Liberty, as defined legally, is an absence of servitude and restraint. American dissidents typically believe in the philosophy of liberty, even if only inadvertently. If it is true that the anatomy of the State is entirely geared toward the coercive suppression of human liberty, then it would be fair to say that the inherent purpose of government is to violently impose restraint, even servitude, upon the hapless citizenry.









Anarchy, etymologically speaking, is defined as being without rulers. As Matthew Reece wrote last year regarding the concept of fake libertarians:

“Thus, libertarians who include pacifism inside their definitions of libertarian are fake libertarians…libertarian postmodernists are fake libertarians… [and] those who call themselves libertarians but explicitly reject anarchism are fake libertarians.” [emphasis added]

This is rather intriguing, for libertarians are those individuals who adhere themselves to the ethical precepts of non-coercion and self-ownership. Given that the State is entirely composed of rulers forcibly imposing servitude and restraint upon its victims, then it would just make sense that once there is an absence of servitude and restraint, there would also be no rulers. If one necessarily follows the other, then it would be accurate to say that liberty and anarchy, properly understood, compliment each other as parallels.

Molyneux’s arguments all revolve around the floating thesis that people already live without rulers in their private lives (for the most part), but yet many of these very same people abhor living without rulers in the public sphere. He says:

“Anarchism is fundamentally predicated on the basic reality that violence is not required to organize society. Violence in the form of self-defense is acceptable, of course, but the initiation of the use of force is not only morally evil, but counterproductive from a pragmatic standpoint as well…[a]narchists recognize the power of implicit and voluntary social contract, and the power of both positive incentives such as pay and career success, as well as negative incentives such as social disapproval, economic exclusion and outright ostracism. This in a very interesting way, the more than anarchism is excluded from the social discourse, the greater belief anarchists can have in the practicality of their own solutions.”

An astute observation, to be sure, but then again, isn’t this just a variation on a theme of what Molyneux himself has described as the fundamental basis of the tax farm itself? If Molyneux’s contention is that the State is horizontal is correct, then it doesn’t really matter whether the goal is liberty or tyranny, for the method of “how things work” is all based on peer-pressure, anyway! Molyneux goes onto say that:

“Now, we certainly could argue that yes, it may be true that an excess of political power breeds anarchy – but that a deficiency of political power breeds anarchy as well!…[t]hus once more we must at least recognize the basic paradox that we desperately need and desire the reality of anarchy in our personal lives – and yet desperately hate and fear the idea of anarchy in our political environment. We love the anarchy we live. We fear the anarchy we imagine – the anarchy we are taught to fear.”

This, more than anything else, is the central idea behind this particular book – that people are already unconsciously living without rulers, but simultaneously, are consciously demonizing anarchy. Contradictions do not bode well for personal integrity, and I suspect that is what Molyneux is illustrating here, for he also says:

“Once we begin to cross-examine our own core beliefs – the prejudices that we have inherited from history – we will inevitably face the feigned indifference, open hostility and condescending scorn from those around us, particularly those who claim to have an expertise in the matters we explore. This can all be painful and bewildering, it is true – on the other hand, however, once we develop a truly deep and intimate relationship with the truth – and thus, really, with our own selves – we will find ourselves almost involuntarily looking back upon our own prior relationships and truly seeing for the first time the shallowness and evasion that characterized our interactions. We can never be closer to others than we are to ourselves, and we can never be closer to ourselves that we are to the truth – the truth that leads us to personal authenticity; authenticity leads us to intimacy, which is the greatest joy in human relations.”

I can definitely testify to this that whenever in private conversations to several American patriots I’ve dared to mention to them the advantages enjoyed by the privatization of the judiciary as a solution, especially considering all the grievances about “judicial activism” expressed most vociferously by none other than these very same patriots! Nationalistic “patriotism,” however, has seldom been open-minded enough to consider alternatives, even free-market ones, because their affinity for protectionism and “constitutional” taxation (among many other things), blinds them to the blessings of liberty.

Most of the rest of this book redundantly points out the clear fallacies statists promulgate whenever they attempt to repudiate the idea of living without rulers. Molyneux said:

“The government does not expand its control because freedom does not work; freedom does not work because the government expands its control. Thus we can see that freedom – or voluntarism, or anarchy – does not create problems that governments are required to ‘solve.’ Rather, propagandists lie about what the government is up to…and the resulting expansions of political coercion and control breeds more problems, which are always ascribed to freedom.”

The scape-goating of voluntary human action, and the free market in particular, as the alleged progenitor of what are simply fake grievances, is such a frequent occurrence in mainstream politics that it’s really just a cliché at this point. Molyneux continues:

“Our core fantasy of ‘government’ is that in some remote and sunlit chamber, with lacquered mahogany tables, deep leather chairs and sleepless men and women, there exists a group who are so wise, so benevolent, so omniscient and so incorruptible that we should turn over to them the education of our children, the preservation of our elderly, the salvation of the poor, the provision of vital services, the healing of the sick, the defense of the realm and of property, the administration of justice, the punishment of criminals, and the regulation of virtually every aspect of a massive, infinitely complex and ever-changing social and economic system. These living man-gods have such perfect knowledge and perfect wisdom that we should hand them weapons of mass destruction, and the endless power to tax, imprison and print money – and nothing but good, plenty and virtue will result.”

