Voluntaryism – The ONLY Political “ISM” That Respects Natural Law

Etienne’s Address to the 4th annual Freedom Under Natural Law Conference

Will Keller Introduction:

Welcome to a special performance by Etienne de la Boetie2. He was also a speaker at Freedom Under Natural Law 3 and did a live presentation as well and had Mark Passio on as a guest, and that was fantastic. And now he’s back live again in Acapulco, Mexico. So, this is going to be a treat. This is going to be exciting. Let me grab his bio. He is the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation, also the publisher of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed!, which is a fantastic book that everyone should have. The ultimate goal is an effort we call the Pre-State Project, which we would drop a hundred thousand copies of “Government” – The Biggest Scam and the upcoming companion book Voluntarism: How the Only Ism Fair for Everyone Leads to Harmony and Prosperity for All. So, Etienne, thank you so much for joining us. And take it away, my man.

Etienne de la Boetie2:

It is great to be with you and great to be with the Freedom Under Natural Law audience. As you mentioned, I’m coming to you guys from Acapulco. You can hear some birds in the background. We’ve got a little watch party here going on, with people from around the world. We’ve got Korea, we’ve got the UK, We’ve got Germany, Mexico and other countries represented. I’ll just kind of give y’all a quick gander at where my backdrop and my set today and where we’re coming to you from. But my talk, you have to excuse me, I’m going to go back and forth from the shade of the sun, because we are in the equatorial climate here.

Behind the Scenes – Etienne presenting from the FUNL4 Watch Party in Acapulco, Mexico – Huge Props to Yuza for Hosting the Party!

But my talk here today is: Voluntaryism – The ONLY political “ISM” that Respects Natural Law.

Just a quick background on myself. A lot of it was just mentioned. I’m the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation. I’m the author of a book called “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! In a past life, I was a technology entrepreneur and operating executive. I’ve been a consultant to Fortune 25, 100, 500 companies. I used to work on Wall Street, I ran a national third-party political campaign. I worked at one of the “big four” think tanks in D.C. and I was a member of Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Nova’s largest CEO network.

I’m best known for the book “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed!, where I make the case that government is best thought of as a technique for robbing and controlling populations. And it’s always illegitimate because it’s impossible to have a legitimate, moral, ethical, and logical “government”.

One of the reasons is it violates natural law and is inherently immoral on the face of it. And the subtitle of the book is How Inter-Generational Organized Crime Runs the Government, the Media, and Academia.

A White Rose Mucho Grande poster showing a media ownership chart breaking down the monopolization of the media by a handful of companies running hundreds of subsidiaries

My main message there is it’s the “government” partnered with a monopoly media system where you’ve got six old school monopoly media companies running hundreds and hundreds of subsidiaries to give everybody the illusion that there are all these different media voices, but really, they all go up to a small handful of media companies operating as a cartel.

A White Rose Mucho Grande Poster Showing Dozens of New Media Companies, think tanks, and “fact checkers” involved in the algorithmic censorship of the DARPA Internet

And on the new media side, you’ve got, you know, about 30-40 new media internet companies, search engines, social media sites, Wikipedia, you know, others that are algorithmically censoring information on what I like to call the DARPA internet.

That’s really the main thing that’s against us: this control of perception that is putting on every screen the message that the government is legitimate, desirable, and necessary.

And the last one is academia. In the government’s mandatory schools, they’re teaching you that government is legitimate, desirable, and necessary before you’re really old enough to evaluate the logic and morality of that claim.

And so what I wanted to do today, just to get started, because I know that this is going to be kind of simple for the FUNL audience, but for my audience, which we’re going to syndicate this content to, I wanted to just take a second and give what I like to call the basic overview of natural law, which is a set of universal, non-man-made, binding, and immutable conditions that govern the consequences of human behavior. There’s essentially five basic breaches of natural law.

There’s assault, rape, theft, trespass, and coercion. All of these transgressions are a theft of some sort. You know, theft is theft, but rape is the theft of sexual choice. , trespass is the theft of physical security in your lair. You know, murder is the theft of life.

And all of these are obviously wrong because there’s somebody that has been hurt.

