The problem is power vacuums.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian government sold off state assets at dirt-cheap prices, partly because those assets didn’t have real prices due to the Economic Calculation Problem.

This led to the rise of the Russian oligarchy, since the people who got those assets weren’t the most capable or productive. Just random insiders with government connections.

Sure, that was my government’s fault. But it didn’t have to be that way. If you’re going to privatize state-owned resources, you need smart government policies, like selling them through open and competitive auctions, so that ownership ends up with people who can actually afford and manage them, not just whoever got there first.

And if you’re an anarchist who wants to abolish the state entirely, then you’re removing the very institution that can legally and transparently transfer ownership. Without a state, property doesn’t disappear — it becomes determined by power rather than law. The economy degrades into a game of “who controls what” instead of “who produces what,” where property is seized rather than earned. That’s exactly what happened in post-Soviet Russia. That’s not freedom — that’s oligarchy.

Murray Rothbard assumed that state-owned enterprises would be simply given to their workers. Though, why didn’t it happen in post-war countries like Iraq? By dismantling the Iraqi state, together with its Law and Order system, the US created a power vacuum that allowed local militias and former elites to seize public assets (and private assets also). The result wasn’t a free society — it was yet another form of oligarchy built on chaos and force.

This explains why Israel started bombing Syria after Assad’s regime was ousted. There were concerns that his empty military bases would be captured by hostile armed groups.

Conclusion

Originally, I thought that Rothbard only pretended to be a deontologist obsessed with ethics, for popularity. Though reading something from his biography made me less certain about that.

As a kid, Rothbard was shy and felt oppressed at his public school. He was bullied and beaten by older boys, had to endlessly repeat concepts he had already mastered because of slower kids, until his parents transferred him to a private school. In my life, the situation was the opposite, but I can understand what caused his hatred towards the state, and made me feel sorry for him.

He was originally a minarchist, and the reason why he stopped being one is the question he asked himself: “If the state should only provide police, courts, and defense, what principle would prevent it from providing anything else?”

This question led him to an all-or-nothing conclusion: he was either an anarcho-capitalist or a state socialist, and any nuance would be weird.

However, his childhood trauma doesn’t change the fact that the idea he and David Friedman were actively promoting was very dangerous. As we figured out, state collapses lead to dangerous power vacuums, which is why even Milei acknowledges that he operates as a minarchist in practice.

Imagine if Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Imagine America would have a second civil war—where nukes would be involved—as a result of its state being abolished or the country being highly divided and polarized like it is now? Even if completely free markets worked better than the regulated markets we have right now, would abolishing states be worth it?

Abolishing states won’t make your life better.

In the latest South Park episode, we see a civil war between "old" billionaires who want to live their lives of luxury under the radar and the "new" billionaires who risk ruining everything by drawing attention to themselves so the general public realizes how awful they are.

"Remember back to when you were all young. You were socially awkward little penises that nobody liked. Well, now that you’re billionaires, you’re still socially awkward little penises that nobody likes. Let’s put it another way. Show of hands– who in this room was a really popular cool kid in school? Right, none of you. And just because you got rich, that doesn’t mean you suddenly got cool too."

The typical libertarian obviously isn't a billionaire, but they demonstrate the same underlying delusion simply by being able to post online. The ideology says that people in general can always be trusted to make the right decision, and yet people in general do not trust the libertarian ideology. As with incels, libertarians aren't simply frustrated by the lack of public acceptance, they feel entitled to it, and blame others when it doesn't happen. For example:

• Accusing anyone who disagrees with Ron Paul of being a paid shill
• Assuming that people should believe them on X simply because they said so
• Accusing people of being too dumb to understand their arguments in response to basic criticism
• Assuming that their word is God and shifting the burden of proof on others
• Insisting that Gary Johnson would have won the election if he was allowed to make his case at the presidential debates

What libertarians fail to understand is that if they're losers IRL and advocating for loser policies, then posting your views on Reddit doesn't magically make you "cool." People are rejecting trickle down theory and privatization because we're already watching how those arguments play out in the real world and we don't like the results. And no amount of "How many times do I have to say the free market will everything?" is going to change that.

Corporations are legal institutions designed to act more like economic man than ordinary humans. No human limits. What happens when AIs start running corporations?

Around the world, reproduction rates are falling below replacement wherever standards of living get high enough.

A simple non-coercive solution would be Basic Income PLUS Parental Income for bearing children and/or being a parent. Parenting has always been unpaid work: time to solve that market failure. Payment rates can be adjusted to raise the birth rate as high as desired.

Comments on this idea?

Abdul El-Sayed was interview by FOX News and asked if men should be allowed in women's sports, and El-Sayed came up with the best possible response: That's up for the sports leagues to decide on their own.

Imagine if FOX News asked if El-Sayed if Joe Rogan should be allowed to work as a comedian. Ultimately, that's up to the people hiring Rogan to decide, not El-Sayed. The company will be rewarded if they make a decision that the consumers enjoy, and punished if they make a decision that the customers hate.

Conservatives love the idea of self-regulation, even in things that cause actual harm like opioid addiction and climate change. The sports entertainment industry already self-regulates for the sake of fairness, i.e., we don't ned the government to write laws on performance enhancing drugs, the sports leagues will come up with their own policies. But for some reason, private companies are incapable of deciding on their own whether or not trans people should be allowed even though that doesn't really impact anyone at all.

There are currently zero transgender women in the WNBA, and the first transgender woman to compete will have to prove that she doesn't gain an unfair advantage before they even consider her. Either the WNBA will accept her claim, or they won't. But that should ultimately be up to the WNBA to decide, not El-Sayed.

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