John Carpenter’s They Live, which Carpenter said was a warning about “unrestrained capitalism”. As much as I adore this movie and, in fact, think it is more relevant today than ever, Carpenter does not understand capitalism. What he captures in this dystopian horror is corporatism (the merger between corporation and state), not capitalism (the voluntary exchange of goods and services).

When discussing the prospect of a laissez-faire society, which is to say a society where voluntary exchange is free from interference (regulation, taxation, etc.) from any centralised authority, i.e government, it has long been argued that corporations would engage in the most heinous of activities if not for being restrained by a government (unrestrained capitalism, that is, true capitalism, where capitalism is simply the voluntary exchange of goods and services as described above), and that they would naturally transform into a government themselves in the absence of such a restraint. In reality, it is, in fact, the opposite that is true: corporations can only engage in the most heinous of activities with the aid of a government, and governments are not a natural occurrence that spontaneously manifests itself after an organisation reaches a particular size. Let us dispel this widely held notion by establishing a fundamental understanding of the power dynamic between the seller and the buyer in the marketplace, when government intervention is not possible (because it doesn't exist to intervene).

The seller approaches the buyer with a product they wish the buyer to purchase from them. The buyer will likely have many choices of sellers to purchase this same product from, or a variant of it of a lesser or greater quality, but let us assume the seller is the only one in town offering this particular product. If the seller quotes the buyer an exorbitant price that no buyer is willing to agree to in exchange for their niche product, then no buyer will purchase this product. Thus the seller is forced to lower their price until the buyer is satisfied to commit to the transaction, for if not their business will cease to exist. That's it. Anticlimactic, I know, but in a free market society transactions in the marketplace are that simple. There can be circumstances where a product is of absolute necessity, such as healthcare, and sellers can get away with charging exorbitant prices when they're the only guy in town, but given enough time and dissatisfaction, and given that in such a free market society there are no barriers to entry into the market (because government does not exist to place such barriers via its regulation), competition will always arise to capitalise on that dissatisfaction. Monopoly is therefore impossible to achieve in an unregulated environment, that is, an environment where a government cannot place obstacles in the way of aspiring competitors or outright bar competition from entry into the market. 

To circumvent this, a wannabe monopolist could act like a government and stick a gun to people's heads in order to get them to commit to the transaction, but this is unsustainable in such a free market society for two reasons: there are no money trees anymore, and reputation actually matters now; the two factors are inextricably linked. Without a bottomless pit of funds to replenish themselves with, i.e. leveraging government power to give themselves a monopoly, a business is compelled to persuade people to willingly hand over their money. This innately regulates the market, rewarding good behaviour with trust and therefore success, while punishing bad behaviour with scorn and therefore failure, reinforcing reputation as the absolute. Thus it is futile in this environment for a business to choose extortion as their sales tactic, for it is (unsurprisingly) considered a nefarious, immoral action by any decent human being, and the business' reputation will be tainted as such by engaging in it, ultimately leading to their demise. 

The retaliation against nefarious business practices will often be simple and peaceful: people will cease to associate with and sustain such an ill-willed business, as they do today. But where there is no legal immunity to hide behind, and where therefore one is held individually responsible for their actions — "I was just following orders" no longer being a viable justification for one's aggression against another — this could escalate when a business goes to great lengths to become a pariah, e.g. engaging in malpractice, extortion, murder. This would most commonly take the form of demands for reparations, i.e. compensation, by those damaged, as is typically the case today when a wrong has been done to oneself by another. These reparations payments would likely be arbitrated by insurance companies, the infrastructure for and practice of which being commonplace in society today already (I refer the reader to The Market for Liberty by Morris and Linda Tannehill for an in-depth study of how private enterprise could trivially resolve the problem of coercion in society in the absence of government). On the other hand, if civility goes by the wayside, violent retribution could be the chosen tool for dispute resolution. However, what one should remember is that reputation applies to the business just as much as it does to the customer, so a tendency to initiate outlandish barbarism to resolve one's conflicts is also innately punished by such a free market society (nobody is in favour of doing dealings with or living next door to an unpredictable brute). In short, in the absence of legal immunity, which is to say protection by government, businesses are entirely at the mercy of the customer and the community, and so they do well to behave accordingly.