There’s a victim that has been victimized somehow by that transgression. And so those are obviously wrongs.

And a lot of people have heard the term: Right: “I have a right to do this. I have a right to own a gun, I have a right to free speech, I have a right to that,” without ever really understanding what the word “right” means.

In the natural law tradition, a RIGHT is anything that’s not a wrong.

And so, if you’re going to go against natural law, you’re going to suffer the karma of that. So, really understanding the basics of natural law… so that you can keep yourself on the right side of morality, the right side of ethics, the right side of karma, is in everyone’s best interest.

And so, I wanted to just kind of break down a little bit about the difference between natural law and political law, which I like to call “politician scribbles” that I “taxed” from Larken Rose. But, you know, natural law is logical. A right is an action which does not harm anybody else, and a wrong is anything that’s not a right.

And so you could actually even break it down even tighter than the name, just do no harm in the universe to others. And everybody can understand that, that’s self-evidence aligned with nature. That’s 100% moral. And it’s so easy that even a kindergartner can understand that we don’t hit people, we don’t take their things. And so, you know, very, very, you know, something that everybody can get behind. It’s universally applicable to everybody. There are no special privileges for some at the expense of others.

Now, when we compare that to political law, well, political law is created by humans through an easily manipulated political process. It’s frequently self-contradictory, , gambling is okay in this jurisdiction, but it’s not okay five miles away in that jurisdiction, or you can smoke a plant right here. But if you go across this imaginary line, now your a criminal. And so it doesn’t make sense.

And it frequently ignores universal moral principles where the enforcers are using violence on peaceful people to either raise revenue on their friends, their neighbors, whoever, or to inflict the moral commandments of one group on the rest of society.

Political Law frequently restricts individual sovereignty and self-ownership, and there’s hundreds of thousands, if not one million laws, rules, and regulations in the United States alone at the federal, state, and local level.

Now, I mentioned that government is illegitimate, immoral, and illogical on its face. And so, you know, just to break it down, you know, as simple as you can get, if John told you that you had to obey him or he would violate you, well, that would be wrong. And even if John and a couple of his friends come over and they say, because he and his friends are in the majority and there’s three of them and one of you, and you have to obey him or them and be punished, that would still be wrong.

And so, even if John and his friends were able to trick, indoctrinate, propagandize, and pay off enough people to vote for an institution to work on their behalf, and they all claim that you must obey its dictates or be punished, it would still be wrong. And if you can understand this basic concept, then you really do understand that government neither has the legitimate nor the lawful right to violate you just because some people decided to vote for it in a political ritual.

Now, if you’re not going to have government, if you’re not going to have democracy, if you’re not going to have monarchy, you’re not going to have a constitutional republic because a constitutional republic is immoral and illegitimate on its face. Then how? What is that? What is the alternative? And the alternative is something known popularly as voluntarism.

I like to say it’s the only political “ISM” that is aligned with natural law.

It’s the only political “ISM” that is fair for everybody.

It is the only political “ISM” that keeps you on the right side of morality and the right side of ethics.

You’re not voting violence on your neighbors. You’re not trying to impose a ruler on your friends, your neighbors, and your colleagues who may disagree.

The basics of voluntarism is the common-sense idea that all relationships between human beings must be voluntary.

Nobody has rights that other people don’t.

Nobody has an exception from morality.

Nobody has the ability to use violence or coercion on anybody else.

And also, it recognizes that the world is a self-organizing system and it’s a spontaneous order, and most of what the government does is provide services, whether that service is delivering the mail or air traffic control or running a horribly bad old-age investment scheme, pension scheme, or armed protective services that they call the police, or dispute resolution that they call their courts.

Well, all of these services could be and would be better provided by the free market, mutual aid societies, armed protective service companies, dispute resolution providers that have a monopoly, nonprofits, co-ops, homeowners associations, and genuine charities if the government wasn’t holding a gun to its head and saying only we can produce these services.

Now, what your teacher and what the media would lead you to believe about the political spectrum is that you’ve got communism on the left, and then you’ve got fascism on the right, and between communism and fascism are Democrats, moderates, and Republicans, okay?

