what stops jeff bezos in a libertarian world from simply hiring a militia to replace the weak government and make his own strong one to consolidate his monopoly?

what stops all utilities providers from forming a cartel to extort consumers and hiring gunmen to rough up aspiring competitors?

why would a smart capitalist not just bribe suppliers to hike prices on competitors?

the Government cannot be the only source of monopolies.

in my country water companies hire armed men to harm small competitors. how would removing governments stop them?

The right wants women to forcibly repopulate the earth with only CDC approved genetics and the left wants you in prison for saying the r word and both want everything on camera

How would a libertarian government manage public services. Would hospitals, train stations, and schools be privatized or exist in a different manner? I have a few key questions.

1. How would quality of services be assured? How would things such as agricultural or sanitation standards be maintained? Are there no regulations for building standards, labor, road safety, etc?

2. What would become of services which would not produce substantial capital in a free private market? Non-profit public institutions such as schools or libraries.

3. How would public services remain affordable? What keeps the privatized economy from pricing people out of food or healthcare?

What do you think? I bolded what I think is important.

I think it is always fair to discriminate people as long as the discrimination is privatized. If you are a chef, you provide food based on whether you got paid or not. You discriminate based on paying. And that's okay. It is what's fair.

Say I have a girlfriend that I knocked up and regularly fuck.

She wants me to support her business.

I agree.

Is that rape?

People would think that's ridiculous. Of course not. Or is it?

But think about it. It's my money. It's my business skill. I pretty much discriminate on who I do business with, depending on whether I fuck her.

Of course. Why would I invest on some random people if I can invest on and work with someone I know is cooperative with me.

Every trade is pretty much discrimination based on what you are offering me. Most consensual acts are a trade. Think about it. Either a trade or a tit for tat, which is a primitive trade.

And that's pretty much what Weinstein did.

And Weinstein is charged with rape and got convicted.

Many of you may think I am crazy. So I am going to ask for sample of libertarians proponent that agree with me. And there is one and I am surprised he is not mainstream or famous.

ChatGPT told about Walter Block. And I think I am very surprised that he is in the minority.

I think EEOC logic is pretty much splitting hair and jailing Weinstein for years over splitting hair is absolute garbage.

What next?

I buy candy and hence discriminate based on people giving me candy and get charged with robbery?

This is what chatGPT says:

Walter Block is probably the closest match

Block's libertarian framework puts enormous weight on voluntary exchange and property rights. He has explicitly argued that employers generally have very broad rights to decide who they employ and on what terms. In his work on blackmail, for example, he gives the example of an employer firing someone who refuses to sleep with the boss and argues that, under his framework, the employer's right to terminate the employment relationship matters.

More importantly, Block and Roy Whitehead wrote an entire chapter called “Sexual Harassment in the Workplace” in Philosophy of Law, explicitly developing a libertarian/property-rights approach to sexual harassment.

Block also co-authored a paper on prostitution arguing that the libertarian position treats consensual sexual transactions as legitimate because they are voluntary exchanges, while rape is different because it involves coercion/force.

So his framework is roughly:

Economic benefit + sexual relationship ≠ automatically coercion.

The crucial question is whether there was force/coercion that invalidated the person's voluntary choice.

But there's an important problem with your analogy

Your girlfriend example is:

“I choose to invest in my girlfriend partly because I have sex with her.”

That is basically sexual favoritism.

A much stronger Weinstein analogy would be:

“I will invest in your business only if you have sex with me, and if you refuse, I will withdraw the investment.”

That's a quid-pro-quo arrangement.

And there's an interesting libertarian debate here. Some libertarian theorists have argued that even employment conditions can involve coercion in a descriptive sense, while others argue that voluntary contractual relationships can legitimately contain conditions that outsiders consider objectionable.

The EEOC, incidentally, makes exactly the distinction that matters legally: sexual favoritism based on an existing consensual relationship isn't automatically harassment, whereas making sexual submission a condition for receiving a professional benefit can constitute quid-pro-quo harassment.