Outside of this free market context however, a business can absolutely get away with such bad behaviour if they pull the right strings and scratch the right backs. In any other context we call this "bribery", but when giving financial incentives to political organisations for privileges we call this "lobbying". This is how and only how monopoly can be achieved. And where there is a lack of choice, businesses tend, much like governments, to increasingly slack on the quality of the service they provide. For they have no financial incentive to do otherwise, with income now guaranteed at the end of the government gun. Competition is the only thing that compels a business to invent, to innovate, to seek better ways to provide value to the customer and, ultimately, persuade them to part with their money, because they can walk away at any moment if left unsatisfied. Without this competition perpetually threatening their existence, they can do exactly what governments do, which is provide no value while reaping all the rewards just the same.

This brings us to PayPal. What they attempted to do by introducing a policy of fining customers $2,500 for what they deem "misinformation" is to become a government, which is to say impose their belief system onto others, coerce people into behaving as they believe they should behave, making the customer beholden to themselves as opposed to themselves being beholden to the customer — a perversion of capitalism. But despite the widely believed notion that corporations spontaneously evolve into a government in the absence of one (not physical but legal absence in this case, with government neither enabling nor disabling PayPal's plans), and that corporations can take over the world whilst nothing can stand in their way, this venture failed instantaneously. For it lacked the two things that allow a government to do what it does with impunity: muscle (to keep people in line) and perception (so people don’t think to get out of line in the first place). Theoretically, PayPal could hire people to abduct its customers, stick guns in their faces, and demand compliance with its new policy. But even if they could muster the muscle to pull this off on such a large scale, without having achieved the latter factor, this would quickly be met with retaliatory force, as well as the mass exodus of its customers (as did happen) and consequently the drying up of PayPal's resources, of which are required to pursue such a quest for world domination in the first place. Being the most popular payment processor in the world, with over 400 million users worldwide, and a net worth of almost $100 billion (at the time of writing), PayPal is most certainly in proportion to the goliath that is the fabled corporate boogeyman dead set on world domination. Yet look how quickly its plans crumbled. Why? Because even if PayPal has the resources, the manpower, and the will, it does not have the perceived legitimacy to do such a thing and for people not to resist them in doing it. 

The reason a perception of legitimacy is so crucial is readily apparent, because without it the wannabe ruler would find themselves — due to an overwhelming distaste for their attempts to limit people's lives — in a constant state of turmoil, one which is too great to overcome by brute force, which one lacking such a perception would be left with as their only option, as has always inevitably been the case with oppressive regimes throughout history. The modern day is no different; the same formula applies. If a mugger put a gun to one's head, commanded them to hand over their possessions or face the consequences, no one in their right mind would accept this as a moral act or suggest that one is morally obligated to obey — in fact they would most likely encourage resistance. But if the mugger puts on a costume and calls themselves "the government", despite doing the exact same thing, almost everyone would and, in fact, does accept this as a moral act, and would and, in fact, does insist that one is morally obligated to obey. The difference is plain to see: not that one gang actually possesses the right to rule, but that one has convinced the victim that they possess the right to rule, and consequently that the victim has a duty to obey. Without this, a government would be perceived in the same way any other gang would be, as a gang, the biggest gang in town in fact, and would surely be resisted sooner or later.

This is how PayPal was received in doing what they did because they lacked this perception of virtue: as a gang. But it is not PayPal or any other private entity that is the danger in such a reach for power, for they all are impotent without this perception, no matter their might and determination. It is that which does command such a perception of virtue, and in so doing can get away with such a reach for power, that one should be concerned with: government, the great enabler. If government were to step in and enforce such a policy on PayPal's behalf — much like they did for Pfizer and other pharmaceutical corporations when mandating the consumption of their product during the recent pandemic, and much like they did for GoFundMe when legally backing them to block the Freedom Convoy access to their donations — PayPal could very easily bring about this policy and with it the dystopian future that many wrongly attribute to unrestrained capitalism, i.e. the sort of capitalism where government doesn't get a cut (actual capitalism). On their own and in the absence of such a mafia however, they can bring about nothing.

