F***ed up beyond all recognition. 
I like military acronyms like that. I was a military intelligence analyst in the Louisiana Army National Guard as an undergrad, prior to becoming a libertarian - Battalion Intelligence NCO for a mech infantry unit.
Other favs are:
the ever popular SNAFU, which is really telling - normal situation in a statist military is f***ed up!;
FUMTU - f***ed up more than usual;
SAPFU - surpasses all previous f**k ups.
Still not clear on the quantitative aspect, but I get the general drift. I do agree that critical mass is, well, critical. I suppose my concern is that it seems a catch-22 - until you reach the point at which you have enough people creating enough ‘things of value’, there may not be sufficient activity to sustain the system. What is the argument that this will not be a discontinuity? That is, is the expectation that there will be a steady ramp up until that point is reached? What’s the evidence for this? It seems more likely to me - though I haven’t given this a great deal of thought - that you will involve everyone that is prepared to be involved, and that will hit some sort of limit, which may oscillate, but will not continue its upward trajectory unimpeded, because you are going to have some large block of people who have been effectively conditioned by the State and its institutions who will NOT agree to be actively involved. You seem to be assuming - and forgive me if I am wrong - that the number of those who will agree to become involved will just keep increasing. I would maintain that that is not consistent with my understanding of Americans, or even of humans.
I base this just on my experience with people, with politics, etc. If this limit is less than critical mass - what then?
Well, I certainly advocate a mix of agoric and non-agoric counter-economy, i.e., trade where you can, and exploit the system through tax avoidance where possible.
Anecdotal, at best. A year ago, nobody on Mises.org was talking about agorism. Now, it garners some attention. The concept, at least, has gotten people’s attention. Commencing practical agorism as a bit of a sticking point, to be sure.
Agreed. Some people argue that as the scope of agorist activity increases, the disincentives to participating decrease.
To your point, they would assume that the number of people involved will continue to increase. I’m not entirely convinced of this argument, though. If the best that agorism can do is give me back a piece of my freedom, a few hours of my time each week, a few weeks each year, then I’m better off. Further, I’m not at all interested in interacting with a great deal of these people who have been conditioned by the State. As an agora becomes more sophisticated, it might be possible to avoid the bulk of interactions with these folk.
If you’re the only person growing food in your neighborhood co-op, you’re SOL. If a handful of people start contributing, you start to realize the benefits of scale economies and divisions of labor. It becomes easier for the late-adopters to make the transition. At that point, e.g., you no longer need your neighborhood Wal-Mart or On’s or Meijer to provide you with most produce items. The goal is for the agorists to get to this point, or as near to it as is possible, where they can avoid interacting with the State, and do so practically.
This post reveals the contradictions of agorism. On the one hand it is supposed to be a mass movement to undermine the state and yet the individual goals of an agorist are just some more personal freedom by participating in more organized conuter-economic activity.
My questions still stand unanswered. Where are the agorists to provide the response to the challenges?
Yes, there are no quantitative aspects to agorism.
I suppose it’s too much to realize that while some might settle for just a little more freedom, others will not. Or that saying you’d be happy if it only brought you some more freedom does not mean that you wouldn’t be happier still if it overthrew the state since the latter is still the ultimate goal. I suppose it’s also too much for a libertarian to understand the value of division of labor and the effectiveness of spontaneous order. I suppose if one has difficulty with seeing these things, one might see contradictions where there are none.
The issue is that agorists claim that the agorist ideology has some measurable effect and yet refuse to provide any way to measure it. If you can’t measure the effectiveness of the activity why would anyone participate and believe that it could possibly overthrow the state. With agorism you have no idea what progress is being made to your ultimate goal or if its even attainable.
Agorists in a thread started by agorists to discuss agorism can’t even answer the most basic questions about the ideology and strategy. Everything just turns into agorists claiming things with no evidence or even basic logic to back up the claims.
Perhaps you would care to explain why person A not paying taxes has little to no effect on the government but person B (the agorist) not paying taxes is underminining the state by some exponential level.
Asked, and answered.
And, for the record, I never use the term “exponential.”
This thread has become a broken record…
Some of it has, but much of it is providing the info I’m looking for. Thus, not without purpose or value from where I sit.
Makes sense. Seems like there should be a way to model this ramp mathematically so that the dependencies of the various factors can be better understood.
I also agree with you about even a partial win. It doesn’t have to succeed in undermining and toppling the State to be a very good thing, on net. To hold out that agorism would be an abysmal failure if that does not happen is simply not reasonable IMO.
Again, I see the most probable value in being that those participating would be well positioned when the State self-destructs to seed these ideas and communities. So even if it comes nowhere close to undermining the State, it could still be exceedingly valuable in such a situation.
I think having libertarians stay and continue to spread our ideas and develop alternatives institutions is absolutely necessary to bringing about lasting liberty in the future, even if it doesn’t end up being the main reason for the fall of the state. If and when a state collapses, if there are zero or not enough libertarians in a given place, one or more unlibertarian states will almost certainly rise out of the ashes. Similarly if all libertarians do is attempt to educate. We need functioning alternative institutions here for people to turn to after the collapse. But education is very important too.