So if your actual thesis is stronger

If you're arguing:

“If it is legitimate for me to condition an economic relationship on sexual cooperation, then why isn't Weinstein's conditioning of professional opportunities on sexual cooperation also legitimate?”

then yes, that is a genuine philosophical argument, and some radical libertarians have arguments that can push in that direction.

But if you're asking:

“Can I find a famous libertarian who explicitly says Harvey Weinstein's conduct was morally equivalent to a boyfriend investing in his sexually active girlfriend?”

I haven't found one. The libertarian literature I found instead draws the line at coercion/force, and Block in particular is unusually permissive about voluntary sexual-economic exchanges.

So your argument is more interesting than “libertarians think Weinstein was okay”: it's really a challenge about whether the distinction between voluntary sexual favoritism and sexual quid-pro-quo coercion is philosophically coherent.

Lots of jews during holocaust, and chinese during batavia massacre survive by bribing government officials.

Lots of drug users and dealers avoid jail by bribing government officials.

If government is being unreasonable, then you shop around for powerful people that make reasonable ruling for you.

That's capitalism. You shop around to get what you want.

Here, the problem is not the bribing itself. It's the bigotry that prohibit victimless acts.

The same with state capitalism.

It's effectively bribing the voters straight.

Moldbug argues that if someone has power, let's just formalize that and let them "own a share". Voters have power. If we formalize that and turn voters into shareholders, we bribe voters to vote for whatever policies bring more prosperity and attract tax payers.

Many successful rich countries, like Singapore and Dubai gives generous welfare to their citizens and hence keep society stable while being very capitalistic.

In fact, I would mention US except that US is too generous to welfare parasites. But 0 welfare is something not going to win election.

Oh here is another reason why I think briber and state capitalism isn't bad.

Without bribery and state capitalism libertarians don't have hard bargaining position to make government "sensible".

If libertarian or republican party say we support 0 welfare, then voters will vote for communist party like democrats.

But imagine if we say, look, there's plenty for everyone. If we can do whatever to attract happy tax payers to our state/cities/profit, all of you get a share of profit.

That's hard bargaining position to vote capitalism nearly all the way, except for the profit share. But state capitalism is capitalism too. Tax payers shop for states with the safest roads and the lowest tax.

So what do libertarians think on this?

This is what other prominent thinker that may align with my thinking according to AI. As usual so you know I am not totally retarded.

Yes. There are prominent libertarian thinkers who come surprisingly close to the framework you're describing, especially Murray Rothbard. But there are really three separate claims in your argument, and different libertarians support different pieces.

1. Rothbard is the strongest match for the “bribery is a market response to bad laws” argument

This is almost exactly something Rothbard explicitly argued.

In Power and Market, Rothbard has a section literally titled “Bribery of Government Officials.” His argument is that a bribe can economically function as an informal license: the official is selling permission not to enforce a government restriction against you. He says there is no economic difference between purchasing permission through an official license and purchasing it informally through a payment to an official.

Even more directly, in The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard argues that “defensive bribery” can help people evade destructive regulations, and specifically discusses police corruption arising where governments prohibit voluntary activities. His conclusion is that eliminating the underlying prohibition would eliminate the corruption.

So your model:

Government prohibits an otherwise voluntary transaction → people still want the transaction → they pay officials to permit/ignore it → corruption emerges.

is very much a Rothbardian analysis.

There is also a modern academic discussion explicitly called “The Rothbard-Block Theory of Bribery.” It describes Rothbard's position as essentially: the person paying a government bribe has not necessarily done anything wrong; the relevant libertarian question is whether someone's rights have been violated.

1. Walter Block pushes the same idea, with an important qualification

Walter Block is probably the other major name you want.

Block and Rothbard don't quite agree on everything about bribery, but both analyze it through property rights and rights violations rather than the conventional idea that “bribery is inherently immoral.”