Politics is evil. And if politics is evil, those who practice it, politicians, must also be evil. And if politicians form governments to impose politics upon those who otherwise would not be political, then governments too must be evil. 

To understand why one would make such a statement, one must understand what politics is. It is the formation of an organisation with the express purpose of spreading and enforcing adherence to one's personal beliefs (law) among the many residents within its geographical boundaries (country) — and beyond these boundaries and among residents of other governments in the event of wars and subsequent invasions. 

But in order to achieve such enforcement and subsequent compliance, one must understand what "enforcement" and "compliance" means in a political context. To enforce one's personal beliefs, one's laws, is to impose one's beliefs onto others. It is the act of saying "You will do as I will, not as you will, and if you do not comply, my henchman will see to it that my power over you is felt." And so, in a political context, compliance is always out of fear rather than want. If one's rules are adhered to and one's order achieved only through threat of force, then the individual's willingness to comply is rendered absolutely irrelevant. Put simply, if one hands over their possessions to the armed mugger willingly, or even gladly, one has still been mugged nonetheless. Neither one's willingness to participate in the immoral act nor the volume of those willing to participate in the immoral act make it any less immoral.

And this is the foundation of politics: threat and subsequent fear of force. This being the case, the foundation being rotten, sustained only by instilling enough fear amongst its residents to dissuade them from resisting — and beyond if deemed necessary to secure conformity — anything and everything government does, which is to say everything politics does, is evil by extension of it being conceived through evil acts. No matter what a cabal such as this achieves, when inserted into the context of holding up peaceful people at gunpoint in order to do so, their good deeds will always be soiled by the bloody hands with which they perform them.

But politics is only evil because it is granted absolute dominion over the lives of every individual within its reach: this monopoly on politics we call "government". If this was not the case and politics was confined purely to the personal, i.e. confined to the private lifestyle and philosophical preferences of the individual, then the worst thing that could, generally speaking, come of a political conflict would be disassociation or a nasty exchange of words — as opposed to a contentious, volatile, and often bloody struggle for control of government and an exchange of repression and, if attempts to reason with the order of the day become futile, an exchange of fists, knives, bullets, and bombs.

This is not to say that in the absence of a monopoly on politics — government — that people would not be involved in violent conflict. That is and always will be guaranteed. But it is to say that the frequency and degree of such violent conflict will be considerably reduced, guaranteed. And it is indeed guaranteed because the primary instrument of violence, the one that has proven historically to be the most efficient at slaughtering as many as possible in as short a time as possible, will have been permanently confiscated as an option to solve any (or indeed all) of the common man's problems. Harnessing political means, which is to say force, is to impose one's preferences onto and over those of others, and so it follows that this cycle only serves to continuously perpetuate violence. Thus, it also follows that the removal of such a cycle, one that harnesses violence as its default action and therefore normalising violence as an appropriate tool to solve one's problems, reduces if not mostly eliminates violence in society. Why? Because now the means by which to defer the physical enforcement of one's preferences onto others is no longer available, one is compelled to do the enforcing oneself, and it is easy to pass these physical and psychological costs onto others when the consequences are remote, but it is increasingly hard to bare the costs when having to personally intimidate, threaten, and physically handle one's peaceful neighbours in order to achieve the desired conformity with one's agenda.

To put the costs that are bogged down in politics and intentionally obscured by its bureaucracy into perspective, and to effectively assess one's moral compass, take an example of a scenario engulfed in politics and privatise it, which is to say strip away any perception of a legitimacy to authority and evaluate one's opinion on the scenario in its now naked form. 

Let us apply this mental exercise to the very concept of government, as I have described above. One's neighbour owns a business, a large business, that provides for their client's community rules, security, healthcare, education, energy, and a whole host of other necessities. But in order to hire employees, purchase office space and equipment, and run day-to-day operations, the business owner, one's neighbour, rather than achieving these things by actually providing a high quality service that offers value to their customers and sustaining the business in the traditional free market fashion, i.e. voluntary exchange for goods and services (laissez-faire), they instead stick up and shake down their customers, their neighbours. And if their customers dare to end their contract with the business, a contract they have never signed nor even seen, the business owner will send employees — who are usually the ones providing for their security — to abduct the dissident customer from their home and imprison them against their will for an arbitrary period of time, until the business owner decides they have been punished sufficiently enough for daring to terminate their contract — which, again, they haven't signed nor seen.

