Fifty Ways to Leave Leviathan

[presence]

Leviathan Police State Libertarianism Essays on Liberty Liberty
Fifty Ways to Leave Leviathan

Max Borders
Jeffrey A. Tucker

Tuesday, October 01, 2013

State management of society is not only contrary to human liberty;
it is also unworkable.

It cannot achieve what it seeks to achieve, which is often all-round control of some sector of economic and social life. The attempt provokes a social backlash. People find loopholes and workarounds or just invent new ways to make progress possible. This is because people will not be caged. They struggle to be free and sometimes they succeed.


Over the last century-plus, the Leviathan State has gained the upper hand, sometimes through big periods of upheaval but mostly through a million daily nicks and cuts. What if this process is being reversed in our time? What if the apparatus of control is being undermined with a million acts of entrepreneurship that evade the State’s attempt to plan and command? There is a fundamental asymmetry between the structure of government and the structure of a networked people.


In our times, innovation has provided people with more tools. And often they use these tools to get around the barriers that politicians and bureaucrats have erected. Some of us take note of them every day. And while we may revel in their cleverness, we don’t take time to look at the big picture. Here is where this phenomenon of small ways to break out from and break down the system—which pop culture often labels “breaking bad”—gets really interesting.


Consider the post office. It has not been privatized. It’s just fallen gradually into disuse thanks to the advent of email, texting, and thousands of other ways of communicating. It may stick around for another decade or so, but as a kind of zombie. Surely its days are numbered.


This is the archetype. Government was supposed to provide but didn't. Now markets are picking up the pieces and making new products and services that facilitate better living, which reduces the role and significance of public policy. Every time the State shuts a door or closes a loophole, people find and exploit two more doors, two more loopholes.


If this model of disruption and defiance is part of a larger trend, it provides a very revealing look at a strategy that liberty-minded people ought to intellectually codify, encourage, and practice. We’ve mentioned it before here when we’ve talked about “hacking Leviathan” and Kirznerian “alertness” to undiscovered methods and approaches.
Compared with politics or the slow road of mass education, the work of hacking Leviathan through innovation is a promising road forward. Something’s happening. It’s like the Singularity for civil disobedience. Pandora’s box. Perhaps a series of innovation tidal waves. A whole lot of people are participating in a great unfolding. And if you’re drawing up grand social engineering plans, throw them out. The world is about to get a lot more dynamic.
Here are just 50 ways people are working around State obstacles:

