Galtland Index

Start Here

9 min read

Start Here

This wiki asks one question three different ways: how do free people cooperate without being ruled? Austrian economics answers with economics — how prices, money, and markets coordinate millions of strangers with nobody in charge. Libertarianism answers with ethics and politics — what it means to deal with other people by consent instead of force. The cypherpunk tradition answers with code — how cryptography and Bitcoin let people build that voluntary order with tools that are hard for any government to shut down. You do not need to know any of these fields to start. This page explains all three from zero and shows you where to read next.

What this wiki is

This is a library with a point of view. It is built from primary sources — the actual books, essays, and papers, quoted and cited — organized into short linked articles you can read in any order. Its outlook is broadly Austrian-libertarian, but it tries to be honest rather than neutral: it flags where its claims are contested and links to serious critics as well as champions.

Everything here circles one distinction: the difference between dealing with people voluntarily — trade, persuasion, agreement — and dealing with them by force — command, confiscation, threat. Franz Oppenheimer called these the economic means and the political means: you can get what you want by producing and exchanging, or by taking. The libertarian moral rule paired with that distinction — don’t start force against peaceful people or their property — is the non-aggression principle. Hold those two ideas and the rest of the wiki falls into place.

The economic system built on the economic means — private property and voluntary exchange — is capitalism, and it may be the most misunderstood word here. People routinely take it to mean the opposite of what it is: the crony capitalism of firms that buy privilege from the state, or the fraud and coercion that an honest market forbids and punishes — or plain greed, which exists under every system and which open competition tends to channel into serving others rather than fleecing them. Sorting out what capitalism is — and what it is not — is one of the first things this wiki sets out to do.

The three threads, from zero

1. Austrian economics — how order happens with no one in charge

In one breath: an approach to economics that starts from a single acting person and reasons outward, rather than from statistics and equations.

Its central puzzle is that a modern economy has no manager, yet bread reaches the city every morning. How? Through prices. A price is a signal that packs in more knowledge than any expert could gather — when copper gets scarce, its price rises, and every user of copper economizes without being told why. That insight leads to the school’s most famous argument: a central planner, having abolished market prices, is flying blind and literally cannot calculate which uses of resources are worthwhile. See the knowledge problem and the economic calculation problem. Order that no one designed is called spontaneous order.

The same reasoning explains money and crises: when central banks and the banking system expand credit and hold interest rates below the level that people’s real savings would set, they set off an unsustainable boom that must end in a bust — the Austrian business-cycle theory. Underneath it all is the idea that value is not baked into things but assigned by people (subjective value), and the method of reasoning from the fact that humans act on purpose (praxeology).

Easiest way in: Bastiat’s seen-and-unseen — one short idea that reorganizes how you read every economic argument. The tradition’s giants are Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard; the Frédéric Bastiat essays are the friendliest starting point. Full map: Austrian Economics.

2. Libertarianism — cooperation by consent, not command

In one breath: the political idea that you own yourself and the things you justly acquire, and that every dealing between people should be voluntary.

If aggression is the wrong to avoid, then the hardest case is the state — the one institution that claims the right to do things no ordinary person may: to tax (take without consent), to conscript, to forbid peaceful trades, and to punish those who opt out. Libertarian writers judge the state by the same rule they apply to everyone else, and much of the corpus works out what follows: see State Power and Intervention. At the far end, some argue that even law, courts, and defense could be supplied without a monopoly government at all — market anarchism. Libertarians disagree among themselves about how far to take this, from minarchists (a tiny state limited to protecting rights) to anarcho-capitalists (no state at all); the wiki maps that whole range.

Easiest way in: Bastiat’s The Law for the moral case in fifty pages, or Rothbard’s For a New Liberty for the full radical version; The Ethics of Liberty and Hans-Hermann Hoppe push the argument to its foundations. Full map: Libertarianism.

3. Cypherpunk — shifting power with code

In one breath: the idea — argued from the late 1980s and organized into a movement in the 1990s — that ordinary people armed with strong cryptography can protect their own privacy and money without asking anyone’s permission.

The insight is lopsided math: some codes are cheap for you to lock but ruinously expensive for anyone — even a government — to break (public-key cryptography). If that is true, then privacy, free speech, and even money depend less on political permission and more on tools anyone can run. The cypherpunks proposed to build the free society rather than merely argue for it — a stance called crypto-anarchy. The goal that lineage had chased arrived in 2009: Bitcoin, digital money with no discretionary issuer who can inflate it and — when you hold it yourself — no custodian who can freeze it, secured by real-world energy cost (proof of work) and prized by this corpus as a form of hard money.

Easiest way in: the Bitcoin article, then Crypto Anarchy. This wiki’s cypherpunk-to-Bitcoin thread runs from Tim May’s crypto-anarchist manifesto through Nick Szabo’s essays to Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper; The Bitcoin Standard is the popular book-length case. Full map: Cypherpunk and Privacy and Cryptography.

Why the three belong together

They are one argument in three registers. Austrian economics explains why sound money matters and why central control of an economy fails. The cypherpunks built the money — Bitcoin, whose supply follows a fixed schedule no central bank can inflate at will — and the privacy tools to use it. Libertarianism supplies the reason to want any of it: a society run by consent rather than command. That is what the wiki’s tagline points at — where Austrian economics meets cypherpunk code — and a few works sit squarely on the bridge: The Sovereign Individual and its account of how technology quietly redraws the balance of power between individuals and states.

How to read from here

Pick the path that fits you:

How the wiki is organized

Four kinds of page: Concepts explain a single idea; References describe a book or an author; Topics (like this one) are maps that tie a thread together; and Theses apply the wiki’s frame to a specific event in the news. Every article links to its neighbors, and those links run both ways, so you can wander the graph by clicking — or jump to any of the topic maps from the home page and follow your interest down.

See Also

Sources

This orientation page synthesizes the corpus rather than any single work; the foundational texts behind the three threads it introduces are:

Graph View

Backlinks