137 00:14:28.560 --> 00:14:35.480 New Libertarian Notes morphed into New Libertarian Weekly, and finally into New Libertarian, 138 00:14:35.480 --> 00:14:41.160 which was supposed to be a monthly, but actually appeared on a monthly basis only in fits and 139 00:14:41.160 --> 00:14:45.120 starts, and finally fizzled out altogether in the 90s. 140 00:14:45.120 --> 00:14:49.160 By this time, of course, the age of the internet was upon us. 141 00:14:49.160 --> 00:14:54.980 Sam taught himself HTML and launched a couple of websites, along with an email discussion 142 00:14:54.980 --> 00:14:57.660 group called Left Libertarian. 143 00:14:57.660 --> 00:15:04.100 But the 90s proved to be merely the beginning of the long gradual decline of his once startling 144 00:15:04.100 --> 00:15:06.700 energy and productivity. 145 00:15:06.700 --> 00:15:11.300 By the turn of the new century, he had pretty much ceased publishing at all. 146 00:15:11.300 --> 00:15:14.700 By 2004, he was dead. 147 00:15:14.700 --> 00:15:20.820 Looking back, it seems clear that the 70s and 80s were Sam's peak years, his time in 148 00:15:20.820 --> 00:15:21.880 the sun. 149 00:15:21.880 --> 00:15:24.780 He published aggressively during that period. 150 00:15:24.780 --> 00:15:30.780 Not only New Libertarian, but a dozen other newsletters and various pamphlets as well, 151 00:15:30.780 --> 00:15:37.560 including his famous New Libertarian Manifesto, with endorsements from both Rothbard and Lefebvre. 152 00:15:37.560 --> 00:15:40.980 He attracted funding for his various activities. 153 00:15:40.980 --> 00:15:45.860 For a few years, in the late 80s, he found enough funding to open a small suite of offices 154 00:15:45.860 --> 00:15:51.100 in a downtown office building in Long Beach, California, for his own libertarian think 155 00:15:51.100 --> 00:15:53.940 tank, the Agorist Institute. 156 00:15:53.940 --> 00:16:01.340 The name, agorist, was derived from the ancient Greek word agora, meaning open marketplace. 157 00:16:01.340 --> 00:16:07.220 Sam attracted a coterie of admirers and fellow revolutionaries during the 70s and 80s, a 158 00:16:07.220 --> 00:16:13.020 couple of whom, J. Neil Schulman and Victor Komen, made independent marks as award-winning 159 00:16:13.020 --> 00:16:18.220 libertarian science fiction writers during the 80s and 90s. 160 00:16:18.220 --> 00:16:22.900 Sam was one of the great eccentrics of the libertarian 70s and 80s. 161 00:16:22.900 --> 00:16:27.560 You've heard that it's impossible to live in Los Angeles without owning a car, getting 162 00:16:27.560 --> 00:16:31.660 everywhere on public transportation the way many New Yorkers do? 163 00:16:31.660 --> 00:16:35.460 Sam did it in LA for 25 years or more. 164 00:16:35.460 --> 00:16:40.180 You've heard that there's never been a libertarian publication that didn't favor the views of 165 00:16:40.180 --> 00:16:43.100 one faction or another of the movement? 166 00:16:43.100 --> 00:16:47.460 Sam opened his publications to every libertarian point of view. 167 00:16:47.460 --> 00:16:52.540 At the top of his masthead in every issue he proudly printed the statement, 168 00:16:52.540 --> 00:16:56.780 Everyone appearing in this publication disagrees. 169 00:16:56.780 --> 00:16:59.780 Sam had a marked talent for neologism. 170 00:16:59.780 --> 00:17:06.060 You've heard that there are two types of libertarians, anarchists and minarchists, that is, advocates 171 00:17:06.060 --> 00:17:10.300 of very small or minimal government. 172 00:17:10.300 --> 00:17:15.900 Minarchist and minarchy and minarchism were all coined in the 70s by Sam. 173 00:17:15.900 --> 00:17:22.000 You may have heard that back in the 70s libertarians who gave up political activism under the influence 174 00:17:22.000 --> 00:17:28.700 of Harry Brown's book, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, were called Brownouts? 