But really, the reality of the political spectrum is you’ve got communism and fascism, which are kind of total government on the left, and then you progress through socialism, liberalism, moderates, conservatives, libertarians, until you get to voluntarism, which is total freedom or REAL freedom. And when I say REAL freedom, I’m underlining the REAL in REAL freedom.

I’m highlighting REAL freedom. I’m bolding REAL freedom. I’m putting it in italics to denote there’s a difference between what most people, you know, think of as “freedom” in the United States, especially in quote-unquote “free countries” in the Western world, and what really is freedom.

REAL freedom is that there’s not a group in society that has an exemption from morality, that gets to use violence and extortion on other people, and luckily, REAL freedom delivers the goods.

Now, here’s another visualization just to kind of give you an idea of what the political landscape is. And so, total tyranny on the far left: the Maos, the Hitlers, the Stalins. You’ve got Kamala Harris and Donald Trump kind of in the middle. If you go a little closer towards REAL freedom, you get Ron Paul.

If you go all the way to REAL freedom, I use myself as an example of, you know, an advocate of REAL freedom, but that’s really the real political spectrum and the Overton window, you know, that has been generated weaponized control of perception, monopoly media, traps everybody in this like little bubble of, “You can either have Donald Trump or you can have Kamala Harris.”

And both of them are nowhere near REAL freedom.

And so one more way of kind of understanding, you know, where this voluntaryism fits on the political spectrum. This is, you know, it’s not a left-right chart. You know, it doesn’t, like the media would have you think there’s the left and there’s the right, and there’s only these two choices you can have: Kamala on the left, or you can have Donald Trump on the right.

But really, the political system is much better thought of in this chart, known as popularly as the Nolan chart, popularized by the Advocates for Self-Government. You can take their world’s smallest political quiz on their website. And there are five questions that check out your personal issues of how you want freedom, how much freedom you desire. And then there are five questions that ask you, you know, how much economic freedom you desire.

If you like a lot of economic freedom and little personal freedom, well, that would kind of make you a conservative, right? Because conservatives and Republicans, they want low taxation and low business regulations, but you can’t be having gambling in certain jurisdictions. You can’t have people smoking plants. So Republicans want to limit personal freedom. These choices put Republicans and Conservatives in the right/conservative quadrant. It makes sense.

If you’re on the left, you like a lot of personal freedom, everybody should be free to gamble as long as they’re not hurting anybody. Everybody should be free to smoke a plant as long as they’re not hurting anybody, BUT liberals want to control business, tax the rich, and steal/redistribute money. And so, very little economic freedom that puts them in the left/liberal quadrant. Makes Sense.

Well, what if you’re for MAXIMUM personal freedom AND MAXIMUM economic freedom? Well, you’re at the top of the pyramid and you’re in the voluntaryist quadrant. My version of the chart is a little bit different in that I created a gap between the voluntaryism quadrant and the libertarian quadrant, and the thing that separates voluntarism from all the other political “ISMs” is that voluntarists do not believe that government is legitimate, desirable, and necessary. And so, everybody in the lower quadrants, they believe that government is legitimate, desirable, and necessary, and most voluntarists, anarcho-capitalists and peaceful anarchists would say that government is illegitimate, undesirable, and unnecessary.

Now, how does that tie to the real world politically?

Well, minarchists (Constitutional Republicans), in the visualization on the right, minarchists, they’re okay with acting violently on peaceful people to acquire fire protection, police, military, roads, and courts. But that’s all they think that the violence should be used for.

Conservatives, they’ll expand the violence to unemployment insurance, retirement insurance, limited health care, limited housing, education, but that’s all the violence should be used for.

Socialists add health care to the mix.

Communists, they’re willing to use violence on people to acquire housing, food, energy, and clothing.

Then there are voluntarists, who are at the bottom and separated from all the others. They’re not willing to use violence against peaceful people. They will seek to acquire desired services through voluntary relationships.

And so now, luckily, amazingly, the good news message that I bring to everyone in the audience today, is that the free market provides a lot of things that the government does for free. There’s economic mechanisms in place that provide these things for free so that a lot of people, when they think that you have to have government to provide public goods, au contraire mon frere!

