Part 3 - The freed market

Up to now, we’ve mostly been diagnosing:

Part 1: The “state vs corporations” story is a myth. In reality we live under a state–corporate complex.
Part 2: That complex runs on four key monopolies in money, land, trade, and ideas that make upward wealth transfer a structural feature, not a bug.

This Part 1s where we flip the perspective.

Instead of asking “What’s wrong with capitalism?” we ask:

What would the economy look like if we actually had markets without those state-backed monopolies?

Same people. Same technology. Same mix of selfishness and decency.

But we remove the legal machinery that lets a small class live off everyone else’s dependence.

What follows isn’t a blueprint and it’s not “step 1: start the revolution.” Think of it as a physics-of-incentives thought experiment:

Remove the rigging mechanisms.
Let people respond to the new incentives.
See what patterns you’d expect to emerge.

That’s all “freed markets” means here.

Markets ≠ Capitalism ≠ State Socialism

First, we need to sort out some terminology, because a lot of confusion lives here.

Markets are just a way of coordinating: people make offers, agree on trades, and adjust based on feedback. Markets can exist under capitalism, socialism, feudalism, or no formal “ism” at all.
Capitalism, as I’m using the word, is markets plus:
- state-enforced monopolies (like the four we just walked through),
- legal privileges for passive owners of capital,
- and a long history of enclosure, colonization, and dispossession baked into “who owns what” at the starting line.
State socialism is basically the opposite mistake:
- instead of privileging capitalists, it privileges a central state bureaucracy,
- and tries to run most of the economy through political decisions rather than decentralized exchange.

Both of these systems fail in ways that are now very familiar:

Capitalism slowly morphs into technofeudalism: extreme wealth concentration, corporate governance without real consent, and a permanent class of people who can’t meaningfully say no.
State socialism morphs into bureaucratic authoritarianism: shortages, stagnation, and a political class that’s just as insulated from consequences as any group of billionaires.

When I say “freed market”, I do not mean:

“Capitalism but with no regulations,” or
“Everyone for themselves, hope the biggest corporation is nice to you.”

I mean:

A society where people coordinate largely through markets and voluntary associations, but the state is not in the business of creating and enforcing monopolies for owners.

Historically, this family of ideas has gone under names like mutualism, left-wing market anarchism, or libertarian socialism. You don’t have to care about the labels. What matters is the structure:

No legal choke points on money.
No state-backed landlordism beyond actual occupancy and use.
No tariff walls to shelter big firms.
No long-term monopolies on ideas.

Let’s see what changes when you take each of those gears out of the machine.

If money isn’t a choke point

Right now, money and credit are the gatekeepers of life. Housing, healthcare, education, even emergencies are routed through:

state-chartered banks,
heavily regulated capital markets,
and central bank policy designed first and foremost around “systemic stability” (which usually means “don’t let the big players fall over”).

In a freed market:

Anyone (person, co-op, community) can issue credit instruments so long as they find willing partners.
Mutual banks, credit unions, and cooperative finance institutions can expand freely, without being fenced out by licensing cartels designed around the needs of huge banks.
Standard money still exists, but it competes with local currencies, mutual credit networks, and other arrangements where the people using them have a say.

What that changes:

Interest rates stop being primarily about “what the central bank and big finance decide” and start being about local assessments of risk and trust.
A lot of what we currently call usury simply disappears because it’s undercut by cheaper, more direct, more cooperative forms of finance.
Workers and small producers are less trapped in one-sided relationships with employers and landlords, because they can more easily access capital on non-predatory terms to start or join co-ops, small firms, and independent projects.

Result: if you have useful skills or a good idea, lack of access to some big bank’s balance sheet is much less likely to be the thing that stops you.

If land isn’t a permanent tribute machine

Today’s land regime treats the earth like a bond: buy a piece once, sit on it, and extract rent from anyone who needs to live or work there, potentially forever, as long as the state defends your title.

In a freed market, the dominant norm is closer to:

Occupancy and use: your claim to land is legitimate as long as you’re actually using it (or consciously stewarding it), not just because your name is in a registry.

That doesn’t mean every property line vanishes overnight. It means:

Vast holdings of unused or underused land are much harder to justify when there is no state willing to evict people on your behalf just because you’ve got paperwork.
Land that is actually being lived on, farmed, or used productively is still defended—but the defense is grounded in real use, not in someone’s ancestor grabbing it decades ago or buying it as a speculative asset.

