The Free-Market Mechanisms That Deliver Public Goods for Free without the Waste, Fraud, Abuse and Extortion

In his speech: How the Free Market Provides Public Goods for Free without the Waste, Fraud, Abuse and Extortion of Monopoly “Government,” Art of Liberty Foundation founder Etienne de la Boetie2 explores how a free market can efficiently provide the services typically handled by the government, but without the downsides of waste, fraud, abuse, and extortion.

Highlighting the principles of voluntaryism, Etienne explains how spontaneous order, competition, and the invisible hand of the market allow for innovation, cost reduction, and quality improvement in goods and services. He offers examples, from private companies offering security, fire protection, and air traffic control to community-driven efforts like mutual aid societies and grassroots environmental cleanup projects.

Etienne argues that REAL freedom, unencumbered by coercive state systems, leads to economic and social benefits, enabling people to thrive through voluntary cooperation. He concludes by sharing practical tips on supporting local economies, engaging in counter-economics, and preparing for economic uncertainty, all while promoting his upcoming book: Voluntaryism – How the Only “ISM” Fair For Everyone Leads to Harmony, Prosperity and Good Karma for All! – Available for Pre-Order at Voluntaryism-Book.org

Full Transcript & Slides

My name is Etienne De La Boetie2, and I’m the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation.

And here at Liberty on the Rocks – Sedona – The Voluntarism Conference, what we’re really out to kind of explain today is how the free market is able to deliver all of the legitimate services that government does without the waste, fraud, abuse, and extortion.

And so the title of my talk today is how the free market mechanisms deliver public goods for free without the waste, fraud, abuse, and extortion of the state.

Some of these we’ve already touched on briefly, but I’m just going to go down a short list of the basics of free market economics for those who may not be familiar.

The first one is spontaneous order, which we’ve already talked about, but it’s really the idea that the world is a self-organizing place that produces spontaneous order. That order emerges out of disorder, and things come together on their own without the need for central hierarchical control, without the need for a ministry of toothbrushes or a ministry of doing things that the government shouldn’t be doing at all.

Another of these concepts in economics is called “The Invisible Hand”. The invisible hand, there’s a short quote from Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own self-interest”.

One of the nice things about voluntaryism, or I like to call it REAL freedom. By the way, when I sign books and I write REAL freedom, I use all capital letters, I bold it, I italicize it, and I underline it just to denote that I’m not talking about the fake freedom that is offered in the government school system but REAL freedom, one of the really nice things, one of the magical things, one of the kind of the good news messages that REAL freedom “produces the goods”.

REAL freedom enables people to come together peacefully and collaborate over great distances in different countries with different goals. Just because they want to improve their own personal lot in life, they want to have better things for their family and their kids, they are going to provide services to humanity.

And that is the dynamic that makes millions of New Yorkers wake up to fresh bagels, or makes milk available in different places that don’t have dairy herds or any of the other luxuries and necessities of life.

They’re not being provided because the brewer, the butcher, or the baker loves you. They just love themselves, and they serve humanity by providing these things, and they get compensated through market mechanisms.

That doesn’t mean that they get to fleece you, because there’s another concept in economics called “Market Competition” where there are other people that have the freedom to offer the same services and the same products in the marketplace, and this dynamic of market competition will balance, for the most part, will balance this desire to charge the maximum amount you can with the fact that somebody can get it elsewhere for less.

That mechanism keeps the price of gas roughly the market rate across different gas stations or the price of French fries roughly the same across other restaurants and fast food places.

Now, there’s something called the “Price Mechanism”. The price mechanism in economics is the idea that setting prices in the marketplace provides information to other market participants so that they can adjust their own pricing accordingly and that society can value different production inputs and maximize where those productive inputs need to go based on this price mechanism.

Now, one example that comes up a lot is when plywood goes stratospheric in Florida right before the hurricane, everybody gets mad and claim: “they’re price gouging! They’re ripping off the people that need plywood!” But no, what’s happening is the market is sending a price signal to the rest of the states around Florida that: Florida needs plywood! And it needs it quick. And there’s money to be made to get it there!

