Nathan Goodman

@nathanpgoodman.bsky.social

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Economist who studies institutions, political economy, polycentricity, defense & peace economics, and border militarization. https://gunsguardsandgovernance.substack.com/ https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1Ue5NBMAAAAJ&hl=en

On March 13, 2026, during jury deliberations, members of the public waiting outside the courtroom heard a loud and sustained disturbance emanating from the area of the jury room shortly after deliberations resumed following the lunch break. The disturbance consisted of multiple individuals shouting simultaneously for approximately one to two minutes in an otherwise quiet courthouse setting. Several individuals independently observed and commented on the disruption. Based on information obtained after the verdict, there is reason to believe that jurors engaged in a heated confrontation inside the jury room and that certain jurors may have been subjected to intimidation or coercion during deliberations.
Similar fear of repression leads many activists to adopt security practices aimed at warding off surveillance. For example, many activists use the encrypted messaging platform Signal to chat with each other. In a world of mass surveillance, using an encrypted messaging platform makes sense, even if you’re doing nothing illegal. But digital security practices and fear of surveillance were used against the defendants. Prosecutors framed the defendants’ use of encrypted chats as evidence of nefarious intent. For instance, in the superseding indictment, prosecutors asserted: "To hide their involvement in illegal conduct, the Antifa Cell emphasized and practiced “operational security” or “opsec” in their communications. For example, members used an encrypted messaging app to coordinate with each other. This app allowed for group chats and had auto-delete and delete-after-a-defined-time functions, which caused communications among the Antifa Cell to be permanently deleted." These types of opsec practices and use of Signal chats are widely discussed and recommended among activists. See this guide from Micah Lee for one example. The plain truth is that activists have good reason to fear retaliation and surveillance, both by the state and by non-state actors that oppose them. Choosing to use secure communications is not evidence of illegal or nefarious intent.
What documents or records did he conceal? The items in question were a box of zines, essentially political pamphlets. These zines are constitutionally protected speech. Anyone can find them online and print them out. People distribute zines just like this at protests, bookfairs, infoshops, independent bookstores, and punk shows, among other places. When they do so, they’re not doing anything criminal. They’re just sharing literature. To make these political pamphlets sound more nefarious, the prosecution repeatedly describes them as “antifa materials.” For instance, the DOJ’s press release says that Des corruptly concealed documents “by transporting a box containing numerous Antifa materials, such as insurrection planning, anti-law enforcement, anti-government, and anti-immigration enforcement documents and propaganda from Sanchez Estrada’s residence to a location in Denton, Texas.” How can we know which political tracts count as “antifa materials”? How do you know that you’re not in possession of “antifa materials” at this very moment? The prosecutors claim that Des moved this box of zines “intending to conceal the box’s contents and impair its availability for use in a federal grand jury and federal criminal proceeding.” Des’s public defender disputes this.
This is a call for a raucous night of strong solidarity with those imprisoned by the state on one of the noisiest nights of the year. On New Year’s Eve gather your crew, collective, community, organization, or just yourself and come together to raise a racket and remind those on the inside that they are not alone. Internationally, noise demonstrations outside of prisons are a way to remember those who are held captive by the state and a way to show solidarity with imprisoned comrades and loved ones. We come together to break the loneliness and isolation.
An “Attack” or a Noise Demonstration? Prosecutors repeatedly describe the noise demonstration as an “attack” on the ICE facility. They note that the defendants used fireworks that night. Prosecutors strongly insinuate that these fireworks were used to attack the facility. For example, Ryan Raybould, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said that “explosives launched at a detention facility were a far cry from a peaceful protest or First Amendment expression.” The implication is that this was a malicious and violent firebombing attempt, rather than an unlicensed and unpermitted fireworks display. But prior to the event, participants consistently discussed it as a noise demonstration. This term suggests that fireworks were used not to attack the detention center, but simply make noise that could be heard by detainees inside. Notably, the noise demonstration was on July 4th, a holiday where fireworks displays are often used to celebrate.