Well, of course, if this is how your run-of-the-mill statist truly views government, if only implicitly, then naturally any harsh criticism of it will be perceived by him to be unbelievably abhorrent. Molyneux explicates:

“The justification for a government – particularly a democratic government – is really founded upon the idea of the ‘social contract.’ Because we happen to be born in a particular geographical location, we ‘owe’ the government our allegiance, time, energy, and money for the rest of our lives, or as long as we stay…[h]owever, to say that the same man can be bound by a unilaterally-imposed contract represented by an ever-shifting coalition of individuals, in a system that was set up hundreds of years before he was born, without his prior choice – since he did not choose where he was born – or explicit current approval, is a perfectly ludicrous statement.”

Hold on a damn minute! Didn’t Molyneux say elsewhere in this book that “anarchists recognize the power of implicit and voluntary social contract?” Well, geez, isn’t that an awful coinkydink? I remember Molyneux’s video when he defined and demolished the social contract in under five minutes, so, does this mean that there is more than one kind of social contract? Is there a government social contract that is noticeably different from the “implicit and voluntary social contract” Molyneux is in favor of? Is this really just a case of semantic and poor word choice on Molyneux’s part? What I do know is that John Locke’s social contract theory is what Molyneux thinks he disproved in a series of PowerPoint slides, despite all the nuance involved in the actual concept. Any which way you view it, it would seem to me that Molyneux wants to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to social contract theory, unless I am grossly misunderstanding him.

Another problem with this book, which is not limited to mere semantics, is a regurgitation of his diatribe against college professors who advocate on behalf of the free market. Molyneux argues:

“If economists believe that free market voluntarism is the best way to organize interactions – and clearly they have far more control over their own profession than they do over governments – then they should work as hard as they can to apply those principles to their own profession. To lose their own excess weight, so to speak, rather than endlessly nag other people to follow the diet that they themselves reject. Thus rather than lecture about the virtues and values of a voluntary free-market – with the clear goal of changing the behavior of others – economists should get together and change their own profession to reflect the values that they expect others to follow.”

Again, Molyneux holds that university professorship is antithetical to free market competition, but does tenure really serve as a form of protectionism? Molyneux elaborates:

“To understand this, the first thing we need to recognize about academia is that, since it is highly subsidized by governments, demand vastly outstrips supply. In other words, there are far more people who want to become academics than there are jobs in academia. Normally what would occur in this situation – were academia actually part of the free market – is that wages and perks would decline to the point where equilibrium would be achieved…[g]iven the number of non-monetary benefits involved in being an academic, in a free market situation, wages would fall precipitously, or job requirements would rise. However, since academics – particularly in the US – basically work under the protection of a highly subsidized union, this does not occur.”

If Molyneux’s arguments against free-market proselytizing by college professors is sound, because their employers and/or unions are highly subsidized by the government, then couldn’t the same case be made against those “captains of industry” whose corporations enjoy their own share of undue government largesse? Molyneux also says:

“If academics is about the pursuit of truth, then my particular contributions to the field should at least garner some interest, if only because of the success I have had with laypeople. However, a wannabe grad student will face extreme anxiety at even the thought of bringing some of my work to the attention of his professors, because he knows what their reaction will be – scorn, dismissal, cynical laughter, or genial bewilderment – and also that by bringing my work to his professors, he will be undermining the forward progress of his academic career. Thus what I do is tortuous, particularly to grad students, because it reveals to them the basic reality of academia, which is that it is not largely to do with the pursuit of the truth, but rather is about the currying of influence and favor, and the pursuit of career goals – inevitably, at the expense of the truth itself.”

His potential narcissism aside, I have to ask, would Molyneux care to expose the gun in the room here? Now, it is a much simpler and airtight argument to make that those K-12 public school teachers are the actual government employees here. I say that because their salaries are paid wholly out of taxation, they enjoy powers in the classroom as “disciplinarians,” and their jobs are dictated based upon the policies of school boards, which are a government unto themselves! College professors, on the other hand, are paid (at least partially) from the costs of tuition, they cannot “discipline” their students, and there is no government body that makes coercively binding political decisions about their occupation (at least, not that I am aware of). If anybody’s profession were to be demonized here, it is those government employees who benefit from truancy laws and property taxes, both of which are conveniently missing from the ivory towers of the intelligentsia.

Stefan’s rantings against college professors who preach the value of the free market, allegedly in order to discredit libertarianism, sounds to me more like conspiracism rather than a serious anti-political argument, as would be more solidly the case against K-12 public school teachers. The degree to which government subsidies corrupt the free market into fascism ought not to be ignored, yet, I am skeptical as to whether greater or lesser proportions of coercive funding, intermingled with voluntary funding, truly dilutes the market dynamics at play, especially interpersonal relationships. Given that the influence of peer-pressure never diminishes regardless of whether the goal is liberty or tyranny, then it would appear to me that Molyneux is likely arguing against his own theories, if not otherwise complaining that such peer-pressure that is used towards tyranny is statist, whereas peer-pressure used towards liberty is libertarian.

Stefan Molyneux’s Everyday Anarchy: The Freedom of Now is a refreshingly briefer primer on anarchism than some others I’ve skimmed on the topic. That being said, had Molyneux focused exclusively on the internal contradictions of statism, coupled with people living as if they were already without rulers, then I think this book would’ve been a lot stronger than it is in its advocacy for statelessness. Comparatively speaking, I think Larken Rose did a much doing job doing just that, without all the additional baggage that Molyneux introduced into the mix.













Kyle Rearden started The Last Bastille Blog in 2011 since he thought the blogosphere would be more conducive to his study of a wide variety of subjects within the alternative media. From 2009 - 2012, his former YouTube channel amassed over 127,000 total upload views with 150+ videos; and between 2012 - 2014, his blog has received approximately 81,000 total views. Currently, he is the co-host of Behind Enemy Lines, a creative consultant for Liberty Under Attack Radio, and records podcasts alongside Alex Ansary.