New Libertarian Manifesto
New Libertarian Manifesto is Konkin’s 1980 founding statement of agorism. Its program runs from diagnosis to method: statism is the condition, agorism the goal, counter-economics the means, and action — withdrawing into and expanding untaxed, unregulated voluntary exchange — the tactics.
What the Book Argues
Konkin’s argument is that the state is sustained by participation, so the route to a free society is to stop participating and to build the alternative directly. The counter-economy — all the trade the state forbids, taxes, or regulates, from the black market to ordinary unreported exchange — is treated not as a fringe but as the embryo of the stateless order. As more activity migrates into it, the state’s revenue and legitimacy erode, until the counter-economy is large and capable enough to supply the protective and arbitration services people still need. Crucially for the wiki’s adoption debate, the strategy is presented as needing no change in human nature: it asks people to pursue their own advantage in freer markets, not to become more altruistic or more politically engaged. This sets it against both reformist electoral libertarianism and any program that waits on a moral transformation of the public.
Why It Matters in This Wiki
This is the wiki’s canonical source for the exit route in the strategy debate — the complement to withdrawal of consent and the contest of opinion, and the one route that sidesteps the coordination-against-the-state worry by needing participation rather than mass conversion. It anchors Agorism and Counter-Economics and connects forward to the parallel economy, which updates Konkin’s counter-economy with a cryptographic stack aimed at making coercion uneconomic.
See Also
- Samuel Edward Konkin III - the author
- Agorism and Counter-Economics - the concept node this work anchors