Are Antistate Libertarians Hypocrites Re: Voluntary Agreements?

Is the current State just an enormous and (highly dysfunctional) "ancap voluntaryist enclave" already, and libertarians are actually the NAP-breaking enemies of civil agreement?

vinney...axkl

26. Januar 2026January 26, 2026 · 6 Min. Lesezeit6 min read · Aktualisiert am 29. Januar 2026Updated January 29, 2026

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Sneak-peak at the ending/TL;DR: Is the current State just an enormous and (highly dysfunctional) "ancap voluntaryist enclave" already, and libertarians are actually the NAP-breaking enemies of civil agreement?

If we anti-state voluntaryists are to be intellectually honest, we need to confront something. I'm trying to work though this and am seeking thoughtful discussion and suggestions for further reading on this topic. Read on for a kind of extreme devil's advocate thought experiment:


Say I set up an anarchocapitalist/voluntaryist enclave on some previously unclaimed-by-any-State-or-peoples land. A lot of land. It's all going well, we've got plenty of "members" who choose to live on my land under mutually-agreed-upon terms, we've got lots of resources and various "governing" and organizing principles and systems. All voluntarily subscribed.
Some people express interest in more thoroughly using some of my property, so I agree to let them do so, under certain terms, with certain behaviors forbidden and with a kind of "rental" fee paid to me yearly based on the particular land and their particular activities. Again, they agree. We can say they "own" the property, but not exactly purely because there are stipulations that I set that they agreed to. Fine.
This turns out to be popular and is repeated a lot of times until most of MY land is being used by a lot of people in this way, according to voluntary agreements.

A few generations pass. The children of some of these "tenants" decide they no longer want to honor the agreement fully. They want to do whatever they want, against my wishes and our contract; also they don't want to pay me anymore either (they call it "theft"!).
Trying to keep the peace, I tell them that this is a voluntary agreement and they're free to leave if they no longer want to honor it. But they definitely can't just break the terms, squat on my property and not expect me to do anything about it...
In fact, our agreement very clearly states that my own contracted collection and protection agencies will work on my behalf to make me whole if the agreement is broken and the perpetrator insists on belligerence. So essentially even the contract enforcement via use of force was voluntarily agreed to and thus not "coercive".
Being a nice, reasonable guy (and one who would like to attract other nice, reasonable "tenants" in the future), I repeatedly remind these agitators that they can and should vacate if they don't like the terms of the agreement.

And get this, they say, "I was born here, I like it here! I'm not going anywhere! And besides, nobody else with property will let me do whatever I want on their land either! Anyway, the other places suck - it's better here; there are more resources, better neighbors, everyone speaks my language, you are usually a decent "landlord"... So, no, I'm not leaving. And on top of that, this property is now mine, not yours. If you send your protection or collection agencies out to enforce our agreement, I'll kick up a lot of shit and maybe even get some other "tenants" to feel the same way - and we might all band together. Then we'll fucking steal more land and redistribute it amongst ourselves and perhaps even attack you, physically... Come at me, bro."

...So what do I do? I've got a bunch of contract-breaking bandits who say our agreement is actually theft of their shit, and they insist they have a right to my property. I think maybe they're communists now? If I invoke the enforcement clause of our contract, they'll accuse me of being the "authoritarian", thieving bad guy!
I thought we were running a voluntaryist utopia, but it got infested with a bunch of property-rights-disrespecting, violent collectivists!


Right, okay, so, in the above fiction, "I" am "The State" as we know it today and my "tenants" are extreme libertarian, anti-state, freedom maximalists. Their argument for personal liberty rests upon breaking a voluntary agreement because it suits them. And they refuse to "just leave peacefully" mostly because they are cozy where they are (and "there's nowhere else to go", as if that's my problem.)

Put another way: Is the current State just an enormous and (highly dysfunctional) "ancap voluntaryist enclave" already, and freedom advocates are actually the NAP-breaking enemies of civil agreement?

Are we de baddies?

