The Sisyphean Task of Libertarianism: Why Your Ideology is Political Cuckoldry, and Why Socialists Gave You True Freedom Do you still want to support anarchocapitalism and minarchism after this article if you are not them?
In response to the mathematics of opportunity cost, some of you tried to hide
behind a convenient philosophical shield: "We are not fighting for money! The
very process of fighting for FREEDOM brings us subjective satisfaction!"
Congratulations. You have just publicly admitted that your movement is not a
rigorous economic science, but a religious cult. From the standpoint of material
benefit, your activism is meaningless.
But let’s take off the philosophical blinders. Relying on game theory, specific
dates, and history, I will prove that you are not just bad economists. You are
historical ignoramuses fighting for a system in which you yourselves will become
disenfranchised fodder. And no, you won't be able to blame everything on "the
state." We are going to talk about the pure, unregulated free market.
Part 1. The Activist's Matrix: Why Socialists Always Win, and You Never Do
Let's compare the life paths of a leftist activist and a libertarian.
The Socialist Matrix:
- Victory: The activist gains status. Their children receive guaranteed free
higher education, medicine, and housing. In the leftist USSR, housing was
given away for free. In the capitalist US, you surrender 30 years of your
life to mortgage slavery, terrified of being fired every single day. Freedom
from the basic fear of poverty is true freedom.
- Partial Success (without revolution): Labor unions secure the 8-hour
workday, paid vacations, and maternity leave. The activist monetizes their
struggle and buys back their own time here and now.
- They abandon activism and invest in themselves: They build a career and
accumulate personal capital. If society shifts left, they integrate into the
system; if not, they are simply wealthy. Result: The socialist expands their
material or personal freedom in ANY outcome.
The Libertarian Matrix:
- Victory: You burned 20 years of your life. The state is gone. And nobody
owes you anything. You enter this new world with no capital. Meanwhile,
corporations and lobbyists enter it with billions and buy up the private
courts.
- Defeat: You threw 20 years of your life into the trash for "subjective
morality."
- You abandon the movement and make money: Only by betraying your ideals do
you end up in the black.
From the perspective of game theory, libertarian activism is pure political
cuckoldry. You spend your resources to freely build a system that will be ruled
by the very people who exploited you this whole time. You are unpaid laborers
building the foundation for someone else's castle.
Part 2. The Collapse of Ancap: Your Ideals Are Worth 2 Dollars
Let's quickly dispense with the anarcho-capitalists. You scream: "We don't need
the state, conflicts will be solved by private courts, the NAP, and ostracism!"
Remember the shameful experiment in Grafton, New Hampshire. Your "free citizens"
got exactly what they wanted: they slashed taxes and cut the police.
What did the market do? A group of idiots started dumping trash and feeding wild
bears on their properties. The bears began attacking people. Citizens suffered
severe, debilitating injuries. Moreover, after the police force was gutted,
quiet little Grafton experienced the first double murders in its history.
Where was your vaunted ostracism? Ideological libertarian store owners could
have easily announced a boycott and refused to sell food to the NAP violators.
But they didn't. Why? Because earning $2 in profit from selling a can of beans
turned out to be more important than the safety of their neighbors. You sold
your ideals, your NAP, and people's lives for two bucks. If you couldn't subject
a dozen misfits to ostracism, you will never stop a mega-corporation.
Part 3. The Minarchist Trap: Your Ideal Already Existed, and It Was Hell
"Fine," a minarchist will say, "ancaps are daydreamers. We need a minimal state,
but with no market regulations, no public medicine, and no welfare! The market
will fix everything!"
Let's open a history book. Your minarchist utopia already existed in the 19th
and early 20th centuries in England and the US. There were no social
regulations. And how did the market handle this "freedom"?
Myth 1: "The market is humane" (Child Labor) The state didn't force children to
work. Free private capitalists voluntarily hired 8-year-old children to
work 14-hour shifts in Pennsylvania coal mines and Manchester textile mills.
Why? Because child labor is cheaper. The market was never going to stop this—it
was unprofitable to do so. They were liberated by socialists, labor unions, and
government bayonets, which legally forbade the private sector from exploiting
children.
Myth 2: "The state invented discrimination" You love "freedom of contract." In
the US until the 1960s, private businesses (cafes, hotels, private schools,
banks) voluntarily refused to serve black people. Banks voluntarily introduced
"redlining," denying mortgages to minorities. Nobody forced private laundries to
hang "Whites Only" signs—the market simply served the racism of the mob. Do you
know who brought freedom there? The state. In 1957 in Little Rock, the federal
government sent an airborne division with assault rifles to force private
citizens to let black children into school. (For the record: At this exact same
time, the totalitarian USSR legally and practically ensured absolute equal
rights for all nations, with African students studying for free at Moscow State
University, while the free US market forced them to the back of the bus).