• 1. Airbnb: This service allows people to rent out their homes for a couple of days. It offers competitive prices compared to hotels and gets around the whole of the regulatory apparatus, zoning control, union monopolies, and other barriers to entry. Of course, in some states, hotel cartels aren’t happy.
• 2. Uber: Taxis have their licenses, which drive up fares. It’s a cozy and well-protected cartel. Uber lets you get around this system, finding great rides in clean cars for better fares—all while checking (gasp! unlicensed) chauffeurs with reputation ratings.
• 3. Bitcoin: Government ruined money long ago. The market has made an end-to-end crypto currency. It could mean death for the euro, the dollar, and other fiat currencies. The implications are awesome and inspiring.
• 4. Private power generation: Big companies like Google are tired of dealing with regulated utilities. They fear outages and need more reliable power. They’re generating their own power. There are only a few, but then again there used to be only a few rich guys using cell phones. That’s where innovation happens. Then, the price goes down and the quality goes up. Moore’s Law kicks in. Someday this trend could challenge the grid.
• 5. Concierge healthcare: Doctors are opting out of Obamacare and the third-party payer system. Pay them up front and pay them out of pocket. Get the care you need and go buy a catastrophic plan if you can (instead of taking whatever’s on the Obamacare exchanges).
• 6. Bitmessage: Want to evade the surveillance state? Bitmessage is the latest in crypto communications, poised to replace email. A few more tweaks on the user interface, and we are good to go.
• 7. Email: The process of destroying the USPS as a monopolistic provider of mail is pretty much a done deal. It took 20 years, but now email is the new first-class mail. Meanwhile, the government’s service loses billions each year. Such a moribund provider could go for decades as a tax-subsidized monopoly. But the market moves on.
• 8. Silk Road: This anonymous website lets you use crypto currency to buy illicit substances, including not-yet-FDA-approved drugs and food. You might find this alarming but consider: the site brings a beautiful peace to an unstoppable market that government has otherwise caused to become violent and deadly. (Shut down on Oct. 2. Remember Napster. The hydra lives.)
• 9. YouTube copyright rules: They were once simple, but as remixing, parody, and covers evolve, the exceptions to strict copyrighting are growing. Now a Miley Cyrus video released at sunup is covered 1,000 times before sundown. In effect, the initially imagined scenario of copyright—government confers monopoly status on every piece of art—is dying before our eyes.
• 10. 3-D printing: Not only will people circumvent unconstitutional gun restrictions (like Cody Wilson has), but people will be able easily to get around patents and regulations by printing their own high-flow showerheads. When everyone is a maker, no one is regulated.
• 11. P2P lending: Prosper and Lending Club let people bypass big incumbent banks and crowdfund as borrowers and lenders. Where there is communication, there are deals being made.
• 12. Health coverage cooperatives: It doesn’t have to be just Christian organizations that set up health coverage coops. These groups cover catastrophic healthcare costs for members, bypassing—for now—Big Insurance and the government regulatory apparatus. (See also this group.)
• 13. The raw milk movement: The government has tried for decades to suppress this unpasteurized brew, but fans won’t be stopped. Buyers’ clubs are everywhere. The more the feds crack down, the more the demand for the product grows.
• 14. Private arbitration: If you have a dispute with someone, the last place you want to end up is in the thicket of the government’s court system. People are opting for private arbitration. Private arbitration may be nothing new, but the extent of reliance on it is. There are a zillion bricks-and-mortar arbiters. Online, Judge.me is now defunct, but Net-Arb is still working. Stay tuned.
• 15. Escrow: How do you guarantee that you will get what you pay for online? Escrow.com is glad to hold the payment and verify the transaction before rewarding both sides with the results. It is security for property that lives in the cloud—and no government courts (or even laws) are involved.
• 16. Space tourism/exploration: XCor, SpaceX, and lots of other groups are getting into the private space race. They’re doing NASA—only better, faster, and cheaper.
• 17. YouTube stars: People like Lindsey Stirling, Rebecca Black, and a thousand others are bypassing the old centralized system of getting an agent and begging a monopolistic record label to take control of your life. Lindsey has made sharp YouTube videos that have launched her into stardom, complete with lucrative tour dates. Such decentralization is happening in movies, music, and more.
• 18. TOR/Deep Web: This browser for the crypto web bounces your originating IP address all over the planet. That way you can surf anonymously—i.e., away from the eyes of the NSA panopticon. (What is a cypherpunk?)
• 19. Universal publishing: At one point, a few people maintained the primary conduits of information. Blogging and Web publishing make it easier to express yourself. Censorship has become nearly impossible. The newspapers are finally staking out their territories online. But they are losing control of the primary conduits of information. Tumblr alone has 50 million unique publishers. (Liberty.me will offer a new, distributed platform soon.)
• 20. Death of prescriptions: You can order your inexpensive drugs from many countries now—safely, cheaply, and securely (and with no prescription). No need to give your overpriced Obamacare doctor or Big Pharma a cut.
• 21. Medical marijuana/decriminalization: States are relaxing their prohibitions on marijuana. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the drug war is lost and that some drugs, like cannabis, have real therapeutic value. Regardless, prohibition is a fool’s errand and punitive measures are increasingly viewed as cruel and unnecessary. Even as the crackdowns continue, these are the first signs of the Drug War’s obsolescence and popular dissent.
• 22. Expatriation: Sometimes if you don’t like it somewhere, you just have to leave. It’s easier and easier to find better climes, whether for weather, taxation, or culture. Expatriation from the United States is reaching record levels in 2013. While this number is still only in the thousands, the option to leave is there and more people are availing themselves of it than ever.
• 23. Startup cities: People in developing countries are starting to understand that rich countries are rich for a reason. So poor countries are starting to import good institutions, or are “rezoning” for prosperity (all while the rich countries are going in the wrong direction). Outside of China’s special economic zones (SEZs), Honduran startup cities are a new experiment worth watching.
• 24. Seasteading: Blueseed is one of the earliest examples of entrepreneurial ventures that will take people to the sea in search of opportunity and superior rule sets. The Seasteading Institute has also successfully worked with a Dutch firm to design the first seasteading modules. The harder the tax and regulatory State pushes, the more viable the sea becomes as a place to live and do business.
• 25. Radicalization of media arts: Goodbye network television from the Cold War era and hello subscription-based content. The shows that are running (Breaking Bad, Orange Is the New Black, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire) sport themes of defiance, disruption, and the persistence of freedom in the face of regimentation. Not only is the a la carte model disruptive, the content is subversive.
• 26. Private schooling/homeschooling: If you don’t like the government schools, take your kids out. Millions of families are doing it. Some are even forming virtual coops and getting content from online sources.