175 00:17:28.700 --> 00:17:30.420 Another conkin coinage. 176 00:17:30.420 --> 00:17:35.440 You may have heard the term coctopus applied to the group of libertarian organizations 177 00:17:35.440 --> 00:17:42.600 funded in the late 70s and early 80s by the Kansas oil billionaire Charles Koch. 178 00:17:42.600 --> 00:17:46.480 Coctopus was yet another of Sam's many coinages. 179 00:17:46.480 --> 00:17:50.580 It wasn't only his coinages that attracted attention, of course. 180 00:17:50.580 --> 00:17:53.020 It was also his ideas. 181 00:17:53.020 --> 00:17:57.960 Younger libertarians today have sometimes heard of Sam Cockin, but don't really have 182 00:17:57.960 --> 00:18:02.420 a clear understanding of who he was or why he was important. 183 00:18:02.420 --> 00:18:07.940 Yet, despite Sam's failure to take proper advantage of the internet and help assure 184 00:18:07.940 --> 00:18:13.680 the survival of his work for at least another generation, I still run into references to 185 00:18:13.680 --> 00:18:17.220 him and his ideas in libertarian publications. 186 00:18:17.220 --> 00:18:22.460 I ran into one just the other day in an article by Walter Block in the newest issue of the 187 00:18:22.460 --> 00:18:24.860 Journal of Libertarian Studies. 188 00:18:24.860 --> 00:18:29.620 Predictably the reference was to the most interesting and probably the most enduring 189 00:18:29.620 --> 00:18:36.620 of Sam's ideas, his concept of counter-economics and the counter-economy. 190 00:18:36.620 --> 00:18:45.500 Nearly every action, Sam wrote in the mid-1980s, is regulated, taxed, prohibited or subsidized. 191 00:18:45.500 --> 00:18:51.740 So everyone is a resistor to the extent that he survives in a society where laws control 192 00:18:51.740 --> 00:18:55.740 everything and give contradictory orders. 193 00:18:55.740 --> 00:19:03.940 All non-coercive human action committed in defiance of the state constitutes the counter-economy. 194 00:19:03.940 --> 00:19:07.440 The counter-economy is therefore pretty vast. 195 00:19:07.440 --> 00:19:13.840 The more controls and taxation a state imposes on its people, Sam wrote, the more they will 196 00:19:13.840 --> 00:19:38.840 According to U.S. government estimates, just the tax-dodging part of the counter-economy is 20 to 40 million of the population. 197 00:19:38.840 --> 00:19:45.600 That's big, but not big enough to cause the collapse of our official economy. 198 00:19:45.600 --> 00:19:52.360 In the Soviet Union, by contrast, Sam noted, communism collapsed in no small part due to 199 00:19:52.360 --> 00:19:54.280 the counter-economy. 200 00:19:54.280 --> 00:20:00.120 Nearly everything was available in the counter-economy, with only shoddy goods and shortages in the 201 00:20:00.120 --> 00:20:02.400 official socialist economy. 202 00:20:02.400 --> 00:20:11.160 The Soviets called counter-economic goods left-hand, and entire manufacturing assembly lines co-existed 203 00:20:11.160 --> 00:20:17.400 with the desultory state-industry ones on the same factory floor. 204 00:20:17.400 --> 00:20:22.400 Counter-economic capitalists sold shares in their companies and vacationed in Black Sea 205 00:20:22.400 --> 00:20:23.940 resorts. 206 00:20:23.940 --> 00:20:28.780 Managers of collective farms who needed a tractor replaced in a hurry looked to the 207 00:20:28.780 --> 00:20:35.780 and the Counter-economy, rather than see their whole cause collapse, awaiting a state tractor delivery. 208 00:20:35.780 --> 00:20:45.780 Nor is this all, for as Sam pointed out, tax evasion, inflation avoidance, smuggling, free production and illegal distribution, 209 00:20:45.780 --> 00:20:49.780 still compose only half the counter-economy. 