Myth 3: "Private medicine will save everyone" In the US, before government
intervention (the 1986 EMTALA law), private hospitals practiced "patient
dumping." If a man having a heart attack or a woman in labor had no insurance,
free private doctors simply threw them out on the street. People died on
hospital doorsteps. The invisible hand of the market decided it was unprofitable
to save them. And what about today? In 1921, Frederick Banting discovered
insulin and sold the patent for $1 so it would be available to everyone. Today,
the unregulated free market of US pharma sells it for $300 a vial. People die
because they ration their doses. (For the record: In the planned USSR, the
Semashko system guaranteed any surgery and any medication for free. No one died
on the street for lacking a credit card).
Myth 4: "The market breeds innovation, the state breeds monopoly" Look at
England and the US. In free England in the mid-20th century, the poor literally
froze to death in their apartments because they didn't have coins to put into
the heating meters. Access to goods was strictly limited by the market: millions
of people for decades couldn't afford color TVs, washing machines, or proper
food. (In the USSR, central heating was practically free and covered 100% of
cities. Freedom is when you are not afraid of freezing to death in your own
home).
Myth 5: “Minarchism Means Freedom”
No.
Minarchism is a state that keeps the baton, the courts, the prisons, and the power to throw you out of your home—but frees itself from every obligation it has toward you.
It can still:
- arrest you;
- seize your property over a debt;
- enforce a contract against you;
- evict your family;
- use violence to defend someone else’s property.
But when you need healthcare, education, a roof over your head, paid leave, or police protection, it suddenly becomes helpless:
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That is not a small state.
It is a one-sided contract in which the citizen must obey, while the system accepts no responsibility for what happens to the citizen.
And here is the most humiliating fact for minarchists: even the USSR—the state they describe as totalitarian hell—accepted more responsibility for the material freedom of ordinary people than their supposedly futuristic ideology does.
The 1936 Soviet Constitution recognized rights to employment, rest and paid vacation, social security, free healthcare, and education. The 1977 Constitution also explicitly recognized a right to housing and committed the state to expanding public housing while keeping rents and utilities low.
The Soviet system told the citizen:
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The minarchist tells you:
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The police may arrest you—but may not be required to save you
In 1989, in DeShaney v. Winnebago County, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Constitution generally does not impose a duty on the state to protect an individual from private violence.
In 2005, in Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, the Court ruled that a woman did not possess a constitutionally protected entitlement to police enforcement of her restraining order. Her husband, against whom the order had been issued, murdered their three daughters.
Read that again.
The state demands that you recognize its police, courts, and laws. But it does not always recognize a corresponding constitutional right requiring that police machinery to protect you.
That is already a disgraceful weakness in the modern system.
Minarchism does not propose fixing it. It proposes turning it into a principle:
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When the state needs to use force against you, it is fully real.
When you need protection from it, the free market suddenly appears.
Housing: the USSR built apartments; minarchism explains why you deserve the pavement
Soviet housing was not paradise.
People waited years for apartments. Many lived in communal housing, cramped conditions, or depended on the restrictive residence-permit system. Homelessness was not literally eliminated; it was hidden, criminalized, and often excluded from official visibility.
But the Soviet system did not declare sleeping in the street a normal and morally acceptable outcome of free exchange.
It built and allocated public housing on a massive scale, kept rent extremely low, and legally treated housing as a social right.
In the United States, the official one-night count in January 2024 identified 771,480 homeless people living in shelters, temporary accommodation, cars, tents, or directly on the street—the highest number recorded since the count began.
What does minarchism offer them?
Housing? No.
A guaranteed roof? No.
Protection from eviction? No.
It offers philosophical anesthetic:
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It is a brilliant trick. If you do not want to fail a social obligation, simply declare that the obligation never existed.
The man is not homeless. He is free from government-imposed housing.
The child is not freezing in a car. His family merely made an unsuccessful market choice.
Soviet women had rights the American market still does not guarantee
Russia granted women the right to vote and stand for election in 1917. To be precise, this was done by the Provisional Government before the creation of the USSR, and the 1918 Soviet Russian Constitution preserved women’s political equality.
The United States ratified nationwide women’s suffrage in 1920.