And the people that get the plywood are grateful to have the plywood versus those that didn’t. And that price mechanism sets off a chain reaction that doesn’t require anybody in Washington, D.C., to lift a finger. The market is doing it by itself. And plywood is being rushed to Florida to help save businesses that would otherwise be destroyed.

Capital Formation is the idea that entrepreneurs that understand their market and understand their business and understand their little part in the economic food chain are really the best people to be able to invest their capital in understanding that particular business or that particular market segment. Those people who have the expertise are the ones who should invest in green technologies, not bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.

Another one that’s one of my favorites is called the Discipline of Constant Dealings. The Discipline of Constant Dealings is the idea that the merchant in the marketplace even though he could cheat, even though the dairy farmer could take a hose and put it into his dairy tank and be making more milk, or the gas station owner could calibrate his pump. He could be ripping you off and only giving you maybe 0.85 part of a gallon instead of the full gallon of gas. But the discipline of constant dealings means that these merchants, for the most part, there are exceptions, of course. Unfortunately, the lack of morality in the government school produces people willing to lie, cheat and steal and do things that I don’t think that to this degree, I don’t think you’d have if it wasn’t for this.

But for the most part, no merchant will risk their profitable business by ripping off the customer, getting caught in the marketplace, and having that knowledge go through the rest of society that this guy is cheating.

He’s not giving me the full gallon of gas. He’s not giving me the full gallon of milk. And so that’s known as the discipline of constant dealings.

Then, there are Innovations and Productivity Improvements that reduce the cost of the luxuries and the necessities of life. And this is one of the biggest things that most people don’t understand.

One of my running jokes is I’ll ask people, “Have y’all seen the new $50 bill?” And people go, “No, I didn’t know there’s a new $50 bill.” And I’ll take out a $100.” Then everybody laughs.

Why are we losing the purchasing power of our money? It’s almost like somebody’s stealing the value out of our money, isn’t it? That is a crooked monetary system. It’s known as fractional reserve banking. The banks are allowed to create money out of thin air even though it’s inflationary, even though it’s stealing the value out of everybody else’s money, even though it’s good for the banks and bad for the rest of society when absent that monetary system.

Innovations and productivity improvements should reduce the cost of the goods and the services that you buy because innovation and productivity improvements are reducing the cost of either manufacturing goods or distributing goods.

The company Smart Green Shipping recently partnered with the University of Southampton to test out its 20-meter-tall (65.6-foot-tall) FastRig wing-sail

One of my favorite examples is global shipping. A company makes a giant sail that they put on ocean-going ships. It’s controlled by a computer, and it catches the wind and turns an oil tanker or a cargo ship essentially into a sail-assisted vessel.

Pyxis Ocean sailing through the English Channel from Spain to Amsterdam, March 2024 using 123 foot “Wind Wings” to reduce fuel consumption on average 3.3 tons of fuel each day.

Somebody thought it up, and now you can install it on a ship that didn’t used to have a sail, to reduce the amount of fuel required on a transatlantic voyage. And then shippers are going to get it there cheaper. So they’re going to offer a discount in the market. And that discount in the market is ultimately going to make it down to the individual consumer and the cost of goods and services that you buy.

And that’s the dynamic that we should be having in society. Everything should be getting cheaper, but instead everything is getting more expensive because we’re being robbed by the banks at the top of the food chain as they steal the value out of the money that we earn and save.

Now, at the same time that the free market and REAL freedom—remember, REAL freedom—REAL is capitalized, it’s bolded, it’s italicized, and it’s underlined. At the same time that it should be making us wealthier and wealthier, there are a number of other competing dynamics in economics that are making us poorer.

William Henry Harrison had a quote: “I believe that all measures of the government are dictated to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

Maybe it’s economic warfare that’s being waged against us. Maybe the lockdowns behind the COVID weren’t for our own good. Maybe they were waging a kind of economic warfare against independent producers and independent businesses, family restaurants, family hotels, and family coffee shops because they didn’t want people to have independent wealth. They don’t want you to be self-sufficient.

It’s easier to game the system because they can invest, they can take this fractional reserve capital, and they can invest in chain restaurants, and chain coffee shops, and chain hotels from behind the scenes, while the government puts all their competition out of business, and they had unlimited banker capital to be able to weather the storm, where the independents and the mom-and-pops, they didn’t have it.