• 27. Online education: Are you after a real education or a signaling mechanism? MOOCs and other online sources (like Khan Academy) are reducing the costs of education—away from the inflated guild of higher ed and publicly funded indoctrination camps.
• 28. Alternative nicotine delivery: From a revival of roll-your-own cigarettes to snus (smokeless tobacco) to e-cigarettes, people are responding to health concerns and ever-higher cigarette taxes—just not the way anti-tobacco zealots think they should. Cue increasingly shrill backlash.
• 29. Farmers market cooperatives/urban homesteading: Farmers market coops have people trading goods in kind. People barter and contribute their labor outside the auspices of government skimmers. Plus, people in big cities are growing their own food—USDA free. (Here’s a tip!)
• 30. Private neighborhood security: Check out new apps like Peacekeeper. It’s just one example of the ways local communities can reduce the cost of security and emergency services—and keep it local. (Here’s another in Detroit.)
• 31. Barter markets: If you are in business, you know the score. If you can trade services or goods directly, it’s best to forego the paper trail. You donate programming time, I’ll give you web space. You promote my product, I’ll promote yours. If money doesn’t change hands, you can avoid all kinds of problems with the government. Barter has become a natural response to the tax collector.
• 32. Email/social media swarming: With social media, it is possible to ignite popular outrage against the machinations of legislators. The outcry against SOPA/PIPA is a good example. The floods of protest against invading Syria had an effect on the pullback from that near disaster, too. Political activism will never be the same. It’s desktop democracy. Aaron Swartz lives forever.
• 33. Camera phones: One powerful weapon against the State is probably in your pocket right now. Consider Copblock and the Peaceful Streets Project. They keep cops accountable through tech-enabled “eternal vigilance.” The more people who stand up in the face of intimidation (or simply film from their windows with a zoom lens), the better.
• 34. Private venture capital markets. There’s a problem with Fed-set interest rates. No one really wins. Since the policy of zero-percent interest rates began, a gigantic non-bank lending and borrowing sector has picked up where the banks left off. And its rates are set by the market.
• 35. P2P file sharing: The survival and persistence of file sharing through “torrents” shows that civil disobedience in the face of intellectual monopolies is alive and well, despite a 20-year war on the practice. The more the monopolists fight, the more file sharers win.
• 36. Speed: At a certain point, no one bothered driving 55 any more (not just Sammy Hagar). People sped en masse until Congress decided to let the states set speed limits—higher. It’s a paradigmatic case: People disobeyed until the law was changed.
• 37. Crowdfunding: If you need startup money, you can pass around the virtual begging bowl. But it can’t be just any old thing. You have to convince the crowd to let go of their resources. But that might be a much lower barrier to get over than snagging the attention of venture capitalists or prying a loan out of your bailed-out bank.
• 38. Social entrepreneurship: The welfare State tends to make people dependent supplicants. Foreign aid does, too. But entrepreneurs with causes are creating better ways of helping the poor, from microfinance to the return of mutual aid societies like the Christian healthcare coops cited above. The social entrepreneurship sector is enjoying a tech-enabled renaissance despite the State. (See also young social entrepreneurs.)
• 39. Medical tourism/opt-out: For a while now, people have been taking their medical problems to other countries that offer comparable care more cheaply and without all the red tape. In fact, people used to come from Canada to get care they couldn’t get in the land of “free” healthcare. Medical inflation is so bad in the United States now that a lot more people are leaving to get treatments abroad, or opting out of the third-party payer healthcare cartel. Meanwhile, some people are leaving to get treatments the FDA hasn’t approved.
• 40. Self-managing organizations: Firms like Valve and Morning Star show that you don’t need formal hierarchies—“bosses”—for an organization to run well. These firms might teach us that the world doesn’t need bosses, either.
• 41. Tax sheltering: Value creators are tired of having their rewards raided by the people with the guns and the jails. Apple, for example, uses a multinational tax-sheltering scheme so complicated that mere mortals can’t possibly follow it. The result: extra capital to make the iPhone ever cooler. Politicians whine but consumers cheer. (Just when you thought Swiss privacy laws were finished, there’s no doubt that clever people will find new ways to hide their capital from the State.)
• 42. Supper clubs: Underground foodies are paying visits to chefs and great cooks outside the auspices of the public health nannies. Every home is a restaurant, every kitchen an income earner. Similar supper clubs sprouted up in Chicago when aldermen in that city banned foie gras (a ban that was eventually overturned thanks to popular outcry, civil disobedience and counter-special interests).
• 43. Offshoring and inshoring: Sometimes corporate taxes, union controls, and regulatory control are all just too much. U.S. corporations take their production elsewhere (currently the United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, when state taxes are taken into account), even as foreign corporations venue-shop for the best production facilities in the United States (away from high taxes and cartelized unions).
• 44. Food trucks: Bricks-and-mortar restaurants love regulations because they can keep a boot on the necks of competitors. That’s why cities that tolerate food truck culture are giving these restaurants a run for their money. If you can stand to eat your tacos on a park bench, it might be worth hitting a food trailer—the ultimate in microentrepreneurship. They are often at the forefront of experimentation and variety.
• 45. Social networks and Skype: Millions of people from all over the world are interacting as if they were next-door neighbors. Subtly this blurs the lines created by nation-states and creates a far more cosmopolitan world—one that exposes the arbitrariness of jurisdictions that you may or may not happen to have been born in.
• 46. Driverless cars: The technology is here. It certainly changes the calculation for distracted or intoxicated drivers, and it fixes the problems with public roads the State won’t fix. Driverless cards will give us safe, automated travel and deny the State funds it gleans from hassling people for both major and minor offenses that result from bad infrastructure, human error, and poor judgment. It’ll just take one or two areas of the world to deploy them successfully to unleash the change.
• 47. Crowdsourcing private equity: Kickstarter and other online fundraisers were required by law to restrict their services to donations and not sell stock. But what about premiums for donations? How big can they be? The limits are being tested. In a few years, you will be able to buy startup equity with Bitcoin and the whole world will benefit. In any case, the loophole has been already been created.
• 48. Private conservation: You can be an environmentalist without agitating to have pristine lands given to the State for taxpayer management. Groups like the Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited do great things when they don’t turn land over to the State. And private individuals are opting to conserve land rather than sell it.
• 49. Immersive environments: We’re in the process of creating the Matrix around us. From Second Life to immersive games, we may soon see linkages between the virtual world and the crypto economy that result in interesting new forms of order.
• 50. Twitter revolutions: Having troubles with a tinpot dictator or religious zealots? Organize, demonstrate and overthrow with Twitter—#overthrow. (But be careful you don’t end up installing a regime that’s worse than the one you helped overthrow.)