During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor called the defendants’ actions “an assault on democracy.” But democracy depends on free speech, the right to dissent, and open inquiry. As Vincent Ostrom writes in his excellent book The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies: "If societies of men are to constitute systems of governance from reflection and choice, those societies are required to establish a culture of inquiry rather than a culture of command and control dominated by those engaged in the art of manipulation." When people are sentenced to decades in prison for the political literature they possess, this threatens to destroy a culture of inquiry and replace it with a culture of command and control.
Non Serviam Podcast #75 The Border Everywhere Immigration, Economics, and Anarchist Liberalism With Nathan Goodman The Border Everywhere Guns, Guards, and Governance
The cover of the book "Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of US Militarism" by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall. The cover shows a menacing police officer in body armor holding a gun.
I’m not a lawyer. I’m an economist. So why am I here? Because economists study how people make choices. Laws, and the way laws are interpreted, influence the choices that government officials will make. Economics helps us understand these choices. Economists emphasize that institutions, including laws, alter the incentives that government officials face. Research from economics raises two serious concerns about militarized policies, including these boat bombings: 1. Many important decisions about militaristic policies are made secretly. This makes it very hard to hold people accountable. 2. Those involved in these operations learn skills, develop habits, and acquire tools. Rather than simply using these abroad, someday they may use these skills, habits, and tools in ways that undermine our civil liberties here at home.
Notably, the death toll of these bombings has increased since I gave my remarks. At least 54 boats have now been bombed, and the death toll is now at least 180, as reported by CNN. In the writeup below, I retain the numbers I used in my talk, despite the fact that they are now out of date. The following is an expansion upon my notes and recollections from my talk, not a verbatim transcript of my remarks. The current administration is increasingly pursuing a militaristic strategy to combat drug cartels in the Western hemisphere. As noted in a recent presidential proclamation, the administration “has designated a number of cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.” As part of their efforts to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S., the administration has bombed at least 46 boats and killed at least 157 people. I say that at least 46 boats have been struck and at least 157 people have been killed. Those were the numbers when I prepared my talk last week, but on Friday, March 20th, U.S. Southern Command announced they had struck yet another boat.
Two Dangers of the Escalating Drug War My opening remarks at "From Cartels to Combatants: The Intensifying Militarization of America's Drug War." From Guns, Guards, and Governance Below this, we see the logo of the CONTRA Center at the GMU Schar School
An orange image has an icon of a book at the top with the text "Markets & Society" (the name of an academic conference). There are three pictures of scholars presenting at the conference. Text below these pictures "Submit your paper abstract or session proposal by March 31." At the bottom of the image there are logos for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University as well as the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics
A photo of me presenting. On my slide it says "From the border to the streets" and shows a headline from my op-ed in The Hill on the use of Border Patrol drones to police anti-ICE protests in LA.
A placard with the logo of the CONTRA Center at the Schar School, my name, and my professional affiliation.
2:40 - 3:55pm Panel II: Law and Legality This panel explores the constitutional, statutory, and international legal foundations for the use of military force against transnational criminal networks and the precedents such actions may establish. Moderator John Hasnas Professor of Business, Georgetown University McDonough School of Business; Professor of Law (by courtesy), Georgetown University Law Center; Executive Director, Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics Speakers John F. Havranek Counsel, Nixon Peabody LLP; Former Principal Deputy General Counsel, US Department of Homeland Security Nathan P. Goodman Senior Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University David D. Vandenberg Attorney Advisor, Civil Rights Division, US Department of Justice