210 00:20:49.780 --> 00:21:07.780 Labor flows as freely as capital, as hordes of illegal aliens pour across borders from more statist to less statist economic regions, and as these people and others begin providing services that are both unlicensed and unregulated. 211 00:21:07.780 --> 00:21:14.780 Most of these people, Sam argued, are acting in an agorist manner with little understanding of any theory. 212 00:21:14.780 --> 00:21:22.020 The Theory, they are induced by material gain to evade, avoid or defy the state. 213 00:21:22.020 --> 00:21:24.680 Surely they are a hopeful potential? 214 00:21:24.680 --> 00:21:26.260 Sam thought they were. 215 00:21:26.260 --> 00:21:31.580 What we libertarians needed to do, he believed, was educate these people, help them to see 216 00:21:31.580 --> 00:21:36.980 that getting rid of the state was good for business, good for prosperity, convert them 217 00:21:36.980 --> 00:21:41.680 to agorism, then basically let nature take its course. 218 00:21:41.680 --> 00:21:47.280 The path from here to Agora now becomes blindingly obvious, Sam wrote. 219 00:21:47.280 --> 00:21:53.140 As more people reject the state's mystifications, the counter-economy grows both vertically 220 00:21:53.140 --> 00:21:54.620 and horizontally. 221 00:21:54.620 --> 00:22:01.080 Horizontally, it involves more and more people who turn more and more of their activities 222 00:22:01.080 --> 00:22:02.080 toward the counter-economic. 223 00:22:02.080 --> 00:22:10.220 Vertically, it means new structures, businesses and services grow specifically to serve the 224 00:22:10.220 --> 00:22:12.220 of the Counter-Economy. 225 00:22:12.220 --> 00:22:16.220 Among these services designed to serve the counter-economy, 226 00:22:16.220 --> 00:22:19.220 Sam listed arbitrators as an example. 227 00:22:19.220 --> 00:22:23.220 But he also commented that counter-economic entrepreneurs 228 00:22:23.220 --> 00:22:27.220 have an incentive to provide better security devices, 229 00:22:27.220 --> 00:22:31.220 places of concealment, instructions to aid evasion 230 00:22:31.220 --> 00:22:35.220 and to screen potential customers and suppliers 231 00:22:35.220 --> 00:22:38.220 for other counter-economic entrepreneurs. 232 00:22:38.220 --> 00:22:42.620 And thus is the counter-economic protection industry born. 233 00:22:42.620 --> 00:22:49.420 As it grows, it may begin insuring against busts, lowering counter-economic risks further 234 00:22:49.420 --> 00:22:52.860 and accelerating counter-economic growth. 235 00:22:52.860 --> 00:22:59.740 Eventually, of course, after a period of increasingly rapid change of this kind, the underground 236 00:22:59.740 --> 00:23:03.840 will break into and displace the over-ground. 237 00:23:03.840 --> 00:23:09.800 The State will wither away into irrelevance, its taxpayers, soldiers and law enforcement 238 00:23:09.800 --> 00:23:17.040 people having deserted it for the marketplace, and will be left with a free, agorist society. 239 00:23:17.040 --> 00:23:19.840 Or so Sam expected anyhow. 240 00:23:19.840 --> 00:23:25.680 It's good to know that Sam's vision still excites interest, comment, criticism, so long 241 00:23:25.680 --> 00:23:33.000 after his heyday, the 70s and 80s, has faded into a steadily less and less precisely remembered 242 00:23:33.000 --> 00:23:38.720 It would be good to see even more attention being paid to his ideas. 243 00:23:38.720 --> 00:23:44.000 It would be good to see them playing a larger part in the emergence of whatever turns out 244 00:23:44.000 --> 00:23:46.440 to be our future. 245 00:23:46.440 --> 00:23:47.440 This is Jeff Rigenbach. 246 00:24:03.000 --> 00:24:05.000 Thank you for watching!