You do not really need that because the market and market mechanisms are providing these.

So a couple of these are: Spontaneous Order, which is really the idea that the world is a self-organizing system. Order emerges out of disorder or out of chaos naturally in a market process because people want essentially the same things in life and the market will enable people acting freely in their own best interests to provide things for society without having to rob and steal from people. Spontaneous Order is a key one.

The Invisible Hand is best characterized by this Adam Smith quote: it’s not the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

And so, New York City wakes up to hot bagels and hot coffee every morning, not because the baker and the barista love them, but because the baker and the barista want to trade their labor for employment, or they’re entrepreneurs that have a dream about having a bakery and thought that they could do it better than somebody else. So they started a bakery and they provide the luxuries and necessities of life to the population. In exchange, they’re, you know, remunerated. They are able to earn a living. They’re able to put food on their table for their kids and their family because of this market mechanism.

Now, market competition is the idea that, okay, there are these entrepreneurs in the marketplace that want to sell you bagels and coffee, but market competition tempers their ability to want to charge $25 a cup for the coffee and $25 a piece for the bagel with the fact that other bakers and other coffee shops are willing to sell it at a kind of fair market price. And this market competition tempers the entrepreneur’s desire to maximize his revenue. And for the most part you’re going to pay the same for gasoline in major markets. It gets different when you get away from many suppliers, but it’s a market mechanism that keeps everybody honest and keeps prices essentially low without the need for government intervention.

The price mechanism is the idea that prices are really important in society, that prices are sending signals to other market participants and other economic participants on what the true value of the inputs and the outputs are, whether that input is clear, whether that input is plywood. An example: FEMA steals billions of dollars from everybody and doesn’t necessarily get the aid to people that need it in a hurricane. But a price mechanism, when a hurricane is headed for Florida or Acapulco or wherever, the cost of plywood goes astronomical and people all over, without any kind of central intervention, began rushing plywood to Acapulco or Florida to ensure that Acapulco and Florida have plywood.

Now the cost is, some people would go, but they’re charging these incredible costs. No, the market is saying we’ve got a small amount of plywood going around. What are the places that it gets to first? In a fair way, that encourages the good thing of people bringing plywood simultaneously. And it kind of balances out and rushes plywood to where it’s needed.

Capital formation is the idea that entrepreneurs in the market that understand their own businesses and their own industries are really the best ones to invest their capital in new businesses. It’s not state-run businesses. The government frequently loses billions and billions of dollars. Solyndra was a great example of green energy that lost half a billion dollars. And so, when individual entrepreneurs that understand when they invest, those businesses produce jobs and they produce profits.

Profits are reinvested in charities and new businesses, and there’s economic growth. The people who are best positioned to direct that growth are the individual entrepreneurs who understand their industries and are in the best position to make these kinds of investments.

The discipline of constant dealings is another one of my favorite examples of the market mechanism. The discipline of constant dealings is, you know, a lot of business people, they could cheat you, right? The guy at the gas station, he may jigger with the pump so that you will get 0.90 gallons of gasoline instead of the full gallon. Or a guy running a dairy could take a water hose and stick it in the milk tank, watering down the milk. Or there’s a gazillion examples of how market participants could cheat you on a daily basis. But for the most part, guess what? Most merchants—there are examples of people that don’t—are honest in the marketplace because they know that if people find out that they are cheating, that nobody’s going to buy their gas and nobody’s going to buy their milk, and they’re going to go out of business. And so that discipline of constant dealings keeps merchants honest without there having to be government oversight to monitor the marketplace.

Innovation and productivity improvements: If it wasn’t for the crooked monetary system, where the monetary system has given the banks the ability to engage in something called fractional reserve banking, where when you go to a bank to get a commercial loan, car loan, or mortgage, they’re not loaning you depositor money. They just tickle the keys and credit your account with digital dollars, and you spend the rest of your life paying off a mortgage that was created out of thin air. That system is inflationary, and it’s stealing the value out of everybody’s money in a way that very few people realize.

