Galtland Index

Samuel Edward Konkin III

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Samuel Edward Konkin III

Samuel Edward Konkin III enters this wiki as the theorist of agorism: the strategy of growing the counter-economy — voluntary exchange the state forbids, taxes, or regulates — until it displaces the state, rather than capturing it through politics.

Biographical Frame

Samuel Edward Konkin III (1947-2004), often “SEK3,” was a libertarian theorist and activist who developed agorism and its method, counter-economics. Hostile to electoral strategy — his break with the nascent Libertarian Party in the early 1970s shaped his thought — he argued that liberty is built by withdrawing from and outcompeting the state in the market, not by winning offices. He propagated the program through New Libertarian magazine and the Movement of the Libertarian Left.

Konkin sits on the market-anarchist wing of the tradition: anti-state and pro-market like the Rothbardians, but distinctive in treating black- and grey-market activity as the engine of liberation and in his left-libertarian cultural orientation.

Works Present Here

One Konkin work is present: New Libertarian Manifesto (1980), his compact founding statement of agorism. It is the source this wiki cites for the counter-economy as exit strategy and for the claim that the program needs no change in human nature.

Place in This Wiki

Konkin anchors Agorism and Counter-Economics and feeds the “exit” route in the broader strategy debate — the complement to withdrawal and the contest of opinion. His counter-economic emphasis connects forward to the parallel economy and the cryptographic tools that aim to make coercion uneconomic.

See Also

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