Now that you see the machinery in operation, step back for a moment. Imagine that the world spinning through time has been like an onion. Over the years human beings have wrapped layers of progress around our blue orb. First it was the Stone Age, then the Agricultural Age, then the Industrial Age, then the Commercial Age. Now we live in the Connected Age.


In this most recent era, a lot of interesting stuff is starting to happen—the most interesting of which is the increasing obsolescence of the State. It doesn’t know anything we don’t know, and the only thing it can do that we can’t is force everyone, at gunpoint, to fund its whims. Our knowledge is crowdsourced, and we never stop learning from each other. We are integrated as in one global, self-ordering city. A few people are starting to see that the circumstances of birth and culture are contingent and the lines are blurring. National boundaries are less tied to the people within them.


The cost of connecting with other like-minded people is going down. Each of us in our private spheres of activity can get on with the business of interacting without the need for terra firma or permission. It’s as if we’re creating communities in the sky and commerce in the ether. It’s nobody’s business because millions of us simply make it so. It’s the ultimate form of democracy.


There may be a technological arms race with “authorities” in the short term, but unless said authorities are willing to get really totalitarian, really fast, the pace of interconnection and creation will simply overwhelm them—even as they try to regulate it all away (with the best of intentions, of course).


This is the way bad laws and bad regimes die. Enforcement becomes impossible. Exceptions are made. Authorities get exhausted. People feel emboldened. It happened this way with anti-usury law in the Middle Ages. Eventually they became unviable in the face of modernization.


And in the days of Prohibition, the law meant every other neighbor was participating in the black market. Repeal came not because Al Capone and his competition were playing shoot-‘em-up. Repeal came because Americans learned the hard way that you cannot legislate morality—not easily, anyway. And the bootleggers didn’t have Snapchat, Bitcoin, and Tor.


Now, imagine not just alcohol, but 10,000 simultaneous products, services, and communities operating concurrently. And in each of these 10,000 products and services, imagine markets of millions.


It seems there are a few possibilities for the State given its largess and power:

• Grow rapidly along with these industries—metastasizing throughout this economy, creating millions of virtual gestapo-like agents that would have to cross national borders to track people down and keep them in line;

• Make examples of a few people in each of the 10,000 industries with punishments severe enough to frighten the rest and keep everyone else in line, causing many of those grayish industries to go out of business; or

• Skim a little bit off all of it, but tolerate it.

In any of these scenarios we can imagine cooperating international agencies, maybe coalescing into something that would be a big, rather rabid INTERPOL with the eyes of the NSA and the aspirations of the UN. It’s not inconceivable that this creature would come into existence. In fact, it seems rather likely. After all, these new communities and markets would be international.


But how long will the State be able to keep up with the dizzying pace of innovation, as this civil disobedience hydra sprouts two heads in the place of any one severed? Unless the State gets really repressive really fast (and we’re all prepared to let them), its functionaries will not be able to control the swarms and the gales of creative destruction those swarms bring with them. Fifty ways will become 50,000. This is our present. This is our future.


Max Borders
Max Borders is Director of Idea Accounts and Creative Development for Emergent Order. He was previously the editor of the Freeman and director of content for FEE. He is also cofounder of the event experience Voice & Exit.

Now see:
Fifty More Ways to Leave Leviathan

 

[phill4paul]

"The problem is all inside your head", she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to leave Leviathan

She said it's really not my habit to intrude
Furthermore, I hope my meaning won't be lost or misconstrued
But I'll repeat myself at the risk of being crude
There must be fifty ways to leave Leviathan
Fifty ways to leave Leviathan

Just Expatriate, Nate
Get Concierge healthcare, Lar
Send an email, Lail
Just get yourself free

......

 

[erowe1]

51. Having a job where you get paid under the table
52. Hiring someone to work for you and paying them under the table
53. Hiring illegal immigrants
54. Settling disputes in nongovernmental courts
55. Getting married without a license

 

[phill4paul]

51. Having a job where you get paid under the table
52. Hiring someone to work for you and paying them under the table
53. Hiring illegal immigrants
54. Settling disputes in nongovernmental courts
55. Getting married without a license

All the above. Bonus for 51., 52., 53. is that you don't have to report income and pay Fed. and State taxes on it. Also no gov. licensing when working under the table!

+rep!

 

[dannno]

Hey presence, what do you think of Wire? A lot of people are using it for encrypted private chat/communications, seems like it is blowing up.. it's a great alternative to SMS chatting on your phone (just download the app) or also you can chat online.

https://wire.com/?hl=en

 

[presence]

56. doing just about anything productive without a license

 

[Suzanimal]

50 More Ways to Leave Leviathan

...