What that changes:

Rents fall because the supply of available housing and workspace expands. Empty lots and buildings become harder to keep empty in the face of real demand.
The line between “owner” and “tenant” blurs as people and co-ops actually in a place gain more secure, direct claims than investors who live thousands of miles away.
Starting a small workshop, farm, or co-op stops being a fantasy reserved for the already wealthy; land ceases to be a permanent tax on existence and becomes a shared resource to be negotiated over based on use and need.

Result: far fewer people paying half their income just to be allowed to exist in a particular corner of the planet.

If trade isn’t rigged for incumbents

Today’s trade regime is a mess of:

tariffs,
quotas,
regulatory arbitrage,
and giant “free trade” agreements that somehow always manage to include hundreds of pages on corporate rights and relatively little on workers or the environment.

In a freed market:

Borders matter a lot less economically because anyone can trade with anyone else who wants to trade with them.
There’s no centralized authority able to say “Only these firms get to sell into this market under these rules.”
Local communities can still decide what risks they’ll accept (for example with environmental standards), but they don’t get to hand out exclusive licenses to politically connected players.

What that changes:

Big firms can’t count on tariff walls to protect them from upstart competitors, foreign or domestic.
The game of “we’ll offshore your job unless you accept worse conditions” loses a lot of its edge when workers can also move, organize, and start their own enterprises across boundaries.
Prices better reflect actual costs and efficiencies, not layers of political markup baked into trade law.

Result: more genuine competition, less protectionist corporate welfare. “Globalization” stops meaning “race to the bottom under rules written by multinationals” and starts meaning “wider circles of voluntary exchange.”

If ideas aren’t locked in cages

Right now, some of the most important technologies and knowledge in your life come wrapped in a thick layer of intellectual property:

You can’t legally copy or remix many things you’ve bought.
You can’t repair devices you own without manufacturer permission.
You can’t freely manufacture life-saving drugs even if you know how.
You can’t read much of the scientific literature you paid for with your taxes without paying again.

In a freed market:

There are no legal monopolies on ideas. Once something is known, anyone can use it, improve it, and build on it.
People still get rewarded for innovation, but mainly through:
- being first to market,
- reputation,
- customization and services,
- and ongoing relationships with customers—not through suing people for using similar ideas.

What that changes:

Generic and open versions of medicines, devices, and software can proliferate, driving prices toward actual production cost.
The right to repair and modify becomes the default, not a political battle.
Research and knowledge circulate much more freely, accelerating innovation instead of letting a few gatekeepers charge rent on access.

Result: the free market finally looks like what it was advertised to be—an engine for spreading useful innovations quickly and cheaply—rather than a system of tollbooths around every idea.

How a freed market feels from ground level

Okay, that’s a lot of mechanism. What does it actually feel like to live in this kind of society?

Some likely tendencies:

Lower baseline cost of living. Housing, basic goods, medicine, and information are all cheaper because there are fewer legal obstacles to competition and direct use.
More ways to say “no.” With cheaper life and easier access to land, credit, and tools, you are less trapped in any particular job or relationship. Bosses and landlords who behave badly lose people to alternatives.
More worker ownership and co-ops. Not because a central planner decrees it, but because:
- workers can more easily pool funds,
- start their own shops,
- and aren’t fenced out of markets by regulatory and IP barriers tailored for large incumbents.
Smaller, flatter firms on average. Big hierarchies that exist mainly because of regulatory barriers, subsidy pipelines, and monopoly profits become harder to maintain.
- Where large organizations persist, it’s because they genuinely coordinate something complex well—not because they can sit on a protected throne.
Less space for passive rentier lifestyles. You can still save, invest, and earn income from lending or leasing, but:
- there’s real competition in finance,
- land claims are grounded in use,
- and ideas can’t be locked down for decades. That makes it much harder to live indefinitely off other people’s desperation.
More local experimentation. Without a central state monopolizing law and infrastructure, communities can:
- try different approaches to mutual aid, conflict resolution, and public goods,
- federate with others when it’s useful,
- change course when something doesn’t work.

It’s not a cartoon utopia where everyone suddenly becomes wise and kind. There will still be unfairness, bad decisions, conflicts, and stupid trends.