Would one hire this neighbour and their organisation for their many services, regardless of the quality, if this is how they sustained their existence? Not if one had a say in the matter, I would wager: this is the point. In this context, that of the private, where no one is immune from responsibility for their actions, and therefore no one can afford to neglect their reputation in the face of society, anyone and everyone is accountable to anyone and everyone — no amount of wealth, status, influence, or force can save those who would conduct themselves by nefarious means, whether carried out by themselves or by others on their behalf: all will be judged as individuals. Simply put, a society that rewards good behaviour with a good reputation and punishes bad behaviour with a bad reputation is a self-regulating one, which is to say order is achieved organically, spontaneously, without force or need of it — unlike the artificial order achievable only through the use of force which we experience overwhelmingly today. Is this not the only way to achieve peaceful co-existence, happiness, freedom? 

For who would deny that humanity is not more productive, prosperous, peaceful, and satisfied in their lives than when left in freedom? The alternative, order by force — this artificial, involuntary order — isn't really order in the same way an abusive relationship, where one party compels the other to stay, isn't really a relationship: if the desire to continue isn't mutual between the participants, the relationship is not genuine. So, if I may be direct for a moment: Why do you stay? Why do you insist that you must stay and to not stay would be worse than staying? What are you afraid of? Responsibility? Choice? Freedom? Are you really more afraid of the uncertainty of freedom than the certainty of slavery? 

Choice means freedom and freedom means responsibility. Freedom is frightening because of its uncertainty: it is the fear of the unknown; and responsibility is frightening because of its uncertainty: the fear of making the wrong choice, or having to make a choice at all; but where there is choice, there is hope: and there is choice, it's yours, it always has been. The order of the day is only legitimate, that is, it can only do what it does with impunity — threaten, rob, command, and enslave — so long as one believes that it is so. Rulers, those who exist today and those passed, are and were only ever as insurmountable a foe as one allows and allowed them to be. 

Stripping the ruling class down, so they're naked of their perceived legitimacy, all that remains is that nefarious neighbour, the one who sticks guns in their peaceful neighbours faces and demands to be paid tribute. For all their talk, costumes, symbols, and rituals, all they are is the common mugger who says "Your money or your life." One need not get into the trenches to argue the ups and downs of any particular scribbles on paper that they insist one should distract themselves with, and instead remember they only exist because they feel virtuous in doing such a monstrous thing — and if it were up to them, they would continue to do this until the end of time. Therefore, anything they have to say about anything is redundant in light of them being totally devoid of the elementary, foundational morality that innately conducts peaceful human interaction day-to-day outside of their domain — politics.

It is government, not freedom from government, which is to say anarchy, that is utopian. All of the increasing interference and subsequent decline in one’s quality of life is not, and has never been historically, a consequence of the capacity to live on one’s own terms — freedom — but a consequence of the increasing inability of one to do so without punishment, for the betterment of others rather than themselves — government. And participating in the popularity contest that is democracy will not remedy that. It will only relieve whomever is the currently downtrodden and unload the pressure of political repression onto one’s ideological opposites; and it is just as immoral to rob and enslave one’s enemies as it is to be robbed and enslaved by them. One should look at elections as a pendulum swing, where wielding the evil of political monopoly — government — does not undo the evil done to oneself, it only ensures that the evil will be done in return, and thus repeatedly batted back and forth in a perpetual grudge match for ideological domination.

Both the politically left, right, and everything in between have the natural right to exist and prosper, so long as they do not impose this philosophy, their personal politics, onto others; and no one has the natural right to wield a metastatic bureaucracy of gangsterism to compel participation in their personal philosophy, to be the hallway monitor of the universe, that is, no one has the natural right to rule anyone’s life but their own.