So, back in the real world, are antistate voluntaryists guilty of violating their own core principle at moment zero of their philosophy?
Below are some items I see as contributing to the ambiguity and antagonizing the problem. For almost all of them, I don't think a resolution is obvious in "libertarian logic", but I hope others will join in the discussion. I think it's really important to address this head on in order to be honest and ethically/logically consistent.

In the bullets above, I've reached the "I just wrote a bunch of stuff and confused myself, now I'll try to list some things that I think I'm confused about so I can think and read about them more" stage of thinking aloud. I'll stop there.
If you have thoughts on this (agree, disagree, have solved this and will point me to prior art, want to tell me I'm retarded, etc.), please contact me on nostr or reply to this post.

#anarchism#anarchocapitalism#ancap#libertarian#voluntaryist

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Comments12

Duncan Cary Palmer

Hey, Vinney, Thanks for your thought-provoking essay… Starting from the assumption that we’re talking about (as a primary example) the USA, here’s my 2 cents, which (fair warning) are liberally seasoned with a lifetime-developed and cultivated Biblical/philosophical world-view: Right from the outset, it seems to me you’ve created a straw man. The US federal government never “owned” all the territories now known as the United States of America, and so for that reason alone, the rest of your thought experiment falls apart. But wait, there’s more: I say the entire notion of “territorial jurisdiction” is a flawed and dangerous sophistry, particularly if you try to extend it beyond ownership by a family. And trying to homogenize society and “governance” at anything beyond a local—perhaps village or city-sized level—is a recipe for unrest, opening the door to all the troubles we are observing today. I believe the core libertarian philosophy (i.e. “Don’t initiate violence”) is 100% legitimate. Coming to that from a Biblical perspective is simple; in the first chapter of Genesis, God gave Adam and Eve dominion over *creation*, not over one another; even purely logically, only our Creator has any credible claim on a “right” to rule us. In stark contrast, what we see in every nation-state in the world, including America, is a speciously justified monopoly on violence. So, no, we freedom minded libertarian thinkers are NOT “de baddies,” we are only speaking the truth when we insist the state is an evil beast that has no right to oppress us and rob us. Centralization of authoritarian violence is an egregious evil that will, I believe, self-destruct. We should hasten that day by simply not complying with the state’s megalomaniacal fantasies. We can and should build stronger local, 100% voluntary communities that thumb our nose at state tyranny. You can find my developing vision for how that might work here: https://peakd.com/a/@creatr/b
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Globe99

"Are we the baddies?" -- I mean sure, if you accept the Curtis Yarvin idea of "formalism", or even traditional neoliberal ideas of the "social contract." We've all sort of signed on to this, so who are we to "say no"? Of course, no, I didn't sign no steeeenking social contract. My libertarian thought increasingly leads me to the conclusion that whether we're talking about States or large corporations, "scale matters." There's a certain scale at which economic calculation problems set in and service quality drops. So at a certain point the only way to maintain participation is through coercion. The USA as a federal system is basically there. And this is exactly what we see in MN, driven (indirectly) by Yarvin through Stephen Miller. There's some recognition of the idea that for "America" to be maintained, absolute Federal authority must be asserted over the States... In Blood, if need be. Miller's X profile (last I saw from the news, I'm not on there) is him shaking hands with Xi Jinping. That's telling.
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Max

So your point is specifically the children born while their parents resided in a private city? Their parents contract for them until they come of age, then they can either sign or not sign the contract.
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Marc

@Max This question is above my pay grade. I would love to read your thoughts.
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Marc

I like the article. You raise some great questions. I don't have all the answers either. I need to read more about the subject, but David Friedman talks about using private companies to intervene in matters such as this. Basically the property owner would need to hire private security to enforce property rights. If I remember correctly he advocates arbitration and wrote about Viking law as a real world example, but I haven't read it in a long time. Samuel Konklin III also wrote about various ways to achieve due process without a state in An Agorist Primer. The dude at my local libertarian bookstore tried to disuade me from reading Konklin III. That made me want to read it more, of course. 😉 Then I learned @TK SuitCoin.exe 80HpW read it on his podcast. https://fountain.fm/episode/RO…UvQYOTXV
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Diacone Frost