The difference is that fewer of those problems are baked in at the structural level:

You don’t start the game owing half your lifetime to landlords, creditors, and IP monopolists before you’ve done anything.
You don’t face giant, unaccountable institutions backed by a legal monopoly on violence.
You and the people around you have more real leverage to walk away from bad deals and build alternatives.

How this is different from “anarcho-capitalism” and from state socialism

At this point, people’s mental autocomplete tends to spit out one of two objections:

“This sounds like ‘anarcho-capitalism’: no state, just corporations doing whatever they want.”

or

“This sounds like communism without the honesty.”

Neither is quite right.

It’s not anarcho-capitalism because:

The whole point is to attack the legal and institutional foundations of capitalist power:
- no state-chartered banking oligopoly,
- no state-enforced absentee landlordism,
- no tariff shields,
- no IP cages.
Anarcho-capitalist theory generally takes existing property titles as sacred and doubles down on absolute private authority, just with different uniforms enforcing it. Freed markets in the sense I’m describing directly question the legitimacy of much of that property, especially where it rests on conquest, enclosure, or state privilege.

In other words: this is not about giving Amazon or Exxon a freer hand. It’s about making it harder for anything like Amazon or Exxon to exist in their current form.

It’s not state socialism because:

There is no centralized ownership and planning board deciding who gets what.
There is no single political hierarchy with authority over the basic means of production.
Coordination still happens primarily through voluntary exchange, contracts, and federations, not through orders.

In practice, a freed-market society might end up looking “socialist” in many ways—lots of worker-owned firms, commons, and cooperative institutions—but the mechanism is bottom-up: people gravitate to arrangements that work and that they can exit if they don’t.

You don’t have to sign onto any particular identity label (“socialist,” “libertarian,” etc.) to see the basic point:

Removing structural privilege for owners and replacing it with actual competition and voluntary association doesn’t kill markets. It finally lets them do what they were supposed to do.

What about accumulation and “the end of history”?

Earlier I said something heretical enough to get me disinvited from most polite conversations:

Capitalism was a beautiful discovery with a fatal flaw.

The beautiful part was the market mechanism:

Local information and incentives.
Decentralized discovery of what people actually want.
Feedback when you screw up.

The fatal flaw was unbounded accumulation under conditions of state-backed privilege:

once you get a lead,
you can use the four monopolies to multiply that lead,
until you’re tens of millions of times “richer” than a median person in ways completely disconnected from normal human differences.

Freed markets don’t make accumulation impossible. People will still:

have different talents and preferences,
make better or worse choices,
end up with different levels of wealth.

But they do change the shape of the distribution:

It becomes harder to build a fortune purely on rent extraction, usury, and political deals.
It becomes easier to erode large fortunes from below through competition, worker exit, and the absence of rigged monopolies.
It becomes much more common for people to control the tools they use and share in the surplus they create.

If you fix the accumulation problem at the structural level, you don’t get heaven. You get something more modest and more real:

A society where most of the dramatic gains from markets go to the people who actually do the work, rather than pooling at the top and ossifying into permanent ruling classes.

If anything deserves the dramatic title of “end of history,” it’s not the moment when capitalism declared victory over state socialism. It’s the moment when we finally stop confusing markets with the specific, historically contingent system called capitalism, and start asking:

What would it take to keep the dynamism and coordination power of markets…
…without building in a permanent extraction machine on top of them?

Freed markets are one serious answer to that question.

Where this leaves us

So far, the argument has been:

The state and corporate capital are not rivals in balance; they are partners in a complex.
That complex runs on a few key monopolies—especially in money, land, trade, and ideas—that systematically push wealth and power upward.
If you remove those monopolies, you don’t get chaos or a corporate free-for-all. You get a very different kind of market:
- cheaper life,
- more worker and community control,
- less room for idle rentiers,
- and more space for people to build institutions that match their values.

If you’re skeptical, good. You should be. There are a ton of obvious questions:

Who handles violence and conflict without a state monopoly on force?
What about infrastructure that needs large-scale coordination?
How do you keep co-ops and local institutions from drifting into new forms of hierarchy and abuse?
What about genuinely dangerous things—nuclear plants, pandemics, climate risks?

Those questions are exactly what the next part of the project is for:

an Objections / FAQ where we can take the most common, serious worries and unpack what freed-market anarchists and related traditions actually say about them,
plus references to people who’ve gone much deeper than I can here.

If Part 1 and 2 were about showing you the machine, and Part 3 was about imagining it without the rigging, the next step is to ask about how specific situations would look.