1. Become an e-resident of Estonia. Estonia was once an unwilling satellite of the Soviet socialist empire. Today, the country is leading the way toward the breakdown of nation-based political organization, especially with its new e-resident program. Anyone can become a resident for $61. What can you do with that? Well, you get a cool card, and there might be some business and banking benefits. No one knows for sure, not even those who champion the program. But it’s a step in the right direction. Digital residency might mean more than physical residency in the world of the future.

2. Skip licensing with TaskRabbit. Occupational licensing is one of the dumbest ideas ever, a real holdover from 18th-century mercantilism. Why must we create a state-protected cartel for every task? Well, TaskRabbit is helping to bust them all up with a system for connecting service providers with service seekers. Know how to fix a sink or need one fixed — or hundreds of thousands of other tasks? Get connected in minutes. So much for the gatekeeping monopolists who stand between us and our needs.

3. Get anything delivered with WunWun. When you need a government service, you get it on their terms. More and more, when you need anything else, it will come to you. WunWun is fairly new and only operates in New York and San Francisco, but you can see where this idea is headed. Click a button on an app and, if it can be brought to you on a bicycle, it will be there in no time. You pay with a credit card. This service is going viral, and paying with cryptocurrency will be an option.

4. Hire or be hired with oDesk. In the old days, getting a job meant impressing a company enough to take you on long term. But in the digital age, anyone can work for or with anyone else, and oDesk is one of hundreds of platforms that make this possible. Freelancing was once the exception, but with government rules and mandates making conventions less viable, millions are turning to task-based employment. Work for whomever you want, whenever you want. It’s a great way to overcome the barriers of the regulatory state.

5. Moonlight with eLance. If you have a skill and a job, but government regulations limit you to 30 or 40 hours of work per week, you can still put those nights and weekends to productive use. Many services, such as eLance, allow you to pick up extra cash without checking with the central authorities. It is completely beyond the capacity of the Department of Labor to monitor this type of work. They call it "exploitation," but we all know it’s just a matter of making ends meet.

6. Foil the revenue cops with Fixed.com. Since the financial crisis of 2008, local governments have been hurting for revenue, so they unleashed the cops to bring in the money. This is one major reason why nearly everyone feels oppressed by the police these days. But the app economy has come to the rescue. Scan your ticket and submit, and a local attorney will push for dismissal. The fee you pay is a fraction of what the government demands. For now, it’s mostly a San Francisco service, but it will soon expand.

7. Put that car to use with Getaround. You have to get somewhere, but it is not always easy because government transit systems are so terrible. Now there is a way to share your car with others and make money at the same time. This app, one of many such services, allows you to rent a nearby car for the day, putting idle resources to work without crazy government mandates for carpooling and public transport. It’s the market at work fixing yet another big problem.

8. Your house becomes a restaurant with EatWith. Why should the regulators say what is and what isn’t a restaurant? If you have a kitchen or an appetite, there are others who might want to make an exchange with you. Such services are busy every day busting up the eating cartels. They are also helping to bring back the dinner party.

9. Get a business loan at the Funding Circle. The Fed broke the banking system in 2008 with its crazy bailouts and zero-interest-rate policies. It is not a reliable source for doing what banks have always done to make money. But the private sector has come to the rescue with online sources for business loans. The interest on such loans is market based, revealing the weird world we have today with regard to interest: there’s the official rate, and then there’s the real rate.

10. Monitor overlords with copblocking. It’s become a thing now that the police are filmed by regular citizens all across the United States and the world. Ten years ago, filming a cop might have gotten you arrested. Today, there is nothing they can do about it, since everyone carries a video maker in her pocket. Filming is not a perfect solution, but it sure makes the cops more accountable. Livestreaming means that the video is still out there even if your phone is confiscated or smashed. Copblocking has become a way of life.

11. Try mobile health care. Time was when health care came to you. As the industry became more cartelized and expensive, the industry dictated the terms and you had to go to them. But regulations have pushed matters so far that the system is breaking down, and many providers are seceding toward a consumer-driven model. Even companies like Uber are looking into putting doctors and nurses on wheels. Such services will only be for the well-to-do — for now. But just as mobile phones got better, faster, and cheaper, so will health care delivery. Mobile health care startups are already attracting a lot of venture capital. First up: Uber for hangovers. (Note: Uber Logistics is coming soon.)

12. Get married on the blockchain. Marriage before the 20th century could be a purely private affair between individuals or within religious institutions. States took over marriage in the 20th century with licenses and strictures everywhere. There’s no better way to depoliticize this institution than finding another way to contract a marriage besides going to the State. The blockchain — bitcoin's payment system — is perfect for posting contracts that are time-stamped, nonforgeable, and verified. Why not let it be the way out of State-controlled marriage? (See Bitnation.)

13. Use blockchain contracting. People who love the distributed ledger have counted fully 84 possible uses of the blockchain for keeping all kinds of records and contracts, including public and private equities, bonds, spending records, crowdfunding, microfinance, land titles, health records, forensic evidence, birth certificates, wills, trusts, escrow, business accounting, and just about anything else that involves contracts. This is serious future stuff: a fully functioning body of law in the cloud that works without lawmakers or bureaucrats.

