link to original reddit post by /u/flix2
It started with a sign. It stood at the entrance of the small community simple but clear:
Welcome to Freetown.
Enter only if you respect the Life, Liberty and Property of all here.
Murderers, thieves and tyrants will be shot.
The message was a practical one, not inspired by history or ideology but by clarity of purpose. It enumerated the things that would be defended with deadly force and warned away those that would harm them. As time went by and neighbours from time to time suggested alterations or additions to the sign it was always argued that brevity had power. It was unnecessary to explain in detail all the different types of property owned in the community and how it could be destroyed or stolen. It was understood by all what harm to life meant, what need was there to specify differences in degree between murder and assault. Liberty being a more philosophical concept was always harder to define, but all agreed that a good rule of thumb was that if someone came around telling anybody what to do with their property or their life shouldn’t be welcomed and, if telling escalated to threats or orders should promptly be shown the door.
In any case even given the small number of neighbours at the time there was never unanimity to change it. If it’s difficult to get a handful of people to agree to anything, it could only get harder as their number grew. Certainly many would have liked to add more rules. Most in the community were Christian and wouldn’t have looked askance at the ten commandments… but freedom of religion seemed to most an important part of Liberty. Remembering the Sabbath, honouring your parents and not coveting could surely be left to individual consciences, whereas stealing and killing were pretty clearly community problems. So after many arguments Life, Liberty and Property remained as the common denominators.
In time it grew to be a social contract of sorts, first in an unspoken, implicit way, but later it was written in the rules of the homeowners association which all new buyers and builders had to sign. So in many ways it was far more real a social contract and far more binding an agreement than any constitution ever approved by “representatives” but never actually accepted by the people, never mind all the people.
The sign also had a selective effect on new residents. Some did not like the idea of violence, even defensive violence and would rather not buy a house or live in a place that so overtly threatened. The idea of many of your neighbours being armed simply did not appeal to many. Others did not believe in private property, but those that would have unlawfully occupied empty houses thought twice when they saw the sign and headed for easier pickings. Of course there are plenty of rich communists and their lack of respect for private property never stopped them from personally owning it... but this was no luxury community, at least when it started, so politicians and bureaucrats were rare.
The first big change came in the police strike and riots. As cops were increasingly paid less, later and in depreciating currency they started to protest more, work less and turn back to some old ways of extortion. Mostly they just did not answer calls, but sometimes when they did they were expensive and less than helpful. So the community was quick to become self-reliant for protection, hiring a private guard for the main entrance and quickly coordinating a group of armed neighbours as backup should it be needed. When the first riots came more than a dozen neighbours stood behind the guard with enough weaponry in plain sight to deter anything short of an army. So the looting passed them by. Car burnings, break-ins, assaults and all types of chaos and vandalism happened in nearby neighbourhoods. The police were busy protesting for back pay. People took note. Similar signs started going up in many communities that had seen the difference between trusting authority and trusting your neighbours. One neighbourhood that actually shared the main road and access, simply asked to merge. Over the years the community would grow to ten times its size. However that was dwarfed by how far its example reached as thousands of neighbourhoods followed it. Actually the neighbours simply could not tell if they were being emulated… or if other people had just followed their own logic and reached similar common sense solutions to simple problems.
The second big change came with the banking crisis. As savings were wiped out first by deflation then by inflation the community, just as the rest of the country, had to start saving again from almost nothing. This time they would not make the same mistake again, they would not work tirelessly for years while trusting the government and banks to secure the currency and their savings. They began to use Bitcoin and physical gold for their savings so that they could be personally responsible for the security of their wealth. They discovered another advantage of personal responsibility: privacy. Eventually most trade was done in hard assets and again the example spread far. Government money, fiat money was only used to pay government services… and as the first depreciated the second kept losing quality. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” well fiat money most definitely belonged to the government and they were welcome to have it.
Some attempts were made by tax collectors to exact payments in hard assets and in some places they were allowed to do so. Others resisted with more or less force. Soon they learned which places to avoid for fear of tarring and feathering, or worse. Anyone who wanted to keep their property from the hands of the ever more rapacious and bankrupt government also learnt the lesson: keep your real assets in a Free Zone or lose them. It’s not that the government couldn’t muster, if pressed, the force to enter the a Free Zone and loot… but it was rare for a reason: Agents were unwilling to take risks for the meager pay they were receiving so the only way to make it worth their while was to let them share in the spoils. Any illusions that they were law enforcers went out the window after the first few times that happened. Honest cops quit. The ones still willing to loot were viewed by most citizens as what they were, a violent gang. They were too few and too cowardly to face any resistance.
Police reform would come too late. Private security backed by citizen militias would prove cheaper both in peaceful and violent times, as well as far more respectful of the Life, Liberty and Property of its customers.
Tax income withered. The death spiral was too fast and paralysing for the government to stop. The government would continue to pretend to offer services and a few people would pretend to pay for them. It would become obvious that there was nothing magical about a monopolistic administration that allowed it to build roads or schools more efficiently than local institutions, companies or communities. In fact it was hard to imagine how anybody had thought that the monopoly could ever do so with better quality than what consumers could expect from competing providers.
Some people rejected this way of doing things and formed their own socialistic communes, syndicates and associations. Many saw a kibbutz revival in the making. Did people in the Free zones object? No. Live and let live. If they want communal property they were welcome to share theirs… as long as they did not try to take ours. Unsurprisingly most people preferred not to live in a commune.
Localism, self-reliance and secure property rights eventually brought unprecedented prosperity, well-being and progress. But that was later, after we survived the invasion...