Absent the crooked monetary system, innovations and productivity improvements should be making everything that you buy cheaper every single year. Your dollar should be buying more every single year if the banks weren’t stealing the value out of the money using fractional reserve banking in a way that most people don’t really understand.

Pyxis Ocean sailing through the English Channel from Spain to Amsterdam, March 2024 using 123 foot “Wind Wings” to reduce fuel consumption on average 3.3 tons of fuel each day.

One example that I like to use… Do I have it in here? I might have it in here later on, but we’ll talk about it in a little bit, is a giant sail that ocean-going ships can put on a ship that didn’t used to have a sail. It’s a mechanical sail, run by computers, and it saves on one type of phone 3.3 tons of fuel a day. These are the kinds of innovations and productivity improvements that lower the cost of shipping things across the sea so that the shippers that have the sail can offer a discount. They can get more shipping business. That discount gets passed on to their customers, and the customers might pass it on to the consumer. This reduces the cost of the luxuries and necessities of life.

And these are just a few of the market mechanisms that provide these public goods for free.

Now, at the same time that the market is making everybody richer and improving everybody’s life, government is simultaneously making everyone poorer. Some of these ways that government makes people poorer are monopolies.

I gave this same speech at the People’s Summit in Morelia, Mexico. We shipped books from my distribution center in New Hampshire to Memphis, Tennessee, which is not that far. We gave them 10 days to get it there. They took 11. So, I did not have copies of Government: The Biggest Scam in History Exposed to sell at the People’s Reset. And that monopoly provider cost me somewhere between $750 and $1,000. The book is always the best-selling book at every conference that we go to—almost always the best-selling book. It’s been the best-selling book. So we would have made $750 to $1,000 for the Art of Liberty Foundation, and instead, we lost it because of the monopoly that the Postal Service has as one example of how monopolies hurt businesses.

Economic misallocation occurs when dollars are taken out of the economy away from entrepreneurs who would invest them in new businesses, new technologies that would improve humanity. Money is wasted in unnecessary warfare for wars based on lies and manufactured intelligence in places of the world where we don’t need to be

Price and capital control, central-planned inflationary monopoly money, tariffs and trade barriers, imports and export quotas, bailouts, and subsidies for failing businesses… William Henry Harrison said it best: I believe that all measures of the government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. And most people just don’t understand how government intervention affects them.

Now, the other thing is that the government’s waste, fraud, and abuse is legendary. New York City paid $2 million for a four-toilet park bathroom. They very famously built a park bathroom in New York that had only four toilets. They paid $2 million for it. San Francisco paid $1.7 million for a single 150-square-foot toilet. Okay, the Pentagon has been caught paying $1,200 for coffee cups, $75,000 for ladders, $170 for flashlights, $13,900 for a crew chief’s chair, $400,000 for the helmets that an F-35 pilot uses, $10,000 for toilet seats. There’s a picture of Florida Congressman Mike Waltz confronting Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on why the Air Force is spending $90,000 for a bag of bushings that would cost about $100. It’s absolutely incredible.

Now, people don’t know this, but the spontaneous order, the self-organization— Would this really work? Would the market actually self-organize very complicated things? And the fact is, it’s already doing it right now. Everything that you buy in a grocery store is an example.

I’m using the cell phone here as an example, but the cell phone is an example of hundreds of different companies that come together to produce a cell phone. Some people make the glass, some make the plastic, some make the Wi-Fi transceiver, some make the battery technology, some make the software. There is no one company that makes it. There is no top-down, you know, government bureau that directs the actions of these companies. It’s all happening in a self-organizing system. It’s coordinating the actions of millions, frequently on six continents, without any coercion, where everyone is compensated for their contribution.

Cars, computers, smartphones, bookstores, airlines, and movies are also examples of large-scale supply chains, complex organizations without central control. So, it’s not something that’s pie in the sky. It’s something that’s going on all around you, including this organic, grassroots spontaneous order that is producing public goods.