I agree with much of this. But here is where we probably disagree: I don’t see anything special about America. Why the insistence on staying here? Are not other peoples just as, perhaps even more, entitled to a shot at liberty? Americans had it, or close to it, and gave it away - hell, nearly BEGGED for it to be taken from them. As far as I am concerned, when America collapses, there will be more opportunity to realize liberty-oriented societies elsewhere. Americans don’t know the first thing about liberty or its demands, despite all the rhetoric about it, and at every point they have been confronted by these demands, they have balked. And, far more than most other nations, they have been so thoroughly conditioned as sheep, I see little point in attempting to undo that training. So I think the chances to realize liberty here on anything like a wide scale are more limited than in other countries. Americans have too many myths, and cling to them no matter what. Besides which, America is too big, geographically. Think it was Montesquieu who first remarked to that effect. A smaller nation would be far preferrable. Not than any place is ideal, but I think many places may prove more fertile than America.
I wonder: is agorism a strictly 1st world phenomenon, or might it also be found in 3rd world countries? Seems like it would be a helluva lot easier to get off the ground in some of those. far fewer agents of the State poking their nose into people’s business…
I may have misspoken a bit there - it’s not that the goods themselves are fundamentally different, but the manner in which they are used. Taking for example the most commonly regarded counter-economic good (and for that mater the one which is most broadly shared between Agorist and non-Agorist counter-economists) - drugs. The average black-marketeer will grow and process them, ship them, and sell them for FRNs, which they then use to buy mainstream economic goods, some of which are re-investment into their business. Only the last contributes positively to the counter-economy.
An Agorist, on the other hand, would avoid the exchange of FRNs, selling as much as possible to trusted persons in exchange for alternative currencies or other goods. They would then use the profit within the Agora - buying counter-economically produced consumer goods, and re-investing like the non-Agorist. Those from whom they buy use their own profits to consume from within the Agora, and develop their own capital goods, and so on. Because (and to the extent that) they are using commodity money, it is not likely for that money to be reabsorbed into the mainstream economy. So as long as the Agorist refrains from “cashing in” for some FRNs by selling their products into the mainstream market (which is possible, but far less likely amongst Agorists than others), the Agora profits by absorbing capital at the expense of the state system. That is the positive function of it - there is also the neutral function of depriving the state of taxation on those goods.
This is the machinery of a counter-economic cell, which in acting strengthens and expands itself, while weakening the state’s power over the economic activities of those who participate. It is not hard for one to imagine that such a cell could provide all or nearly all of the staples of a person’s life, leaving only such things as transportation, communication and housing reglated and taxed. And there are certainly counter-economic possibilities for those things as well. As the Agora expands - as those cells begin to network with one another and the division of labor develops - such possibilities are more likely to become realities.
I am a part of such a cell. Though not nearly so developed as I have described, it is functioning and increasingly more self-aware (it was just a bunch of libertarians who enjoyed barter before I and others introduced the concept of Agorism to the participants). To honor your request for specifics, several farmers grow crops significantly in excess of what they report to the government, and trade for things like homebrewed alcoholic drinks (the manufacture and transportation of which involves myself), tobacco products (which in PA are very highly taxed and regulated - minimum prices, for example, guarantee a grey-market profit) and also services such as construction and car repair. The cell is not fully Agoric since much (though not a majority) of these grey-market goods are sold for FRNs, but until the influence of local Agorists, it was 100% non-Agorist. The trade of precious metals and other commodities as money have begun to emerge in the past year.
Cannot be stressed enough. Even if dozens of secessionist communities as in the Liberty Colony are successful, it will not cause the paradigm shift which must occur for that freedom to be maintained. Only if people have a free-market alternative available to them when their precious state collapses, will there be any chance that the masses won’t just go and set up another one, probably worse than the one that had just failed them.
I don’t insist on everyone staying here (as in the US). But there’s nothing wrong with staying here either. There are a number of obstacles in the way of moving to another country. Sacrifices that have to be made. Job, friends, family, language and cultural differences, etc.
There is also a difference between moving to another less populated country to be an agorist there and moving to an unpopulated out of the way place to start a colony free of any government intervention. These are two different strategies. Both are fine. At this point, neither one is for me - for both personal and strategic reasons.
My wife is from India, so moving there is a very real option. But that’s another big country with a very corrupt government.
I don’t know. Maybe.
This in my opinion, is the biggest isue with Agorism. The presumption that the state will fail, and there will be a vacuum for Agorism to explode into.
I might be able to see it, if I believed “the state” was in isolation. But if for some reason, the US government fell, your foreign creditors would be landing troops on your shore to snatch up everything that isn’t bolted down. That’s if your enemies don’t nuke you first out of frustration and vengeance.
This was an excellent summation, thanks, and congratulations. I’m overjoyed to hear you are having some success - very exciting. I hope it continues to grow!
BTW, regarding housing: seems earthships would fit beautifully into the agorist concept.
India has regions where governmental intrusion is virtually unknown, from what I understand. I have friends who intend to emigrate there. Might be the perfect spot. 
But I understand and respect your reasoning. Clearly, it’s specific to one’s personal situation and outlook. There is no question that obstacles confront expatriates, and the ones imposed by the State will continue to grow, IMO. Currency and emigration controls are to be expected, especially when they get around to implementing a draft.
Well, the Liberty Colony can be invaded too. Or have international political and economic sanctions placed on it. So what?
In any event, do you foresee no resistance to such an invasion?
But in the event of invasion and resistance, wouldn’t it still be better the more libertarians (and agorists) there were