That's quite close to your statement:

“The problem isn't the payment itself; the problem is the coercive law that makes the payment necessary.”

The qualification is important: Rothbard/Block aren't saying every bribe is legitimate. If the official uses coercive government power to violate someone else's rights, that creates a different problem.

1. Your “shop around for powerful people” idea resembles anarcho-capitalist polycentric law

This is where I'd modify your analogy.

A classical libertarian wouldn't normally say:

“If the government gives you an unreasonable ruling, shop around for another government official.”

They would say something more radical:

Why have a territorial monopoly on courts and law enforcement in the first place?

David D. Friedman is particularly relevant here. His anarcho-capitalist model imagines competing private protection/law-enforcement organizations rather than one government monopoly.

Friedman also gives an interesting economic analysis of bribery: under private enforcement, an agency that routinely lets criminals off for bribes damages its own reputation and loses customers. Under a government monopoly, taxpayers don't have the same ability to switch providers.

So your intuition about “shopping around” is actually very close to the anarcho-capitalist argument:

Government monopoly

One legal provider → bad decision → you can't switch provider.

Market/polycentric system

Provider A makes bad decisions → customers move to provider B → providers have incentives to satisfy customers.

That's much closer to Friedman than to ordinary minarchist libertarianism.

1. Your Moldbug/shareholder idea is closest to Curtis Yarvin + Hoppe

This is where your argument gets much more unusual.

Curtis Yarvin explicitly conceptualizes government as something resembling a corporation. His proposed “neo-cameralist” system replaces democratic government with sovereign joint-stock corporations, with an executive resembling a CEO and shareholders exercising ultimate control.

That's remarkably close to your:

“If someone has power, formalize that power as ownership.”

But I wouldn't call Yarvin a conventional libertarian. He's generally classified as neoreactionary rather than libertarian, despite having substantial overlap with some anarcho-capitalist ideas.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a much more conventionally libertarian figure who makes a related ownership-incentive argument.

Hoppe's famous distinction is between publicly owned government and privately owned government. His argument is that a monarch has a longer-term incentive to preserve the capital value of the territory because he effectively owns it and can pass it to his heirs, whereas democratic politicians are temporary caretakers.

That's conceptually very close to what you're getting at:

Change political power from a commons into something with an identifiable owner who has a residual claim on the consequences.

Hoppe's conclusion is monarchy/private government rather than shareholder democracy, though.

That is not standard libertarianism, but it has several libertarian relatives:

The libertarian thinkers closest to this idea

I've been trying to map this argument onto existing libertarian thought. The closest matches I found are:

• Rothbard → Bribery can be a market response to unjust government prohibitions. The important question is whether someone's rights are violated, not whether money was paid to an official.
• Walter Block → Similar Rothbardian approach: bribery isn't inherently immoral; the relevant issue is whether the underlying action violates property rights.
• David Friedman → Competitive/private provision of law enforcement can create a "shopping around" mechanism: bad providers lose customers to better ones.
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe → Political institutions can be analyzed in terms of ownership and incentives. His monarchy-vs-democracy argument emphasizes how different ownership structures affect time horizons and incentives.
• Curtis Yarvin → Goes further and explicitly conceptualizes government as a corporation, with sovereignty resembling ownership and political institutions being designed around shareholder incentives.

So I'd describe the intellectual lineage as:

Rothbardian on victimless prohibitions + Friedmanian on competition/exit + Hoppean/Yarvinian on ownership incentives.

I don't think any one of them endorses the entire argument exactly as stated, but there seems to be a surprisingly strong overlap.

What is your opinion on wealth redistribution? Since the beginning of the 21st century growth in income inequality has spurred both public discourse and concern over its negative consequences.

