Market Anarchy: What's the Point?

This is a fairly common point brought up by people- what's the point of being a Market Anarchist? After all, it's not like we can bring down the state overnight. To answer this common point, I'd like to point out some things that becoming a Market Anarchist does give you.


1. Personal understanding and awareness.

First of all, Market Anarchy provides a solid understanding of society and politics. It really cuts through the rhetoric and propaganda that we constantly hear, starts from first premises, and show us what the truth of the power relationships and the moral principles are about a situation. With this understanding, you can become more aware of the morality of your own beliefs and actions, and of what the incentives are. In short, it makes you more aware and more honest.

I'm not going to waste time voting, because voting is a sanction of state coercion. I'm not going to do anything for the state unless I can't get away with it. I'm not going to waste my time thinking about "immigration", or nationalism, or even the supposed intractable debates like gun control or abortion, because I understand the moral principles involved. If the state is just a gang of armed thugs cloaked with legitimacy, there's just no reason for me to take ANY statist issue seriously.


2. Personal growth.

An understanding and awareness of power relations can bring about personal growth as well. This has not happened to me, but some Market Anarchists, when grasping the fact that parenthood is just one giant power relation, can much more easily come to grasps with what has been done to them in their childhood. An individualist view of society can also help to divest oneself of unhealthy relationships, although this would be more of a moral point than a political point per se. But if you accept Market Anarchy, then you are likely to adopt the moral standpoint as well.


3. Building a network and helping to further the cause.

If you want to do more, you can help the cause by explaining to your friends what Market Anarchy is. Some people just won't understand, some people will. I find that it mostly depends on how open they are to break their conditioning- atheists, for example, tend to be much more likely to grasp the moral concepts involved.

One common criticism I get is that we shouldn't complain because our society is okay. Okay compared to what? Iran? Yea, sure. But compared to a Market Anarchy equivalent? That's ridiculous. I could go on and on about all the things that the state does to the economy, people and society, and how it fails miserably at every single "service" it supposedly provides, but just think about this. If the state is only sapping 2% of our economy every year- which is an extremely generous assumption, given that the state controls a huge chunk of our economy and wastes a large proportion of it- then that represents 22% per decade. Without the state, we could be 22% richer at the end of that decade, in real terms, actual things you can buy, not by inflation of their stupid paper money. Indeed, just by inflation you lose more than that every decade off your savings, sometimes up to half of your savings.

It's completely ridiculous to think in that way. People don't say "oh, the mafia is not so great, but they're not as oppressive as those in Italy so we shouldn't try to get rid of them". The mafia does not force you to pay taxes or dictate every single aspect of our lives. The state is the most dangerous force in our society, so why shouldn't we want to get rid of it? We want to get rid of kidnapping, extortion, theft, slavery, and political power, and in all those areas the state is our enemy #1. We have no chance to ever live in a free society unless we promote Market Anarchy. So... why not?