Sympathy as the Engine of Mutual Aid: Reading Kropotkin's Bipartite Account of Sympathy Anarchist Studies - Print ISSN 0967-3393 - Online ISSN 2633-8270 Volume 34 Number 1 (2026) Sympathy as the Engine of Mutual Aid: Reading Kropotkin's Bipartite Account of Sympathy Michael Grooff pages 13‑34 DOI: 10.3898/AS.34.1.01
Border Policing as Political Policing: How Efforts to Control Borders Are Used to Repress Social Movements Nathan P. Goodman, Mercatus Center at George Mason University Abstract: Immigration restrictions and border security efforts grant coercive powers to government officials. I argue that these discretionary powers have too often been closely tied with efforts to police and repress political dissent. Sometimes, this is the explicit intention of policymakers. For instance, the Alien and Sedition Acts as well as the Anarchist Exclusion Act both aimed to restrict migration of people with disfavored political beliefs. However, in some cases, political policing arises from a repurposing of coercive tools used for more mundane border policing. For instance, drones used to surveil the borderlands have been repurposed to surveil protestors. The Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC), which is the Border Patrol’s top SWAT team, has also engaged in militarized policing of protests. I argue that this type of coercive policing of dissent threatens core principles and institutions of liberalism. I also counter several possible rebuttals that a liberal defender of this type of policing may offer. Keywords: immigration, borders, policing, free expression, free association, right to protest, social movements, liberalism
The Schar School of Policy and Government and the Corruption, Networks, and Transnational Crime Research Center (CONTRA) at George Mason University invite you to a conference: FROM CARTELS TO COMBATANTS: The Intense Militarization of America’s Drug War 📅 Monday, March 23, 2026 🕐 1:00–6:00 PM 📍 Mason Square — FUSE Building, Room 1311 George Mason University 3401 Fairfax Dr Arlington, VA 22201 Leading scholars and practitioners will discuss the legal, policy, and security implications of recent changes in U.S. strategy toward transnational criminal organizations.
The cover of "Deleting the State: Requiem for an Illusion" by Aeon J. Skoble. It shows an eraser erasing the Capitol building.
How Much Benevolence is Benevolence Enough? PETER T. LEESON* Abstract Political agents in charge of policy under democracy confront a dilemma like that faced in ‘stag hunt’ games. The absence of an effective enforcement mechanism for punishing politicians who cater to special interests gives political agents strong reason to doubt the commitment of their fellow statesmen to the public welfare. As a result, even when policy makers are partially benevolent to the public, they are still led to cater to special interests and society fares no better than if politicians were strictly self- interested. Political agent benevolence is thus an all-or-nothing proposition. Unless benevolence is total, policy looks the same.
A stack of books: "Against the Deportation Terror" by Rachel Ida Buff "Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol" by Kelly Lytle Hernandez "Impossible Subjects" by Mae Ngai "Immigration and Freedom" by Chandran Kukathas
Libertarianism massively expanded its footprint across college campuses via the funding of groups like Students For Liberty. But it likewise exploded from internet personalities packaging political critique as spectator bloodsports. Those recruited in this context couldn’t help but centrally identify themselves not in terms of unifying ideals or aspirations, but in opposition to the vaguely progressive political sentiment around them. What resulted was an echo-chamber where what was reinforced was not a common valuing of liberty for all, but any and all lines of attack against progressives. “Libertarianism” migrated from the conceptual frameworks of people like Nozick, Rothbard, Friedman, and Huemer (however incomplete or misguided those were), to a grab bag of responses to common talking points. Want to win a debate against liberal? Here are some easy tricks you can learn to crush them! Many of the constitutive facts or arguments involved were legitimate—minimum wage laws were instituted deliberately to hurt women and blacks—and your generic off-the-street progressive is easily surprised and flattened by such. The result was mass recruitment of upper-middle-class white boys who were attracted to the power and status of low-level debate wins. Libertarianism promised one thing and one thing alone: owning the libs. This had always been an attractive factor to recruits, but its new populist social organs and recruitment projects, in conjunction with podcasts and compilation reels—intensified these dynamics.
The cover of Gene Healy's book "The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power."