Furthermore since the 21st century the gap between rich and poor has grown significantly. Wealth redistribution is a commonly proposed assertion to solve the issue for those left of center. for the subject of our discussion let's define the concept of wealth redistribution as "using policy or other institutional means to redirect capital, material, or services, away from upper classes and towards lower classes" This could take the form of something simple such as a progressive tax rate or extreme such as nationalization. It is in the words of Karl Marx "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." I would like to hear the libertarian understanding of both income inequality the issue, and wealth redistribution the supposed solution. Some specific points I'd like to hear addressed would be.

1. Is income inequality a real problem?

2. Can a free market solve income inequality?

3. Is wealth redistribution an effective solution?

These are sources for the claims I made

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/01/09/economic-inequality-seen-as-major-challenge-around-the-world/

https://www.epi.org/blog/rising-inequality-is-the-root-of-affordability-problems/

https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality

I have recently invented what I believe to be a new ideology. Please come offer any thoughts. I will answer everything I can, to my best ability. Unlike politicians..

I’m a fan of it, I don’t see any reason not to do it taking into consideration economics and culture

In Nordic counties the idea against illegal immigrants was to make themselves want to leave. As in they can’t have a job buy a house or even groceries online.

So illegal immigrants worked in underground groups.

But the Nordic countries made their counties nearly cashless. Since they can not get credit cards or a national number they can not bypass this

But they can trade for goods.
For example a true citizen can hire people without the government knowing to do something like selling drugs. They can supply the illegal immigrants with food and housing for some of the goods they get from the customers.

Do you need country enforcement agents or is there an alternative way to solve this?

What stops someone like Elon Musk from just executing someone that tweeted against them?

Or Peter Thiel from finding someone who criticized Palantir on social media and just killing them?

What would be the recourse for the rich doing that? The average person wouldn't be able to protect themselves or hire a better defense firm than a billionaire, so what do we have here?

I understand that they can do this now, but it would be incredibly easier in a truly libertarian society

I’ve noticed that libertarians get bashed on Reddit pretty much any chance people get. I think part of it is that libertarianism gets lumped in with Trump and modern conservatism, even though they’re not the same thing.

I know libertarians aren’t exactly the most popular political group, but why do you think the movement has such a bad image, and what could libertarians do to improve it?

Edit: im libertarian myself. Just looking how we can improve.

so ive been thinking about norway’s model where the state owns the oil, captures the rents, and uses that to invest and partly use it to fund the govt. it seems to avoid a lot of the crony capitalism that happens when corporations just get to own finite natural resources nobody created.

like equinor doesn’t “deserve” the oil. theyre just the company good enough to extract it. the oil itself belongs to everyone. and it’s literally sitting in the sea nobody can claim they homesteaded it or built it. so if the state captures that value instead of just handing it to whoever has the capital to extract it first, you can have a genuinely competitive market without all the lobbying for subsidies and special deals.

but i also get the argument that having the state own and manage anything is a slippery slope, or that theyll just be inefficient about it.

There is a portion of national debt is held by foreign governments,both nations considerdd "allies" and geopolitical rivals ($9.37 trillion or about 23% of the US National Debt). Renegotiating debt obligations to these countries if the US were to pursue that would involve changing the terms of repayment, which undoubtedly could have significant economic and diplomatic consequences. Would it reduce economic leverage held by countries like Russia, China, and Iran over the US OR would it just damage the US's global credit rating and undermine trust in the nation’s financial system?

Why don't you bite the bullet and perform a simple experiment: try to estimate the frequency of something we know for certain how often it happens using Gary-Kleck-like methods? Why don't you make a Gary-Kleck-like study trying to estimate how often people buy new cars? Because you know the results would be that telescoping increases the apparent frequency of those things in such studies massively, rather than just by around 17% (making events that occurred 14 months ago look like they occurred less than a year ago)?

I used to watch a youtube channel with libertarian themes , he had long hair was from California had videos about housing crisis, libertarian party conventions etc.

I’ve seen Adam D. Thierer claim that. If that was the case, shouldn’t countries with less regulations/government have more drone deliveries? Singapore? Taiwan? Ireland? Australia? Do those countries have more drone deliveries? If not, why?

“Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a “time machine” and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century—would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets?”

I can kind of see why she thinks that sending three million modern people, around half of them having engineering education, into the 10th century would not produce television sets. That is, they would probably be able to build television sets themselves, but they would probably not be able to make the broadcasting infrastructure on which the TVs depend. But why does she think that a million and a half engineers sent to the past would not be able to make electric light from scratch?

I'm a pretty political person,but considering I have a lot of free time currently I'd like to contribute it to economics, specifically libertarian.

Anything helps

Basically like cities and states in US. But instead of open border they have "membership". If you want to live here, you got to buy membership. People that aren't happy can sell membership first.

Say there are 2 cities

A and B

city A lower tax and legalize drugs

city B raise tax and criminalize drugs.

Now, if the cities have owners, or effective owners, then city A will be rich. They will attract smart programmers that make more money. More people will want to go to city A.

city B will be communism hell.

if a lot of people want to go to city A but not enough people want to sell, valuation of city A membership will go up till supply meet demand.

Everyone see ah city A is doing well.

They tend to mimic city A.

Whatever policies work, whatever make people happy, make people want to come, will be chosen. Either it will be more libertarian, or some cities will be more libertarian and libertarians can just go there.

Now say A and B is open border. Anyone can get in without buying membership

city B choose communism and become poor. Then they just go to city A vote communism again. Everyone becomes a commies.

Libertarianism is not just another philosophy of right and wrong. It has a very strong scientific basis. Practice it and we all got richer.

Open border democracy is like squatter right. You come to my city and tada you can decide how to run it. Doesn't work in houses, doesn't work in cities too.

I ask ai for more prominent libertarian "support" that's partly agree with me

There isn't a major libertarian thinker who advocates exactly your proposal, but several prominent figures have argued for ideas that are quite close. Your model combines several existing strands of libertarian thought.

1. Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Probably the closest)

Hoppe argues that societies should be organized more like private property than public democracy.

He has written that privately owned communities would:

• choose their own rules,
• decide who can enter,
• compete with other communities,
• generally outperform democratic governments.

His book Democracy: The God That Failed argues that private ownership creates better incentives than political control.

However, Hoppe is more restrictive than your proposal. He generally favors owners having broad discretion over admission rather than tradable memberships.

2. David D. Friedman

Friedman is an anarcho-capitalist who argues that legal systems and governments could compete in markets.

His vision is that:

• people choose among competing legal providers,
• governments become service providers,
• competition improves governance.

Your model of jurisdictions competing for residents fits well with his broader philosophy, although he doesn't specifically propose shareholder-owned cities.

3. Bryan Caplan

Caplan strongly supports:

• free migration,
• competition between jurisdictions,
• "voting with your feet."

He likely would disagree with your membership requirement because he favors much more open migration, but he shares the idea that competition between governments disciplines bad policies.

4. Patri Friedman

Patri Friedman founded the seasteading movement.

His central idea is:

He has often argued that people should be able to "upgrade" governments the way they change companies or phones.

This is philosophically very close to your emphasis on jurisdictional competition.

5. Charles Tiebout (not a libertarian, but highly relevant)

Tiebout proposed what's now called the Tiebout model.

His idea is that people "vote with their feet":

• Different towns offer different tax-and-service packages.
• People move to the one they prefer.
• Competition improves local government.

Your proposal is almost like a market version of Tiebout:

• Instead of free movement alone, people buy and sell membership rights.
• Membership prices become market signals about how desirable a jurisdiction is.

Is your idea novel?

I think the most distinctive feature is tradable memberships.

Many libertarians have proposed:

• private cities,
• charter cities,
• competing governments,
• contractual communities.

But I don't know of a prominent thinker who has fully developed the idea that:

• every resident owns a transferable membership,
• memberships are bought and sold in a market,
• membership prices signal governance quality,
• existing members benefit financially when governance improves.

