strike 3

against the state, that is

(That’s my lowercase version of an LRC-type headline.)

I confess it: I’m an imposter. I’ve only read 2 of the 3 great 20th-century manifestos of free market anarchism:

Only tonight have I finally received manifesto #3, The Market for Liberty, by Linda and Morris Tannehill.

This is from the foreword by Karl Hess:

The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.

Morris and Linda Tannehill, in this book, which has become something of a classic even while being (until now) out of print, answer that politics is not necessary, that the ancient and ongoing contrivance of the marketplace can be substituted for it with ennobling results.

Advocates of state power will of course recoil from the idea and point out that it is all idle dreaming, that the state has always existed and must always exist lest brutal humans descend into, horrors, ANARCHY. They are correct, of course. Without the state there would be anarchy for that is, despite all of the perfervid ravings of the Marxist Left and statist Right, all that anarchy means — the absence of the state, the opportunity for liberty.