14. Manage transactions with Counterparty. Let’s say you have an idea for a legal institution that isn’t yet available, or you want to pioneer a new system for business-to-business exchanges and invoicing. There are at least two well-funded platforms that specialize in innovation on distributed networks: Ethereum and Counterparty. They are busy working (in private) with some very large companies right now. Private, lower-cost alternatives to government are on the way.

15. Encrypt your smartphone data. Ever since people became aware that government is using surveillance to track our every online move and every phone call, people have demanded solutions. Apple was the first to act to encrypt all smartphone data to the point that not even the company itself can access it (iOS8). The same change is being made to the Android operating system. The FBI went nuts and denounced this encryption, but it’s too late. Users feel safer, and there’s no going back.

16. Buy and sell through Open Bazaar. Last year, the government took down the Silk Road online marketplace, seemingly ending a peaceful solution to the violence of the drug trade. Several more sites popped up to take its place, but the ultimate solution lies with a distributed network with no central point of failure. This is what the company Open Bazaar is doing. It will be a marketplace that anyone can download and implement. It lives on a network too diffuse to be dissolved. And it is designed for bitcoin.

17. Use tax preparation software. It is nearly beyond the capacity of mere mortals to prepare taxes by hand these days, but software has come to the rescue. There are so many packages available that put the power of a huge team of accountants in the hands of every person, and at a very low price. It’s amazing to see how the private sector has managed to save us time and money in this most arduous task.

18. Ditch school and go Praxis. Everyone knows there is a huge college bubble developing, with debt and costs exploding. The question has been: what will replace the traditional path to higher education? Innovative alternatives combine work and study into affordable one-year programs that bypass traditional college entirely. The student integrates into a commercial space and thereby completes the program having obtained actual, valuable skills. That’s a massive change for the better.

19. Enjoy pot legally. Forty years ago, Richard Nixon started a war on pot as a political maneuver. It boosted his credibility and attacked his enemies. Sadly, tens of millions of innocent people have been abused and caged as a result. But the public isn’t standing for it anymore. States and cities are decriminalizing it all over the country in response to noncompliance and voter revolt. Nearly half the states have liberalized. Only the South remains to act in some form. It’s a beautiful thing to see freedom from the drug war dawning at last.

20. Build your car from a kit. Federal regulations have made a mess of car coolness over the years, mandating higher hoods and trunks and dramatically reducing visibility thanks to safety standards (even as fuel economy mandates lighter cars). Whatever happened to the car of the future that looked sleek and amazing, like an arrowhead? Well, there is a loophole: you can build your own. This is what FactoryFive allows you to do. How satisfying to drive an embodiment of the rebellious spirit!

21. Become a homebrewer. It’s seems incredible that the United States once banned the production and distribution of alcohol by constitutional amendment. Talk about nuts! Prohibition was repealed in 1932, but the prohibitionist mindset is still with us. That hasn’t stopped the homebrewing of beer from taking off in a dramatic national trend, however. The craft-brew movement started with a guy working in his basement. It’s now a large commercial industry to supply enthusiasts. Be your own bootlegger.

22. Contribute to community charity online. The rap about capitalism is that it's all about greed. That's nonsense. A major employment of capitalist tools has been the building of huge community-based networks of philanthropy. Through sites like Groupon Grassroots, you can now support a large variety of meritorious projects right in your own neighborhood. Charity has never been more networked and effective as compared with tax-funded transfer payments.

23. Grow plants from open-source seeds. Since the movie Food, Inc., the public has been widely and rightly upset about patented seeds. Seed patents conflict with 6,000 years of agricultural practice in which people save and share seeds. The Open Source Seed Initiative is fighting back against government-protected monopolists by producing excellent seeds for sharing around the world. It’s the application of the most successful software model to the practice of growing food. No government agents or crony thugs involved.

24. Live in a tiny house. Since at least the 1920s, the American dream has been all about home ownership — and the bigger, the better. Bankers loved it and so did government, which subsidized the trend for the rest of the century. Then the system exploded in 2008. Today, people are busy rethinking, and one result is the tiny house movement. Tiny houses are affordable, easy to keep up, and allow for flexible and light living. They’re also illegal in most municipalities, but thankfully they can also be mobile.

25. Sip ayahuasca tea from abroad. Native populations of South America have used the herb ayahuasca for centuries as a natural hallucinogen. They say it makes profound spiritual revelations possible. Maybe. But whatever: the drug warriors hate it. That hasn’t stopped the development of an active market for spiritual tourism and for acquiring ayahuasca teas from abroad. Nothing can stop the forces of supply and demand.

26. Attend Voice & Exit. This festival of the future is poised to give TED a run for its money. The idea — the human algorithm — is about abandoning systems that are no longer working and starting new systems (in the spirit of this article). “Exiters” flock to the event each year to celebrate human flourishing, and there will soon be events in multiple cities. The founders are proud of their post-partisan ethos and welcome people from all backgrounds. But the focus is on celebrating voluntary solutions to improving oneself, one's community, and the world. (Disclosure: Max Borders is a Voice & Exit cofounder.)