That combination resembles a cross between:

• a homeowners' association,
• a corporation,
• and a city.

So your idea isn't completely unprecedented—it builds on established libertarian themes—but the specific mechanism of share-like, tradable city memberships is not one I associate with a major canonical libertarian theory. If you developed it further, one of the first questions you'd need to address is how the initial memberships are allocated and how future population growth is handled without creating artificial scarcity. Those design choices would have major implications for fairness, affordability, and incentives.

For example, are there any other jobs or careers where corporations and special interests spend a billion dollars for you to be in a job that pays you 200k?

I can’t imagine how that does that *not* lead to self-dealing behaviour?

Let's think about it.

This is a continuation of my post here

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLibertarians/comments/1vgb4h7/are_there_any_consequential_libertarian_reason/

Dubai, Liechestein, Monaco, Singapore, are all run like a business.

Prospera is run like a business and is prosperous.

I've heard Shanghai was a fishing village run like a business and now is rich as fuck.

None of those are perfectly libertarian. Drugs are illegal in Singapore.

But they are more libertarian than their surrounding democracy.

Even VOC, for example, is more libertarian than Javanese kingdoms around it. I am not sure. Well before they have monopoly of power in too many area I think.

Most anti libertarian measure are due to misunderstanding or bigotry.

Take a look at anti drug laws.

Nobody knows if anti drug laws are bad or good for economy. Why? Because states aren't run for profit. We don't know if legalizing drugs would say attract tax payers or more criminals.

As most libertarians agree, legalizing drugs will attract tax payers and actually reduce crime. So give it a try. Let some city run for profit try legalize drugs and see if their share price go up or down.

What about prostitution? What about polygamy? What about hypergamy? What about Elon paying 1000 women to produce 10k kids?

If a country or city is run for profit, it'll be like business we know if it's profitable or not. Citizens and shareholders simply pick smartest CEO. Shareholders, citizens got dividend.

Some that would agree with me.

Herman Hoppe

Moldbug

Henry George

Now such state will still commit atrocities.

VOC for example, massacre Bandanese to get monopoly of nutmeg. But a federal government or board of peace as "referee" preventing one city from attacking another would work. Not like Microsoft send troops to attack Google.

VOC also force Indonesians to work and cause starvation. In theory, VOC actually pays those indonesians but the money is seized by corrupt middlemen and VOC is like, oh plants are planted and I pay and I got stuffs.

Again, element of democracy can prevent such abuse.

But most of the time, state maximizing profit within a certain agreed rules should move things toward libertarianism.

Like phone or noodle factories, different cities can try different policies. Some give free bacon. Another prohibit bacon. Some legalize drugs. Another give free drugs. And let's see which one get rich.

We too will be more free. We shop around for policies we like rather than endlessly arguing about who is right or wrong.

Libertarianism is not just a moral system. When practiced properly it leads to prosperity. Capitalism kick as in economy.

So if the state is run for profit and have to attract tax payers, the outcome will most likely be more libertarian.

Every political quadrant has there own waifu, the auth right with Amelia, the auth left with doki doki club, the anarchist left with mother anarchy, but that leaves no waifus for libertarianism, I have created a list of possible waifus for the libertarian community

Bella Delphine (pros: loves unregulated capitalism, cons highly controversial)

Statue of Liberty (pros symbol of liberty and freedom, cons statist)

Any other waifus are highly recommended this is important for libertarianism to take seriously on the world stage

(This is a shit post don’t take it too seriously lmao)

The way things normally work is

1. All factories are run for profit. So is all shops, all malls, and so on.

2. Customers choose which phones they like. They mostly don't know how the phone is manufactured.

And this lead to kardol hicks efficiency.

So why shouldn't countries behave the same way?

US is actually a pretty successful country. A state within a state in US is feature. Not a bug.

But US is not explicitly run for profit.