Early Soviet labor law provided eight weeks of paid maternity leave before childbirth and eight weeks afterward—a total of sixteen paid weeks. These protections were introduced after the revolution and reaffirmed in the 1922 Labor Code.
The United States passed the Family and Medical Leave Act only in 1993. Even today, federal law generally guarantees eligible workers up to twelve weeks of job-protected leave—but does not require that leave to be paid.
A Soviet woman a century ago was entitled to paid time to give birth.
A modern American woman may receive legal permission not to be fired—provided she can somehow survive without wages.
And the minarchist looks at this arrangement and declares:
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Apparently, childbirth is the private choice of the woman, while future workers, taxpayers, consumers, and soldiers are a public resource.
The benefits are privatized.
The cost of reproducing society is dumped on the mother.
Paid leave: the USSR in 1936; the United States says, “Negotiate it yourself”
The 1936 Soviet Constitution recognized annual paid leave as a worker’s right.
Federal law in the United States still does not require employers to provide paid vacation, paid sick leave, or paid public holidays. These benefits are generally left to negotiation between employer and employee.
In the supposedly totalitarian USSR of 1936, the worker was at least legally recognized as a human being who required rest.
In the minarchist utopia, the worker is a perfectly free seller of labor who may voluntarily choose between:
- working without paid leave;
- losing income;
- losing the job;
- going hungry.
But the contract was signed voluntarily, so freedom has apparently been preserved.
Education: a right in the USSR, a product under minarchism
The 1936 Soviet Constitution recognized a right to education, including free education. The 1977 Constitution promised free education at every level, scholarships, textbooks, and broad access to vocational and higher education.
In 1973, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to recognize education as a fundamental right under the federal Constitution.
Yes, the United States has public schools, and state constitutions provide educational guarantees.
But minarchism does not seek to strengthen the child’s right to education. It moves in the opposite direction:
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The rich child receives teachers, laboratories, security, and elite connections.
The poor child receives a lecture about personal responsibility.
Inherited advantage is then renamed “merit earned through free competition.”
“But the USSR had repression!”
Yes, it did.
There was censorship, political imprisonment, suppression of real opposition, and an enormous gap between constitutional promises and political reality.
But this does not rescue minarchism.
It makes the comparison more humiliating.
The question is:
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The USSR violated many of its own obligations. That was a failure of the state.
Minarchism proposes deleting those obligations entirely—and then declaring failure impossible.
If a state promises housing but fails to provide it, the failure is visible.
If the right to housing is abolished, the person under the bridge no longer counts as evidence against the system. He becomes a private individual who exercised freedom badly.
Minarchism is not freedom from the state
It is the freedom of the state from responsibility for you.
It is a system where:
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Minarchism does not abolish coercion.
It preserves every form of coercion necessary for the wealthy to defend their property, while removing every obligation necessary for ordinary people to defend their lives.
It is not a night-watchman state.
It is an armed guard standing beside the safe, calmly watching while the owner throws you into the street.
You believe that deregulation gives birth to competition? In the US, they cut
corporate taxes, froze the minimum wage, and removed merger controls. The
result? Capitalism devoured competitors and birthed Boeing. The corporation
became a monopoly, fired its engineers, hired "effective managers," and spent
billions on stock buybacks. Now their planes are literally falling apart in
mid-air. The market killed safety for the sake of profit. (At the same time, the
"monopolistic" USSR artificially created competition by funding dozens of
independent design bureaus: Tupolev, Ilyushin, MiG, Sukhoi. The USSR built
reliable planes and millions of buses, while your market degrades).
The Bottom Line: What Are You Fighting For?
Take off your rose-colored glasses. You are not fighting for freedom.
Your economics is unpaid labor for future corporate monopolists.
Your morality is worth $2 for a can of beans sold to a man whose bears will
kill your neighbor tomorrow.
- Your historical ideals belong to an era when a private owner could impunity
force a child into a mine, throw a dying person out of a hospital, and hang
a "No Blacks Allowed" sign on the door.
True political freedom, safety, the 8-hour workday, medicine, and education were
gifted to you by socialists and state coercion. You are fighting for the right
of corporations to wipe their feet on you with impunity, and you cowardly call
it "minarchism."
P.S. Watch their reaction. Now they will try to forget about the racism of
private businesses, the corpses on hospital doorsteps before 1986, the price of
insulin, and the disabled victims of Grafton. They will scream hysterically:
"But the USSR had repressions!" or "That's crony capitalism, not the real free
market!" They will hide behind theoretical slogans once again. Because to admit
the facts is to admit that socialism gave the world a thousand times more human
lives and freedoms than all libertarian fantasies combined.