27. Drink butter coffee. How could something so simple and wonderful elude us for so long? The trend to mix butter and coffee underscores how brilliance and innovation need not involve complex technology. It only requires insight. When you embrace butter coffee, you are leaving that state-perpetuated myth that fats found in butter are unhealthy. It took a peer-to-peer network of ancestral health practitioners to bring down the anti-fat propagandists and scientific “experts” a peg or two.

28. Be a fully informed juror. It’s the traditional right of juries to judge not only the defendant's guilt or innocence but also the law under which he or she is charged. But jurors are rarely told that. Sometimes, however, their conscience guides them in the right way, as with many recent marijuana cases. There are hundreds of documented cases in which juries have simply refused to convict regardless of evidence. Prosecutors have become discouraged at even finding jurors, so they shelve the cases. The FIJA is doing heavy educational lifting here.

29. Hire a virtual assistant. Minimum wage laws and other regulations mean it’s too expensive to hire assistants the way people once did. That’s tragic. But technology finds a way. You can hire an assistant online without having to fork over the big bucks for benefits, health insurance, and unemployment insurance. They work through email, Google hangouts, Skype, and other conferencing systems. And you can find them at sites like Brickwork.

30. Eat grass-fed beef. Government apparently wants all edible animals stuffed with corn — because the corn lobby remains one of the most powerful in Washington. But not all consumers are going for it. They are finding ways to import grass-fed beef and even to do ranching their own way. Food innovations such as these can’t be stopped, no matter how many agents the feds send out to arrest the supposed bad guys. Rogue farming and ranching are on the rise.

31. Read or publish an eBook. Time was when only the rich could afford home libraries. They were treasures, more valuable than houses and the land they sat on. It was only in the 20th century that home libraries became common. In the 21st century, anyone with a cheap e-reader can download hundreds of thousands of books at no cost. It’s a breathtaking development, and yet how many of us take all this knowledge for granted? Every dystopian novel features a world of censorship. That world is impossible today.

32. Participate in Liberty.me. The ideas of liberty have always needed an action plan, something besides begging the people in power to recognize human rights and liberties. Now there is a global liberty community that provides discussions, libraries, friendship, and turnkey publishing, effectively crowdsourcing the building of liberty. It’s a community for doers, not just dreamers, and it’s made possible entirely through digital media. (Disclosure: Jeffrey Tucker is the founder.)

33. Benefit from drones. Two years ago, the word "drone" was synonymous with US imperialism and murders abroad. Then the private sector got involved, and drones are now used for humane purposes such as delivering groceries and other products. Amazon Prime Air is the pioneer here, but it is not difficult to imagine these glorious machines flying all over the airspace in a way that serves people, getting them what they need or want in a way they want it. That even includes beer, except that the FDA shut this service down. For now.

34. Use multisig. Bitcoin can brag of its peer-to-peer structure, but what if you want more than one party around to execute a transaction? For example, business partners need to all be involved in decision making. Another example is a bequest: the beneficiary needs access. Twelve months ago, multisig seemed like a dream. Now, it's a reality. All the main exchanges offer multisignature interfaces. You can have many people involved in making a transaction now, potentially hundreds. This is the ultimate in customizable payment and money systems.

35. Stream your music. Some readers might remember meandering through record stores looking for “long-playing” records. Then came eight-tracks. Then came cassettes. Then came CDs, and they were amazing. But they didn’t last long. The world became fully digitized with the iPod and MP3s. But that didn’t last long, either. Just within the last 12 months, we’ve seen miracles happen. Infinite libraries of thousands of years of music are now available for low fees, via tiny devices, at sites like Spotify, Pandora, Google Play, and hundreds of others. You can listen to anything, anytime, anywhere. It’s mind-boggling, and it makes a mockery of regulatory attempts to control technology and the arts.

36. View nanoscale lithography. Copyright is pretty weird, forbidding reproduction of an “owned” image or text without specifying the medium or scale. What if you take a giant picture and reduce it to microscopic size and embed it in another piece of art? Is that infringement? One artist decided to test the notion. How absurd can copyright enforcement be? The result is “When Art Exceeds Perception,” an exhibition of art at Cornell University. The reproductions can’t be seen by the naked eye, but the copyright holder is still objecting, which is, as it turns out, part of the art itself.

37. Be your own quant. Ten years ago, there was an emerging hysteria about how “quants” — super-smart number crunchers with private knowledge — were ruling the financial space, edging out individual investors and even medium-sized institutions. They were rigging the game and grabbing all available profits for themselves. Today, the same and better knowledge is being democratized with such services as Kensho, which is bringing quant-style power to every investor and institution, essentially running a Google-style search feature for investments. So much for the monopoly. The market's tendency is to distribute valuable information.

38. Skip the student loans. A key problem with government loans is that they are not creative. Students rack up debt and find their careers hobbled for years. What if there were a different way? Lumni suggests this: they will pay for your education and, in return, you give a percentage of your income back after you get your paying job. It’s not a loan; it’s an investment — or a form of seed funding. It’s flexible, and the company benefits from your later performance. Now that’s creative.