A headline reads "Libertarians: We Told You So" at the New York Times, and shows a boot stamping on a Gadsden flag style snake.
activists during the civil rights movement could not...expect...state-provided defense to protect them...the African American community organized armed self-defense to protect activists from violent repression ... From these activists’ perspective, defense provided through a top-down, monocentric order was ineffective at best and a threat to security at worst. Given the context-specific challenges faced by civil rights activists, the type of security they desired was unique to their local circumstances and subjective perceptions of alternatives. Third, polycentric defense enhances the robustness of the overall system because there is no single point of failure. A key concern regarding monocentric systems is that a substantial shock to the centralized decision-making unit can be severely destabilizing. Because polycentric systems involve numerous, overlapping decision-making units engaged in competition and experimentation, failure by any one unit does not undermine the system’s overall stability. Returning again to the citizen-based response in the United States during and after the 9/11 attacks, sole reliance on the monocentric order—that is, the U.S. national security state—would have led to more successful terrorist attacks, compared to relying on responses from dispersed citizens who were effective in stopping several attacks from occurring where the government failed to provide adequate security. Finally, polycentric defense disperses power within a society because no single unit possesses monopoly control over decision making. A key issue with monocentric defense is that the centralized decision-making unit can use its monopoly power to harm the citizens it is supposed to protect. Under this scenario, the monocentric order tasked with providing defense becomes a threat to the security of citizens. Polycentric defense offers a means of mitigating the harm posed by this internal threat by dispersing power across multiple units of decision making.
There is also the technical infrastructure that powers the resistance in the form of an app like Signal. The slow, boring work of radical hackers over decades that have given protestors secure, easy-to-set-up lines of communication. Ancient struggles like the Crypto Wars of the 90s which made encryption legal for everyday people to use and the work to build, popularize and maintain Signal are what has enabled protestors securely communicate in ways that frustrate the regime’s surveillance attempts. The specific structure of closed encrypted group chats means the resistance is more resilient. Hack right-wing “journalists” like Cam Higby can infiltrate individual chats, but they only reveal a small part of the broader network. Compare that to prior protests in which people openly organized over public-facing social media which was much easier to shut down or disrupt. It’s worth talking about the broader political implications of all this. I joke about Minneapolis activists using principles from a book that fewer than a handful of people in that city have even heard about, much less read, because it speaks how Carson got at something with his writing. The reason people are acting in this way is not because they have a formal understanding of the principles of swarming or netwar, but because they saw other people doing something effective that they could do themselves. The reason Minneapolis resistance has worked so well is that it consists of forms of activity that require minimal buy-in in terms of ideology (secret police shouldn’t abduct my neighbors) and resources (all you need is a phone, a whistle or a car).
ICE is there to kidnap black and brown people. They’re not subtle about their racism—even the local police have complained about how all of their off-duty non-white officers are being harassed by federal agents. Masked, unmarked men are simply snatching people out of their cars, throwing them into unmarked SUVs, and driving them away, often to never to see their loved ones again. People’s cars are left abandoned in the streets, sometimes still running, sometimes still in drive. In response to this, many vulnerable people have essentially gone into lockdown. There are families that can’t leave their houses. Other people—friends, families, and neighbors—are looking out for them. The networks that are looking out for them are far and away the largest, most organized, and most successful networks like these I’ve ever seen, and they’re entirely decentralized. There is no central group or organization that is making this happen. It’s just people. People who are organized. There are two sides to this struggle: rapid response and mutual aid. Rapid response networks organize to identify and track ICE vehicles and agents and to disrupt abductions in process. Mutual aid networks organize to get affected people food, medical care, rides, vet visits, company… whatever they need. These are two separate webs of networks. The mutual aid side is more secretive in its organizing, of course, because it is taking care of the people who cannot leave their homes without being kidnapped.
An image shows a crowd in Minneapolis. An article reads as follows: Networks Versus Hierarchies in Minneapolis’ Struggle Against ICE Frank Miroslav | @mutual_ayyde | January 28th, 2026 For some time, I was thinking about writing a review of Kevin Carson’s book The Desktop Regulatory State, which helped inspire me to become an anarchist back in 2016, to see how it aged in the decade since it was published. But then ICE invaded the city of Minneapolis. And then the citizens fought back in a way that is seemingly a textbook application of what Carson wrote about in that book, to the point that if a second edition is ever published, I would not at all be surprised if it had an entire subsection in the appendix of the book, Case Study in Networked Resistance.