And so, some of these other things that make everybody poor:

Government-Enforced Monopolies. The post office is an excellent example. When I’ve done mailings in the past, in the place where the postage stamp is, I’ll actually go back and I’ll put $0.10 with a line struck through it, $0.15 with a line struck through it, $0.22, $0.24, and then whatever the current postage is, because the cost of postage is going up, it’s outseeding inflation. It’s outstripping inflation. And guess what? If others could deliver the mail, they would—if there wasn’t a government gun to their head saying, “You can’t deliver the mail.”

There should be a poster right here, okay, with the Art of Liberty Foundation logo on it. We unfortunately sent it through the Postal Service.

Their next day air thing, I’m dead serious, I swear to you, I swear to you, it was supposed, instead, like my assistant didn’t understand that if it absolutely positively has to get there overnight, you don’t get it to the U.S. Postal Service, but we paid for it to be next day aired here yesterday, and it’s not here, and that’s why there’s nothing there.

That monopoly dynamic makes everybody poor, and the government inserts monopolies all over society.

While other railroads around the world are beginning to deploy trains that travel FASTER than planes, “government” – owned Amtrak loses so much money that in many years it would be cheaper to close it down and buy every single passenger an economy-class plane ticket!

Amtrak is another example of a government monopoly. The FAA, which I’ll get to in a minute, is another example of a government monopoly. All of these are making everybody poorer than they should be.

Economic Misallocation is the idea that when the government invests, whether the government is investing in green technologies or the government is investing in subsidizing certain companies at the expense of others, that money would be better allocated by individual entrepreneurs in the marketplace who understand their businesses so that they can reduce the cost of the luxuries and necessities of life.

And every time the government invests a dollar, it’s stealing value from an entrepreneur who would have spent it better to produce something of value that society wants.

Warfare and weapon systems are probably the best-known example of this. You know, every time a cruise missile rocks an empty valley in Afghanistan or Iraq or Ukraine, somebody just made a quarter of a million dollars, quarter of a million dollars, quarter of a million dollars, quarter of a million dollars. And literally, the value and the wealth of society are being wasted and destroyed through trillions of dollars of unnecessary wars waged on lies and manufactured intelligence.

And now we know that’s true. We know that there weren’t destroyers attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. Even the government admits that a lot of these wars were based on lies.

Subsidies – Every time that the government takes money from everyone and invests it in a subsidy or subsidizes—whether it’s an agricultural subsidy, whether it’s an ethanol subsidy, whether it’s you name it—they’re taking money and they’re subsidizing typically inefficient producers in the marketplace at the expense of the efficient producers in the marketplace. And you’re going to end up paying higher costs in addition to the taxes you’re paying.

Price and Capital Controls – When the government says, you know, when they say, “Oh, we need to have rent control in New York City to keep apartments inexpensive for the people that want them,” the people that want them cheer and go, “Oh, that’s great,” even though that’s going to destroy the incentive for entrepreneurs that provide housing, low-income housing, and other kinds of housing, to invest in those properties or to build new properties. That’s stealing value from the owners of the properties, and it’s creating unintended consequences that are bad for the average consumer. Javier Milei in Argentina just removed rent control in a big segment of society, and they’ve seen prices drop across the board. Not in every single case, but essentially across the board, removing these price controls leads to better outcomes.

Central Planning – Government is famous for central planning. You’re going to see James Corbett take that apart in his presentation: An Announcement from the Ministry of Toothbrushes so that I won’t talk too much about that now.

Inflationary Monopoly Money – we’ve already talked about. The fact that the money is losing value destroys the ability of society to save and have investments for new businesses, for your kids to be able to take a year or two off college and pursue whatever they want to pursue.

Tariffs and Trade Barriers – Tariffs, government says, “Oh, well, we’re not going to tax you for that. We’re just going to put a tariff on goods coming from across the seas,” as if you’re not going to pay that in higher prices for the goods that you want to buy from across the seas. It’s absolutely ridiculous. They’re taking the money, spending it how they want in Washington, DC, and claiming to offer you a benefit. And they’re benefiting, in many cases, inefficient producers at the expense of more efficient producers. Import-export quotas, bailouts, and subsidies for failing businesses, these are just a few.