39. Write a judge at a sentencing hearing. No one wants a case to go to trial anymore, not defenders and not prosecutors. It makes sense: courts are broken beyond repair. Sadly, this means that many innocent people plead guilty just to break free of the system. But there’s still the sentencing, and the judge has massive discretion. Your letters on behalf of the defendant can and do make a huge difference. They should be personal and authentic. Your plea for leniency can keep one good person out of a cage.

40. Learn anything. Online learning used to be a novelty. Then it started becoming mainstream and comprehensive. Today, it is exploding beyond belief. Here is a site that offers 100 other sites that teach just about anything you could ever want to know. And the crazy-great Khan Academy isn’t even listed. It boggles the mind to consider that there was a time when government imagined that it could control what we learn.

41. Transfer money ridiculously cheaply. Life was proceeding normally, then suddenly an $80,000,000 transaction floated across the Blockchain. As always, the money moved, completely and wholly and fully verified, within minutes, unlike a bank transfer or a credit card transaction. But here’s the kicker: the transaction only cost $0.04! That’s a savings of $2 million from what any other form of moving that sum would take. To anyone but the government, that’s serious money. Can Bitcoin break the network effect of nationalized money? Absolutely.

42. Remit money cheaper. Banks and wiring companies are charging too much money for people to send money home — mainly to poor countries. But remittances are about to get a lot cheaper. Companies like TransferWise, Moni Technologies, and WorldRemit are competing, paradoxically, to keep more money in the hands of people in the developing world.

43. Start a podcast. Podcasts are old school, but in this world of nonstop surprises, that doesn’t make them outmoded. They are more popular than ever before, and ever easier to start. This makes sense, given the growing length of commutes and people’s desire to gather interesting information — and to know what’s true. At the height of State power in the 20th century, the State controlled all information flows. Now, anyone can start a fireside chat with the world. The monopoly of information is ruined.

44. Make a movie. Five years ago, people were still buying camcorders. They were expensive and not that effective. They were a vast improvement over the on-shoulder models from 20 years earlier. But today? Everyone with a smartphone carries a movie maker in his or her pocket. Anything and everything can be streamed, and the competition has caused movie quality to soar. Plus, there are no more secrets in public spaces, and this has to be a good thing for human freedom, given that the State has lived on hiding its deeds from public notice for, well, thousands of years.

45. Get a Fiverr. Maybe you want to send a customized Christmas song. Maybe you need a new logo for a blog. How about a custom shirt design or a new stamp for your business? All of this can be done for five bucks. That’s right, a full website that is offering P2P services that used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. It’s all voluntary and everyone wins. How can you not come away with a smile? Note that the prices of state services are forever rising while the private sector is forever driving them down.

46. Pay with dogecoin. This “alt-coin” — a spin-off cryptocurrency — started as a ridiculous joke. It was an Internet meme of a Shiba dog looking oddly smart and sweet. Nothing more. The image was slapped on a cybercurrency on its own blockchain, just to show that it could be done. And then it took off like a rocket. Everyone laughed until it became real. Today, dogecoin is the number three most-capitalized cryptomoney, after litecoin and bitcoin. It’s also fun to mine and ridiculously plentiful. Sure, it could crash, like so many others. But while it lasts, it teaches us a lesson: there is value in Internet fashions. It’s all subjective.

47. Partake in the Creative Commons. Not every government imposition on market institutions allows for a way out. But in the case of copyright — a regulatory intervention that has become a major source of mischief in the digital age — Creative Commons is the answer that freedom-lovers can embrace. FEE founder Leonard Read pioneered this approach in the late 1940s, long before people even questioned copyright. FEE in 2014 has gone all the way by putting all its content in the commons with no restrictions. Goodbye censors. (Note that CC offers many varieties of licenses, and some are even more restrictive than government copyright.)

48. Tsu me. There are hundreds of social networks today, and one really big one. How long can that last? A site called Tsu.co opened in October and, within only a few weeks, it rocketed to the top of all site rankings. The move has been so fast that plugins haven’t caught up to it yet. Yes, the new social network learns (steals) from Facebook in lots of ways. But that’s the way the market works: the experience of one company becomes a collective good that everyone can try out — and then improve on. No one stays on top forever. Just ask MySpace.

49. GetGems. Instant messaging is still the thing, but what if it lived on a distributed network with no central control that also allowed instant currency exchanges at near-zero cost? That’s what going on at GetGems. It’s some pretty edgy stuff, but remember: these are the early days of such innovations. No one can prevent us from talking to each other — or exchanging with each other — in whatever way we choose. (See also other forms of crypto-texting.)

50. Buy your own kingdom. An art teacher in Portugal had a snappy idea: buy an island off the coast of Madeira. Then he had an even better idea: turn it into his own kingdom. That’s what he did, and he calls it the Principality of Pontinha. Earlier last year, there was talk of selling the Belle Isle section of Detroit. Wonderful. Even better: just sell all unowned and state-owned things and privatize the world.

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https://fee.org/articles/50-more-ways-to-leave-leviathan/