An image has a blue background with pictures symbolizing academics, scholarship, and audio. It has a drawing of a young F.A. Hayek. There is an orange rectangle in the foreground with white text that reads "EP. 215: Jacob T. Levy on Tensions Between Immigration Control and the Rule of Law." https://www.mercatus.org/hayekprogram/hayek-program-podcast/jacob-t-levy-tensions-between-immigration-control-and-rule-law
The cover of the book "National Economic Planning: What Is Left?" by Don Lavoie
100 subscribers You did it. Guns, Guards, and Governance by Nathan Goodman has reached its first hundred subscribers. Gunsguardsandgovernance.substack.com
The Military-Industrial Complex GMU Working Paper in Economics No. 22-32 17 Pages Posted: 23 Jun 2022 Last revised: 9 Nov 2022 Christopher J. Coyne George Mason University - Department of Economics Nathan P. Goodman George Mason University - Mercatus Center Date Written: June 13, 2022 Abstract This paper first discusses the origins of the military-industrial complex in the United States. We then explore several ways that public choice economics can illuminate our understanding of the military-industrial complex. Specifically, we focus on the following issues. Defense contractors engage in rent-seeking, while politicians engage in rent extraction. As a special interest group, defense contractors reap concentrated benefits while dispersing costs on the broader public. A “revolving door” exists between the military and private firms, and military personnel move through it repeatedly. Democratic oversight of the military-industrial complex is limited by principal-agent problems and information asymmetries. We conclude by discussing some implications of public choice analysis, as well as how public choice perspectives on the military-industrial complex relate to other views on the political economy of war, militarism, defense, and imperialism. Keywords: military-industrial complex, Dwight D. Eisenhower, military sector, rent seeking, revolving door
Mandatory Biometrics: A Dangerous Proposal Against biometric mass surveillance gunsguardsandgovernance.substack.com The background shows a fingerprint with white light against a dark background
There are good reasons to think that, for some self-petitioners, biometrics appointments may be perceived as prohibitively costly to attend. Recent high-profile stories of ICE agents detaining people at USCIS appointments may make showing up at biometric appointments far more intimidating than submitting paperwork and letters.[23] Even if the biometrics appointments do not deter self-petitioners, the stringent proposed rule about missing an appointment may lead to their benefit requests being denied. This may result in VAWA applicants staying with their abusers and being subjected to further abuse. DHS does not consider the costs of this abuse in its analysis. The agency should revise its analysis to incorporate assessments of the social cost of domestic abuse that its stringent rules are likely to perpetuate.[24] To reduce these costs, DHS should consider the following rule changes: Allow more flexibility in biometrics appointments and interviews so that self-petitioners can reschedule when necessary. Allow the use of biometric data as an option for demonstrating good moral character, rather than making it mandatory for all self-petitioners.
There are good reasons to think that, for some self-petitioners, biometrics appointments may be perceived as prohibitively costly to attend. Recent high-profile stories of ICE agents detaining people at USCIS appointments may make showing up at biometric appointments far more intimidating than submitting paperwork and letters.[23] Even if the biometrics appointments do not deter self-petitioners, the stringent proposed rule about missing an appointment may lead to their benefit requests being denied. This may result in VAWA applicants staying with their abusers and being subjected to further abuse. DHS does not consider the costs of this abuse in its analysis. The agency should revise its analysis to incorporate assessments of the social cost of domestic abuse that its stringent rules are likely to perpetuate.[24] To reduce these costs, DHS should consider the following rule changes: 1. Allow more flexibility in biometrics appointments and interviews so that self-petitioners can reschedule when necessary. 2. Allow the use of biometric data as an option for demonstrating good moral character, rather than making it mandatory for all self-petitioners.
There are good reasons to think that, for some self-petitioners, biometrics appointments may be perceived as prohibitively costly to attend. Recent high-profile stories of ICE agents detaining people at USCIS appointments may make showing up at biometric appointments far more intimidating than submitting paperwork and letters.[23] Even if the biometrics appointments do not deter self-petitioners, the stringent proposed rule about missing an appointment may lead to their benefit requests being denied. This may result in VAWA applicants staying with their abusers and being subjected to further abuse. DHS does not consider the costs of this abuse in its analysis. The agency should revise its analysis to incorporate assessments of the social cost of domestic abuse that its stringent rules are likely to perpetuate.[24] To reduce these costs, DHS should consider the following rule changes: Allow more flexibility in biometrics appointments and interviews so that self-petitioners can reschedule when necessary. Allow the use of biometric data as an option for demonstrating good moral character, rather than making it mandatory for all self-petitioners.