I have spoken much about choice, which is to say freedom, and to confine something entirely to the private, i.e. the personal, means to have freedom. The privatisation of politics, therefore, means to make politics entirely down to one’s preference, meaning one has the freedom to conduct their own life according to whichever philosophy they individually prefer, and no one has the right to compel them to do otherwise. What this means is the abolition of political monopoly, that is, the abolition of the organisation that compels one to live according to the philosophical preferences of others: government. The result is the privatisation of politics, which is to say freedom from tyranny and being unarrested in exercising one’s natural right to own and rule oneself: rule by none, otherwise known as anarchy.

"The queen is dead, long live the king!"

The sentiment behind this proclamation is to both mourn the death of the passing monarch and assure the monarchy's subjects that the monarchy shall live on in the incumbent. But why would one outside of the monarchy's circle of influence — of whom have the obvious incentive to gain the incoming ruler's favour in order to gain influence, authority, and fortune for themselves — say such a thing and actually mean it, given that the relationship between the subject and the monarch is one objectively of servant and master? And in light of this unbalanced dynamic between the subject and the ruler, why is it considered an absurdity by the majority for one to bring voice to this absurdity?

The answer is patriotism, which is to say the conflation of love for one's country with love for one's rulers, whether they be monarchs, democratically-elected politicians, dictators, or any other flavour of government that has reigned over the population for so long that it seems absurd for the population to imagine a life without it. What this achieves over the course of space and time is normalising this way of things, whatever "this" may be, to the extent that after many generations, the memory of how this way of things came about decomposes in the population's memory. At a certain point, after this way of things has fully integrated itself into the minds of the population, the servant, at long last, begins to love their servitude — as was always the intent of the ruling class. This love manifests itself in the form of symbols, monuments, celebrations, and most of all, human sacrifice to honour and preserve its now long established order.

We stand in this latter point in space and time, where this order that was once new is now ancient. It therefore stands to reason that the common subject would find it rather difficult to comprehend one who would dissent from this long standing tradition embraced by everyone around them. But if one travels back to the formation of this order, my dissidence suddenly won't seem so peculiar.

As one knows full well, if one were to stop paying tribute — taxes — to the ruling class — government, of which the monarchy is apart and is in fact above — then one would most certainly find themselves confronted by the enforcers of its will, without whom none of its order would be possible — police — and the consequence of such disobedience is a lengthy stay in a cage — prison — or, if one attempts to violently resist, death. This being the foundation of its order, and the looming threat that influences all of one's interactions with it, the relationship between oneself and one's ruler cannot be said to be consensual. Since one cannot leave without violent repercussions to compel them to stay, this relationship is in fact an abusive one, and in a private context, no one would hesitate to condemn a relationship of this sort as such. But when dressed up in a pristine, well fitted, ceremonious looking costume, this basic understanding of morality and human interaction is totally abandoned by the majority of the population — and this is where the majority and I differ: I do not abandon basic morality because someone put on an outfit and declared themselves the "law", no matter how long they've insisted upon doing so.

Therefore, the origins of this "law and order" is akin to a resourceful mafia — now known as the government — approaching oneself and sticking a gun to one's head, or more accurately, hiring other thugs — now known as the police — to stick their guns to one's head and saying "your money or your life" — now known as taxation. One, after submitting to their demands, must continue to pay tribute to this mafia under constant threat of the same violence, and after a given number of years of this being the way of things — now known as the law — the mafia approaches one again and demands that the contributor — now known as the taxpayer — celebrate the day the now established order first began their reign over one's pocket and one's life — now known as the jubilee. And if one, such as I, voices anything but pride for this sort of order — patriotism — I am condemned as ungrateful for everything they do for me, when everything they do for me is done whilst holding a gun to my head with one hand and rooting through my pocket with the other.

If their order was not established in this manner — involuntarily — then I would have no such thing to say about it. But given that it was and continues to be so, only in a different arrangement, I cannot approve of its existence let alone mourn the passing of a figurehead of what is nothing more than a well dressed cabal of thieves. So I do not mourn the queen's passing, but nor do I rejoice at the news of her death — I am merely indifferent.