This type of questions doesn't make much sense because etatists cleaverly fabricated them with the twisted logic of very-unnatural-law. If you strip it naked, you can prove that the state doesn't (and can't) fulfill their part of the deal. even if they change their mission over time; they will fail in that too. every attempt by the state to fix/improve something fails. every service they provide is less efficient then on a free market. their money is worse then on the free market, etc. so I can ignore all of that philosophical discussion and use economy to demonstrate that they are big fat liers, con men or complete failures. if they come clean and say out loud that it's not their aim to be fair and fullfill their part of the agreement because majority doesn't care (or understand) and that these are new "lease" terms, then I will spend my brain cycles to deal with it.
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YODL

Really liked this post. I'm too new and unversed in the literature to add much of value, but that won't stop me from jotting down a couple thoughts anyway. On item 1, that does seem to be a problem given a newborn can't voluntarily agree to something. So would seem cross-generational contracts can't work. Not sure I fully understand #2, but seems connected to something I was gonna comment on regarding "homesteading" as rule for initial ownership. In your hypothetical, you seem to be laying claim to far more land than you can possibly be making economic use of. In the real world, more of a collective of owners, it's a little trickier I suppose. Not really sure, feel like I'm missing something. An issue with #3 seems connected to #1, in that the State outlives the set of individuals who make up the initial collective. It has uncertain future makeup as well. Guess I'd need more time to think about it. Not even sure I've replied with anything meaningful, but I'll leave it in since I've already typed it out. Thought-provoking stuff!
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Bill Cypher

I think the legal question are organizations people is highly relevant here. By taking the assumption they are you are creating an immortal ish being and now the problem of being born into a lifelong contract you never had a chance to negotiate arises. If organizations are simply collections of people the government as an organization now has to renegotiate terms frequently allowing the non government members closer to ideal book ideal voluntarism. The US government clearly regularly violates non aggression principle even in your worst case assumption about the state being just which forfeits their natural contract rights anyway. A lot of this would magically be solved if people would be held accountable as individuals for actions taken as organization members. This is still in debate in the current legal system not just voluntaryist books. Nuremberg ruled no following orders defense but ICE has legal immunity is a great contrast to show it isn't settled.
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AU9913

The basic premise is flawed. I do lease land, but I also own land. The land I own isn't leased from the federal, state or county govt that claim authority over it. They change laws without my consent constantly (this is the equivalent of changing the terms of the lease), if that happened on my leased land I would sue the owner for violating the terms of the contract. Before you say, "oh you agreed on changing lease terms via democratic process by leasing land from the federal govt, you just claim you own it." Well then you'd have to establish the right of that entity that claims ownership has authority over the land they're leasing. There is no such document showing the federal government owns the land I live on today. They may have owned it at one point, but they have since transfered that ownership to someone who transfereding to another person until you get down the line to me. They don't own my land and I actually lease it. That initial premise being incorrect breaks the entire rest of the argument. Also if you force someone into a contract under duress, that contract is void.
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Raison d'État

No. But you raise good points. As you yourself alluded to, being born into a "social contract" is no different to being born into chattel slavery. Under most legal traditions, children cannot be parties to binding contracts. Newborns certainly cannot. I would go further than most and say any contract where one or more parties had no option to negotiate terms should be held invalid, as should one so clearly made under duress between an individual and a State. But the issue of "Communists" or "bandits" you describe is a real one. Homo Sapiens excels and constructing high-minded excuses for gutter behaviour. Pure voluntaryism is going to run smack into one of those situations, and sooner rather than later. All real-world non-state societies have fallback traditions of arbitration for deals that are not honoured, but the "ultima ratio" is and will always be the threat of armed private war.
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vinney...axklAuthor

Would love to hear @MAHDOOD , @AU9913 , @Bill Cypher , @stevenroose , @mike weigh in (these come to mind from recent interactions). Please tag anyone else who leans towards ancap/voluntaryist/anarchist/libertarian (or the opposite direction!) ; bonus points if they're well-read and can suggest additional reading. After reading Rothbard, Hoppe, Friedman, Spooner and many others, I'm still left with this unresolved.
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