There are good reasons to think that, for some self-petitioners, biometrics appointments may be perceived as prohibitively costly to attend. Recent high-profile stories of ICE agents detaining people at USCIS appointments may make showing up at biometric appointments far more intimidating than submitting paperwork and letters.[23] Even if the biometrics appointments do not deter self-petitioners, the stringent proposed rule about missing an appointment may lead to their benefit requests being denied. This may result in VAWA applicants staying with their abusers and being subjected to further abuse. DHS does not consider the costs of this abuse in its analysis. The agency should revise its analysis to incorporate assessments of the social cost of domestic abuse that its stringent rules are likely to perpetuate.[24] To reduce these costs, DHS should consider the following rule changes: Allow more flexibility in biometrics appointments and interviews so that self-petitioners can reschedule when necessary. Allow the use of biometric data as an option for demonstrating good moral character, rather than making it mandatory for all self-petitioners.
The cover of the book "National Economic Planning: What Is Left?" by Don Lavoie
Nobody is Protected How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States Reece Jones
7. Conclusion Regardless of whether the terms I use in the previous section ever catch on within social movements (they likely will not), I hope that this chapter encourages researchers to continue exploring the synergies between mainline economics and radical LGBT politics. Analytical anarchism, as well as the related research program of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom regarding polycentric governance, can be quite fruitful for understanding social movements, mutual aid, and anarchist prefigurative politics. Public choice, particularly the analysis of political capitalism, can be fruitfully applied to understand the systems of state violence and economic privilege that radicals rightly critique. Ultimately, mainline economics offers a powerful lens for understanding our world. Through that understanding, radicals can better understand the feasible paths available for emancipatory social change.
Many radical queer and trans movements emphasize direct action and mutual aid projects that leverage local knowledge to directly help the most vulnerable, rather than imposing top-down plans via efforts to seize control of a state that is hostile to queer and trans survival. These strategies are far less vulnerable to the pitfalls we identified in the previous section. Rather than imposing centralized economic planning, they empower individuals to use their local knowledge, cooperate from the bottom-up, and help their community. In this respect, the vibrant and positive sum practical anarchism of radical queer and trans liberation movements is already consistent with the radical liberal vision I outline here. They might never choose to speak of it in those terms, as they may associate “liberalism” with a stodgy status quo rather than an emancipatory project. But they already live their lives in a manner that is consistent with bottom-up discovery, endogenous rule formation, the pursuit of the positive sum, and efforts to live our lives as dignified equals. Ultimately, that is more important than labels. While social anarchists and other LGBTQ radicals may at times envision future arrangements that would likely have harmful unintended consequences, the day-to-day activities of their movements help to create productive and emancipatory forms of voluntary association. The anarchist emphasis on experimentation, direct action, and mutual aid leads to genuinely positive action, regardless of what totalizing visions any given radical may be motivated by.
But even if a radical liberal anarchism of the sort that the 19th century individualists embraced seems possible, some radical queer and trans activists may worry that it winds up supporting existing unjust distributions of wealth and life chances. Yet consistent with Holcombe’s analysis of political capitalism, the 19th century individualist anarchists recognized that existing inequality and economic injustice rests upon state-granted monopoly privileges, especially “four of principal importance: the money monopoly, the land monopoly, the tariff monopoly, and the patent monopoly” (Tucker 1893). Tucker argued that ending such state granted monopoly privileges would empower ordinary people and erode precisely the exploitative and unequal relations that socialists wished to resist. Members of queer radical movements have likewise sought to end unjust state-secured monopolies. For instance, activists affiliated with AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) have opposed pharmaceutical patents and FDA restrictions that limit HIV patients’ access to medicine (Szijarto 2023). Radical transgender activists have often supported routing around the monopoly privileges that medical professionals have when it comes to prescribing gender affirming hormones and related treatments (Rotondi et al. 2013). These activists engage in mutual aid, routing around state-erected barriers to entry and ensuring that their fellows have access to the healthcare they need. This strategy directly challenges state secured monopoly privileges and moves us in the direction of a genuinely free market, rather than the captured political capitalist system we live under.