Underwriter Laboratories certifies electronic equipment for safety without government mandates. The Ocean Cleanup Project is removing plastics from rivers and oceans through a private initiative. The Non-GMO Project certifies non-GMO ingredients where the government wouldn’t, so there was a government failure. The government, through a well-recognized dynamic called regulatory capture, was unwilling to force companies to tell you that their garbage food was genetically modified organisms. The market stepped in where the government failed, and now I don’t buy grains unless they are certified non-GMO.

Consumer Reports tests and reviews just about everything. I’ll talk about the North Maine Woods here in a second.

Rural Metro Fire provides private fire protection, EMS rescue, and medical aid at vehicle accidents and even wildland fire protection. Detroit Threat Management provides cost-effective armed protective services in Detroit, where the monopoly police are notoriously inefficient and corrupt.

We’ll talk about NAV Canada here in a bit. Kiva provides crowdsourced loans to entrepreneurs. They’ve provided over $2 billion worth of loans to startups, the same way the small business example does. The first time that I gave this talk, I was in Sedona for our Liberty on the Rocks conference, which you can find all the archives at Sedona.artofliberty.org.

When I rolled into Sedona for the conference, I had done some advertising in the local newspaper. I signed up for an email blast and learned that Sedona had just spent $1.5 million to construct eight outdoor pickleball courts. So I was shocked, as everyone is probably shocked, to find that they spent $1.5 million to build some pickleball courts.

So I called a buddy of mine that I know in Memphis, Tennessee, that actually has a private pickleball paradise called Willow Grove Pickleball Paradise.

I asked him how much he’d spent to build Willow Grove Pickleball Paradise. What he told me was that the cost to construct six outdoor courts, plus two bathrooms, lights, and fencing was less than $100,000. So he’s currently building five more indoor courts—climate-controlled courts—that he will pay between $325,000 and $350,000 for. He charges $5 to play all day and come and go as you wish. If you buy a monthly or yearly package, it gets even cheaper than that. If you don’t have money, he’s going to let you play for free.

Okay, so for one-third of what the city of Sedona spent, less than one-third of what the city of Sedona spent, he’s providing the exact same service. He’s actually providing a better service. It’s cooler, the grounds are better, he’s got a lake, he’s got horses and mules that will come up and let you pet them, he’s got dozens of different exotic chickens roaming the place. It really is a paradise. So he’s providing a better service with more courts, the exact same service in the sense that he will let you play for free if you can’t afford it. And so, without any waste, fraud, abuse, or extortion.

And also, where is this money going? We did some math. If you had four paddles for each of Sedona’s courts, and they were all made out of solid gold, it would only cost $700,000. So where did all this million dollars disappear to, to provide these eight pickleball courts?

I’d mentioned NAV Canada. You know, a lot of people don’t realize this, but Canada privatized air traffic control. I mean, like, so you know, pickleball, that’s easy at the end, what about something complicated that the government does, like air traffic control? Well, NAV Canada—Canada privatized their air traffic control in 1996 through a sale to a privately run nonprofit called NavCanada. It’s the world’s second-largest air navigation provider by traffic volume. They have 1,900 air traffic controllers, 650 flight service specialists, and 700 technologists and computer programmers. They coordinate the activities of 12 million aircraft movements a year. They’ve got 40,000 customers—airlines, private pilots, airfields, et cetera. They cover 18 million square kilometers. They have 42 control towers. It really doesn’t matter what it is, the market has the ability to self-coordinate the most complicated things.

Well, what about the poor, the needy, the disadvantaged? What about people who break their arm in the job, in the coal mine, or something like that? Well, a lot of people didn’t understand this, but before the government came in with this cash welfare system, which has a lot of problems with its incentives and a lot of problems in turning a safety net into a hammock for people that aren’t interested in contributing to society in a meaningful way, these mutual aid societies used to provide the exact same benefits as the government’s welfare program. They provided unemployment insurance, they provided disability health insurance, and old age pensions. There was something known as “lodge practice” where the mutual aid societies would hire doctors to work on their behalf. Doctors would make house calls. The doctors worked directly for the mutual aid society. They were part of the mutual aid society. They were a member of the mutual aid society. So their interests were completely aligned with the interests of their patients in a way that the current monopoly medical system is not.