We mentioned spontaneous order. Voluntaryism, not only does it work and deliver the goods, but it’s around you all the time. It’s already working. You’re already seeing it. You’re already seeing it in the marketplace.

I’m using this exploded cell phone, this picture of this exploded cell phone here to make the point that a cell phone isn’t really just made by one company. It’s made by hundreds, if not thousands of different companies around the world doing everything from mining materials in Africa and Australia and other countries for the raw goods and the components, the lithium for the batteries, the glass for the screen, the software that powers the device. There might be thousands of companies involved in creating individual applications. The people that make the wireless transceivers, the people that make the plastic.

There’s no central planning involved in this. These are all people who just want to have a better life for themselves and their family. They’re innovating in their own individual niche, and they all come together completely spontaneously. There’s no violence involved. There are no threats. There’s nothing of that nature.

And my other favorite example of this is the grocery store. The grocery store is coordinating the activities of millions and millions and millions of people around the world that have no top-down centralized planning at all to ensure that you get avocados in January and strawberries in February in a complex global supply chain that also includes, you know, retailing, merchandising, advertising, making the products look attractive and the packaging look good. And so it really, it really is all around us today. And there’s no reason in the world that these things can’t apply to the goods and the services that government provides to make them better, faster, and cheaper, just like they do for the grocery store, just like they do for cell phones, just like they do for automobiles, just like they do for Hollywood films, just like they do for bookstores, airlines, you name it.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Now, I want to give you some examples of grassroots spontaneous order, where it’s routinely producing what we would commonly think of as public goods. Now, I don’t have it on this slide, but I’m going to tell you. A couple of years ago, I was in a Tough Mudder race with my son there.

And one of the guys, we had a team of a group of friends.

And one of the guys on the team was a venture capitalist that built bridges. And he told me like, we’re talking about it and everything. And he was telling us the background of how they work. Okay. They go out and they find a place where you’ve got to drive, where there’s a whole bunch of traffic and a whole bunch of people that would have to drive an hour or two hours out of their way to get from point A to point B. And they invest their own money, and they build a bridge, and they figure out, would the customer pay $5, $10, whatever it is, to save themselves an hour to two hours of time in the hassle of getting from point

The Wayne Six Toll Bridge is a privately owned suspension bridge over the Ohio River on the Golding Street Extension between Newell, West Virginia and East Liverpool, Ohio, United States. It carries two lanes of roadway and a pedestrian path along the west side. The toll is $1 for vehicles and $0.05 for pedestrians.

A lot of people believe bridges wouldn’t get built if the government wasn’t doing it. Oh, yes, they would! And not only will they get built, but there’s a profit motive that encourages the venture capitalists that build bridges to go out and find these places before the other venture capitalists build bridges, find them, and they go do it first. And so that’s already going on, and it’s being done for you, for free.

The venture capitalist doesn’t care about you, he just wants to make money, but you get to save an hour, two hours of your life in exchange for $5.

That in a world where our money wasn’t being stolen, the value of our money would be like, $5, $10, whatever it is. And so that’s going on.

Underwriters Laboratories certifies electronic equipment for safety for insurance companies. That’s not a government operation.

The Ocean Clean Up Project’s Interceptor is stationed at the mouth of polluting rivers to ensure that plastic never makes it into the ocean in the first place.

The Ocean Cleanup Project is removing plastic from the rivers and the oceans.

The Non-GMO Project is certifying non-GMO ingredients where the government wouldn’t. So we had a market failure where there’s already an FDA that’s already supposed to be protecting you from things like GMO, but through something called regulatory capture, which is the well-understood economic idea that the agencies in Washington, D.C. are captured by the companies they regulate, and there’s a revolving door of people going from the GMO industry, from Monsanto.

Michael Taylor is the textbook example, where there’s a guy going from Monsanto in and out of the FDA every couple of years, sometimes he’s working for Monsanto, sometimes he’s working for the FDA. And so we had a quote-unquote “market failure” (Really “government failure”).

And then the market came in and solved the problem and now I don’t buy grains if it doesn’t say the Non-GMO Project! The government supposedly is supposed to be protecting us from that. But instead, we had to have to have a private company step forward.

Consumer Reports tests and reviews just about everything. And I’m going to get into the North Maine woods here in a second. But a lot of people don’t know this.