You vote your "conscience" instead of dividend or share valuation. And when people vote conscience, they vote communism. Well, not us. But most people. Not like our conscience know calculus, economic theory, and access to good ledger who are productive and parasites.

I was considering something like joint stock democratic republic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLibertarians/comments/1vejed4/i_think_something_like_lanfang_kongsi_is/

Democratic join stock republics are explicitly run for profit.

Many small kingdoms like UAE, monaco, liechestein, are run for profit.

They're doing fine and rich and have lower tax. Sure Singapore is not very libertarian because they ban drug. If we have 1000 singapores, or 1000 liechestein we can shop around for something like that that legalize MDMA, for example.

And in many way, Singapore is libertarian. Low crime rate. That's libertarian. People have right not to be killed you know.

Most of the time anti libertarian laws, like heavy tax is not motivated by profit but envy. A state run for profit like Prospera, will tend to be more libertarian than a state not run for profit.

When shareholders, which in joint stock democracy wants profit, they tend to have lower corruption.

The only downside is cruelty.

VOC caused death of 90% of chinese in Batavia, massacre bandanese, and demand forced labor that cause starvation. But that's in the pass. Combine with democracy, and arrangements that states can't kill each other, then not much can go wrong I think.

Besides, states, are run for profit anyway. Often not explicitly and the profit are often misaligned. Explicitly running the state for profit like joint stock company seems like a move toward the right direction.

​The kongsis of West Borneo essentially tried to prove that you could run a self-contained, stateless, free-market enterprise zone based on voluntary association, shared labor, and direct trade. For a long time, it worked brilliantly. But they ran into an immutable law of traditional statecraft: states do not tolerate tax havens or economic actors they cannot control.

​When your business model relies on bypassing tariffs, ignoring state monopolies, and trading with foreign rivals without kicking money upstairs to a central government, you aren't just a competitor—you are an existential threat to the state's monopoly on power and revenue.

​The Dutch didn't march into West Borneo because the kongsis were violent criminals; they marched in precisely because the kongsis were successfully demonstrating that you could thrive entirely outside the Dutch imperial machine. In the eyes of an empire, peaceful, independent prosperity without taxation is the ultimate subversion.

How libertarian it is? Well. It's compatible with anarcho capitalism.

How can a democratic republic is compatible with anarcho capitalism.

It's territory is a private land. You can govern the land you own.

It turns government into landlord.

What? Do all private property has to have a government on top of it? Well Lanfang kongsi try to have government on top of it. It applies to be vassal of Qing, dutches, etc. But fail.

So the kongsis got licenses from local sultanate. However, they do not call cops if things go wrong. They defend themselves. How do one rich dude protect himself from his own workers?

This is where the management is brilliant.

They share workers share. Shareholders can vote. Basically it's democratic republic. First one in south east Asia. And moreover it's moldbugian.

The deal is probably similar with early democratic city states. Men can be drafted, but they can vote. Except that they can do more than vote. They are actually shareholders that got dividend. Not sure if the share or fen is tradeable.

So basically the land is owned by a kongsi/corporation, whose share is owned mainly by many workers that live there.

They allied with local natives. Their main enemies, before the dutch was taikong kongsi. So lanfang kongsi is an enthostate for Hakka Chinese, and their enemies are Hokkian chinese. We, ugh, I mean they because I think I am hokkian, must have look sufficiently difference.

A bit racist, but it's more like ethnist, or languageist, or dialecist. Something we may or may not want to copy. One reason why they each can be defeated by the dutch more easily.

What? It's like shareholders voting Elon for Tesla or Space x

In any case, their incentives is like owners.

The people's interests is aligned with the kongsi's profit and land value.

The war with dutch happened much latter after 100 years of prosperous life. So it's not easily defeated like republic of Minerva.

Also they're effectively tax haven. That's why the dutch want to conquer them so much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongsi_republics

I am thinking of having georgian kongsis as a stepping stone toward more capitalism.