And so, medical care used to be a lot cheaper. You didn’t have to worry about the doctor having a financial incentive to inject your child with vaccines or some of the other, you know, problems that we have with monopoly AMA, first-dollar healthcare insurance. And get this, the mutual aid societies competed with each other to see who could offer better benefits for their members. So the Rotary Club didn’t want you going to the Elks, and the Elks didn’t want you to go to the Rotary Club. So they had to compete on who offered better benefits.

And so, you can see how the market provides better outcomes than the top-down government system at the point of a gun.

Etienne, what about the environment? Without government, there wouldn’t be national parks and state parks, and there wouldn’t be people protecting the environment. Au contraire, mon frère, yet again.

A lot of people don’t realize this, but there’s an area in Maine, you can see it there on the right, it’s called the North Maine Woods. It’s 3.5 million acres of privately protected forest in Maine. Mostly, it’s timber companies, but there are private landowners, conservation areas that have already been set off as strictly conservation areas, that are all managed together by the North Maine Woods. It’s twice the size of Massachusetts. And it has all of the amenities that you would expect from a national park or state park. You can go hiking, camping, four-wheeling, snowmobiling, and hunting at essentially the equivalent prices of a state park or national park. So, the market has the ability to protect resources, to protect the land, and to make it available to people without the government as well.

Now, voluntarism doesn’t mean that there isn’t any organization. And again, I’m not just cherry-picking the cheapest pickleball example that I could find. This is an example of where I used to live in Ashburn, Virginia. This is in the tech corridor outside of Washington, D.C. in Northern Virginia. It is a planned community called Ashburn Village. We had 1,500 acres, 5,000 residential units, and 15,000 residents in this planned community. We had four recreation centers, four outdoor pools, one indoor pool, a full weight room, over a dozen outdoor tennis courts, four indoor tennis courts, a full gymnasium, indoor and outdoor basketball courts, a weight room, sauna, steam room, and all of it was paid for through your dues.

So, the community was providing, the private community was providing all of the things that, like, a lot of times the government provides, but it was doing so privately. Now, the roads were managed by the city, but that doesn’t mean that the village wouldn’t have or couldn’t have, through the homeowners association, managed the roads and other things.

That is just, again, another example of how you don’t have to have government. I’m actually headed here at the end of the month to Prospera to check this out for myself and to get scoop from “on the ground”. But even at the country level, a lot of people don’t realize this. In Honduras, on the island of Roatan, is what’s known as kind of a free private city, where some individual business people negotiated a 50-year sovereignty with the government of Honduras. And so, on this 1,000-plus acres, they have their own free private city, where the laws and tax rates don’t apply. And so they have some of the strongest private property protections at the same time as they have some of the lowest tax rates anywhere. It’s a 5% flat tax on gross income for individuals and an additional 1% flat tax on gross income for legal entities. They operate a high-end resort called St. John’s Bay. They’ve got the tallest residential building in Honduras, an 18-hole Pete Dye-designed golf course, private villas, a Bitcoin center, a scuba shop, among other amenities. And they’ve had over 200 businesses that are located there.

This is an old figure so its probably higher now, but they had $120 million invested to date the last time I checked. But they’re organizing a government at the same level as a regular government. They’re doing it privately. They’re doing it at a lower cost than any other government on the planet. And so, all of these government services could be delivered by the free market without the extortion of “government”.

I guess, you know, to kind of sum things up, the good news message is that more freedom equals more prosperity. These are some charts and graphs from some scholarship done by the Fraser Institute of Canada called Economic Freedom in the World. And what they do is they measure the degree of economic and personal freedom that various countries have around the planet. They measure the countries against each other.

And so, what you’re seeing is, in the green, the dark green is the 10% or the top 20% of the freest countries. The light green is the next freest, the yellow is the next freest, and the red is the least free. The bright red is the absolutely least free.

And so the more freedom that you have. The wealthier that you are, the longer you live. The more freedom that you have, the fewer children are forced to work in the labor force. The more freedom you have, the greater percentage of the country’s income goes to the poorest 10% of its people.