A Rural Metro Fire Department

There’s already private firefighters. There’s a company called Rural Metro Fire that provides private fire protection, EMS, rescue, and medical vehicle accidents, even wildlife fire protection in rural areas all across the country is provided by a private company. It doesn’t have to be the government. It’s already being done.

Detroit Threat Management is Providing Police Services in Detroit

There’s a company in Detroit called Detroit Threat Management that provides cost-effective armed protective services in Detroit where the monopoly police are notoriously inefficient and corrupt. So the government is doing such a poor job, not just in Detroit.

Right now, I’m a little nomadic. I’m living in Memphis, Tennessee right now. And I promise you, in every single business, there is private security in every single parking lot, in every single shopping center, in almost every single business. The police department is so inefficient and corrupt that the government has to buy additional security, in addition to what you’re being taxed for—the security that you don’t want. Even though you’re being taxed and robbed for the security that’s not doing such a good job, you’ve got to buy additional security.

Why don’t we just all buy the security ourselves and get them like right out of the thing because we’re having to do it anyway? Now, Nav Canada, I’m going to talk about in a bit.

Kiva provides crowdsourced loans to entrepreneurs, the same as the Small Business Administration. You can loan as little as $25 to an entrepreneur, when they pay you back you can loan again!

Nav Canada…

Well, surely we’ve got to have the FAA, or planes would just be dropping out of the sky, and they’d be running into each other. Canada privatized air traffic control in 1996 through a sale to a privately owned NAV Canada. They have 1,900 air traffic controllers, 650 flight service specialists, 700 technologists, software developers, whatever. They’re doing 12 million aircraft movements a year. They’ve got 40,000 customers, pilots, private plane owners, things like that. They’re covering 18 million square kilometers. They’ve got 42 control towers and seven area control sites.

We don’t need the government to do anything… even the most complicated, wide-scale things. It’s the second-largest air navigation provider in the world by traffic volume.

This is one of my favorites. Well, surely if we didn’t have national parks and state parks, then the developers would just… we would just have everything paved, and it would just be garbage and wasted.

There’s a place in Canada called the North Maine Woods. It’s 3.5 million acres of privately protected forest in Maine. It is twice the size of Massachusetts. It is made up of conservation areas where people have donated money to have areas privately protected. It’s mostly the timber companies, there are private landowners, and they’ve put the stewardship of the land into a nonprofit called the North Maine Woods. It’s providing all of the amenities you would expect from a national park or a state park. You can go hiking, you can go camping, you can go four-wheeling, snowmobiling, hunting. It’s got all that at comparable prices.

It’s not that volutaryism is some kind of pie-in-the-sky idea. All of this is being done today. Most people just never know it because, as I mentioned in the opening, they don’t want you to know about it. Google and Facebook wouldn’t sell us advertising for this conference because they don’t want you to know that this is going on.

Mutual Aid Societies – This is really, really fascinating. Mutual aid societies. In this country, before the government got itself into the cash welfare business—really kind of in the 20s and 30s—there were dozens of individual mutual aid societies that provided many of the exact same benefits as government welfare: unemployment insurance, disability insurance, health insurance.

There was a thing called “lodge practice” that has been stamped out by the AMA. The AMA literally did away with lodge practice because it was impacting the amount of money that doctors could make.

And so they didn’t like that at all.

So they did away with what was known as lodge practice. But these mutual aid societies would all pool their resources, they would hire their own doctors, and they would split the cost of the doctor across everybody in the mutual aid society.

And you would go see the Mutual Aid Society doctor and he would be on call for you. Back then, they used to have house calls, and the doctor would come to you, and it was a better quality of medical care because the doctor’s interest was aligned with your interest as a member of the Mutual Aid Society. The doctor was a member of the Mutual Aid Society. And that’s not what we have right now with government run healthcare.

And get this, you ready for this? The mutual aid societies competed with each other. They competed with each other to who would provide better benefits for their members because they wanted you part of the Elks. They didn’t want you in the Rotary Club’s Mutual Aid Society. They wanted you to be part of the Elks. And so they’re going to compete on who would offer better benefits.

Now, back to the Sedona example.