The income level of the poorest 10% in free countries is dramatically, dramatically higher than the income level of the poorest percent in less free countries. The income per capita is much greater. The growth rate is greater. The investment per capita is greater. And the unemployment rate is lower.

So we know that the more freedom you have, the more prosperity, the more harmony, good outcomes. Voluntarism really is a way of maximizing economic and personal freedom to maximize harmony and prosperity.

I’ve got a book coming up called Voluntarism – How the Only “ISM” for Everyone Leads to Harmony and Prosperity for All. We’re trying to raise $25,000 for the print run and the marketing campaign about that. You can find out details at voluntarism-book.org . My organization is the Art of Liberty Foundation. We are a startup public policy organization coming at socioeconomic problems from a principled voluntarist perspective, where government is illegitimate on its face.

We’re principled voluntarists, we’re free-market people, and we’re dedicated to exposing energy generation, organized crimes, and control of government and media as I outlined earlier. I mentioned we published Government: The Biggest Scam in History, backed up by the liberator flash drive. These are how you can get ahold of me, and I thank you for your kind time and attention.

Will Keller Outro:

Right on, Etienne. Much appreciated. Look, I got your book right here. Everybody should have this book on your coffee table or somewhere where people can come in and look at it. It reads like lots of good pictures and images and appealing to many people and your work’s been astounding. Thanks so much for being such an inspiration to us all at FUNL, much appreciated.

Let’s see, bring in Will here.

Yeah, great presentation. Oh, man. It just shows how, I mean, Etienne’s a great example of understanding natural law, incorporating natural law and true freedom and bringing it in this, in the governmental and the operations category where it’s like all the information is there. It’s observable. It’s correct. It’s true. You know, the government institutions and systems They are broken, not even broken as he’s talking about, right? They’re inverted and they’re working against everyone.

It’s not even practical. It’s, it’s retarded. It really is. That’s how it works. Etienne, thank you so much for your presentation. And everyone that is watching in Acapulco, Mexico, my brother Yuza, thank you very much. And yeah, and a lot of great comments and chats and the support in there. So please go to ArtOfLiberty.org for Etienne de la Boetie2 and check out his books. And he’s got fantastic other presentations as well.

About Etienne de la Boetie2

Etienne de la Boetie² is the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation, the author of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! and the editor of the Art of Liberty Daily News on Substack and Five Meme Friday, which delivers hard-hitting voluntaryist memes and the best of the alternative media.

He is the author of The Covid-19 Suspects and Their Ties to Eugenics and Population Control/Reduction and Solving Covid – The Covid 19, Eugenics, and Vaccine/Drug Scam Timeline

His upcoming book is Voluntaryism – How the Only “ISM” Fair for Everyone Leads to Harmony, Prosperity and Good Karma for All

About the 4th Annual Freedom Under Natural Law Conference

F.U.N.L. is a collective of like-minded truth seekers, freedom activists and content creators who deeply care for the freedom of Humanity and who find meaning in planting seeds of knowledge and wisdom in order to end slavery one mind at a time.

Our Mission: To serve Truth, to protect and respect Nature and all forms of life, to live in accordance with the immutable and universal principles of Natural Law, to share our knowledge and wisdom in the most efficient way possible starting with our own children, while continuing to improve ourselves and applying this knowledge into concrete actions. To help and support the self-sustainable communities of the future who live by the principles of Natural Law with a deep understanding of the objective difference between right and wrong and who support freedom, creativity, individual expression and holistic health.

FUNL Website with conference replay and ALL the FUNL4 speakers: freedomundernaturallaw.com

Enjoying Our Work on Voluntaryism? – Help Us Finish “THE Book”

If you are enjoying our articles, presentations, memes, visualizations and sample chapters from Voluntaryism – How the ONLY “ISM” Fair for Everyone Leads to Harmony, Prosperity, and Good Karma for All, then we could use some help finishing up the book. We are raising $25,000 to finish the book and do a large, cost-effective print run. We have raised $6537 from 103 supporters with $18,463 left from our $25,000 goal. If you can help then we have some great premiums to say: Thank You! Donate today at Voluntaryism-Book.org

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