And so to get people here, we advertised in the Red Rock News. I subscribed to their email newsletter to ensure the ads were going out as we expected. And I get a story that Sedona had just opened up eight pickleball courts at a cost of $1.6 million. And I couldn’t believe it.

So, I didn’t cherry-pick this. I didn’t go out and find the cheapest pickleball court. I just called the only guy I know who has a privately run pickleball court. And it’s a place in, in Memphis, Tennessee, in a kind of an affluent neighborhood.

It’s called Willow Grove Farm Pickleball Paradise.

So I call and ask, “Hey, what did you pay to create Pickleball Paradise?” And it is a paradise. It is beautiful. It’s nestled in the woods. They have six outdoor courts. They’re building five climate-controlled indoor courts. He has horses and mules that will just come up to you at the fence and let you pet them. He has dozens of varieties of exotic chickens that roam the ground that look absolutely like a paradise.

The cost of constructing his six outdoor courts, including the lighting, the fence, and two bathrooms, was less than $100,000. He is currently building five more indoor courts, four full-size courts and one little mini “singles court.” I don’t play a lot of pickleball, but evidently, there’s a smaller court called a single court. He will pay $325,000 to $350,000 for five more indoor courts.

He charges $5 to play all day long. Okay. You can come and go all day for five bucks. If you buy a monthly or yearly plan, it gets even cheaper than that. He’ll let you play for free if you can’t afford it. Chilled bottled water is just a dollar.

Okay. So where’s this $1.6 million going? I emailed the head of Sedona Parks and Rec two days ago. And I left a message saying: “Hey, I’m an investigative journalist. I’m trying to figure out where this $1.6 million went.”

He has not gotten back to me.

[Etienne Note: The head of Parks & Rec did finally get back to me, and I requested and received copies of the bids and budget, and it is filled with outrageous expenditures like $2500 to remove a post AND $800 to test the lights. $102,000 was spent on the demolition of an existing ball field (Which was ridiculous as well), so the final cost for the courts was only $1.5 Millionish. I actually interviewed the city employees involved with the project. They were embarrassingly clueless about the immorality of robbing average people to overspend/waste a million dollars on eight Pickleball courts… Article on the investigation coming soon!]

I mentioned that we’re having a conference today, and he has not gotten back to me, but I did some math.

The average pickleball paddle is eight ounces. If you had four paddles for each court, all made out of solid gold that would only be $710,000.

So, the guy in Memphis built more courts. Eleven courts versus eight, better courts, five indoor courts for less than $500,000.

Where is all of this money going in Sedona?

The other point that I want to make about this is that the guy who built these courts in Memphis, Tennessee, is providing the exact same service that the government is providing.

He’s providing the community pickleball courts, but he’s doing it without a gun. He’s doing it without stealing and robbing and extortion and coercion, and he’s achieving a better result that is cooler, way cooler.

Okay, then, what the city of Sedona is providing, I assure you, is not too different from what we can create ourselves. And, you know, I wanted to just have some solutions—just like I like throwing in solutions and everything.

What I like to do is find others and everybody that came from afar, I’m so glad that you’re here. I know that a lot of people don’t realize there are so many other people, amazingly cool, amazingly beautiful people that believe the exact same thing, that don’t want to use extortion, aren’t advocating for the use of extortion or violence on their neighbor through the political process, don’t want to vote to rob them, don’t want to participate in rigged elections. There are many, many others. Find them, get organized. There’s power in numbers, and you become part of the safety net.

This is a picture of the Porcupine Freedom Festival in New Hampshire, one of the largest and oldest freedom gatherings.

There’s a video that I don’t have time to play, but these are two tax collectors that showed up a couple of years ago at the Free State Project’s Porcupine Freedom Festival and tried to collect the meals tax (theft) at the Festival. They were mocked. They were made fun of. They were driven off. And the taxman has never been back to the Porcupine Freedom Festival. And that is really the power of numbers. And so that’s why you got to get organized.

I recommend, like, I’m worried about government money. So, I always encourage people to get prepared for a dollar devaluation or collapse. My favorite thing to do is just pay in cash. It saves the local merchant 1.5% to 2.5%. It starves the bank for 1.5% to 2.5%. It allows independent mom-and-pop businesses to pocket the cash versus getting robbed by the government in taxation. And then you and the merchant have more cash on hand in the event of a bank holiday.

I encourage diversification into non-dollar-denominated assets like goldbacks, silver, and crypto. I was watching last night, and people were doing transactions in crypto for a variety of goods and services. And somebody was offering silver as well. And so it’s happening all around you.

Engage in counter-economics. Regarding counter-economics, maybe Derek Brose is going to talk about this a little bit. But anything that you do that shifts something done in the state’s purview into the private is good for freedom and bad for the tyranny of the state. Private market associations, there are all kinds of different things that allow you to do that.

Don’t pay taxes. Work off the books. Shop at the farmer’s market and pay cash. Shop local versus Amazon and the chain stores. Growing your own food is like printing your own money. Use credit unions versus the market banks.

The one thing I’ll say is I’ve got all of this coming out in a book that should be released in early November. We’re doing an Indiegogo campaign for that book right now. We’re raising $25,000 to get a low-cost initial print run and a marketing campaign behind the book, and so far in a couple of days, we’ve raised $1,471 $2726 from 29 62 backers, or 5% 10% of our goal.

So, if you wanted to participate in that and you’d like to pre-order a copy of that book, it’s at voluntaryism-book.com. We’ve got some great perks for people that can help us get this book into the marketplace.

And with that, I will leave you. As I mentioned, I am the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation. We’re a startup public policy organization. We’re looking at problems and trying to solve socioeconomic issues from a principled, voluntarist standpoint. We’re trying to be a voluntarist think tank and bring the message of many of these speakers, amplify it, and get it out to all corners of the world.

That is the end of my talk, and I thank you for your kind attention.

About the Speaker

Etienne de la Boetie2 is the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation, a startup public policy foundation exposing the illegitimacy and criminality of “government” from a principled voluntaryist perspective. He is the author of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! – How Inter-Generational Organized Crime Runs the “Government,” Media and Academia – available at Government-Scam.com and Voluntaryism – How the Only “ISM” Fair for Everyone Leads to Harmony, Prosperity and Good Karma for All – available at Voluntaryism-Book.org.

He organizes the Liberty on the Rocks – International Voluntaryism Conference each fall in Sedona that brings together voluntaryists from around the world at Sedona.ArtOfLiberty.org. He publishes the Daily News from the Art of Liberty Foundation at DailyNewsFromAoLF.Substack.com and Five Meme Friday, a weekly survey of the best of the alternative media at ArtOfLiberty.org/Subscribe and all his original writings and research can be found at ArtOfLiberty.Substack.com and ArtOfLiberty.org

About Liberty on the Rocks Conference & The Art of Liberty Foundation

Is the biggest secret in American/ international politics that “government” is illegitimate, immoral and completely unnecessary? Voluntaryism, REAL Freedom, is the only moral political philosophy on the market. Every other political “ISM” including socialism, communism and constitutional republicanism has a ruling class that has rights that you don’t have, an illogical exception from morality, and “voting” is so easily rigged by monopoly media, moneyed interests, and the organized crime “government” itself counting the votes with unauditable black box voting machines and mail in ballots that it is, frankly, a joke to think your vote maters or will even be counted

The Art of Liberty Foundation, a start up public policy organization exposing the illegitimacy and criminality of “government” from a principled voluntaryist perspective, is also educating the public on the 2nd biggest secret: We don’t really need “Government”! In a Voluntaryist world of REAL freedom, all the legitimate, non-redistributive services provided by monopoly “government” would be better provided by the free market, mutual aid societies, armed protective service companies, arbitration providers, insurance companies, non-profits and genuine charities. The world would be much more harmonious and prosperous under REAL freedom! This year’s Liberty on the Rocks conference brought together some of the most respected economists, legal experts, political philosophers and academics to explain spontaneous order and how the free market would better provide everything from roads to military defense to air traffic control without the waste, fraud, abuse and extortion of monopoly “government.”

If You Like Liberty on the Rocks, You are Going To LOVE: Voluntaryism – The Book!

Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the Government-Scam.com/Store.

Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s book “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.

Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” + Liberator flash drive + Larken Rose’s The Most Dangerous Superstition + Art of Liberty Foundation Stickers delivered anywhere in the world. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.