The radical queer and trans movement’s emphasis on prison and police abolition, as well as their efforts to organize individuals who face violence and criminalization by the state, means that they have direct experience engaging in this type of endogenous and bottom-up governance. To the extent that the most marginalized members of the queer and trans community see the police and the criminal justice system as a threat rather than a service provider, they will seek out alternative mechanisms to keep their communities safe. For instance, the Audre Lorde Project, an organization run by LGBT people of color, has operated a safe neighborhood campaign that works to deescalate and prevent hate violence without calling the police (Goh 2019). Similar projects in which marginalized people build alternatives to state administered governance have been documented by Mariame Kaba and other prison abolitionists through a project called “One Million Experiments.” This name resonates with the emphasis mainline economists place on bottom-up processes of experimentation and discovery, rather than top-down one-size-fits-all solutions.
However, some liberals may balk at the proposal. They may question its feasibility. After all, Mises, Hayek, and other similar liberal thinkers did not embrace Tucker’s anarchist conclusions. This is largely because they believed that a state equipped to enforce general rules, especially rules pertaining to the protection of property and contract, was necessary for sustaining the market order and the social cooperation it begets. Were they correct? Tucker and de Cleyre did not think so. More importantly, an emerging research program in mainline economics provides social scientific reasons to believe that social order, social cooperation, and the protection of rights are possible without a centralized state. This research program, which Peter Boettke (2005) has dubbed “analytical anarchism,” uses historical case studies, institutional analysis, and economic theory to analyze situations of endogenous rule formation. These situations occur when individuals or groups cannot rely upon a state’s formal legal system to protect their rights or solve their governance dilemmas, and therefore they instead endogenously devise governance arrangements that work for them. Boettke and Candela (2020) summarize a large portion of this literature, showing that both inclusive mechanisms that bring people together and exclusive mechanisms based around selective groups can be used to provide governance that sustains social cooperation from the bottom-up.
Yet while mainline economics hereby imposes a set of constraints upon the ways we can escape the current morass of imperialism, coercively imposed gender conformity, political capitalist exploitation, and mass imprisonment, this does not mean that a radical break from the existing order is impossible. Instead, it means that this radical break, to achieve liberatory ends, must maintain opportunities for bottom-up, decentralized coordination of individuals’ diverse plans. In the next section, I discuss one possible way forward for this kind of bottom-up radicalism.
Whether social anarchist proposals are subject to this critique is a more complicated question. After all, social anarchists are not proposing a central planning board to coordinate production and distribution. Their preferred arrangements are still polycentric, and therefore leave room for individuals and groups to act on their local, context-specific knowledge. However, to whatever extent social anarchism entails jettisoning exchangeable rights to productive property, it is likely to prevent the emergence of prices for productive property. The knowledge discovered and communicated through prices is therefore unlikely to be discovered and communicated. In such a context, local decisions can still proceed based on local knowledge, but coordination and cooperation across wider groups of people that cannot directly communicate with one another is likely to be hampered. When the extent of social cooperation, productive specialization, exchange, and coordination is limited in this way, people will likely be substantially poorer. Under such conditions of poverty, fewer people, including queer and trans people, will be able to flourish and thrive. The productive specialization that has given rise to LGBTQ-empowering forms of commerce and civil society would be hampered. Moreover, to achieve coordination in the absence of markets and central planning, communities would likely turn to tradition as an alternative coordination mechanism (Lavoie 1985b). Traditions are often a useful coordinating mechanism, but they can be stultifying and oppressive for those whose values, goals, and identities do not fit well with them. We might therefore expect coordination based on tradition to further the marginalization of at least some queer and trans people. Thus, any proposal that aims to entirely jettison exchangeable property rights to productive property is likely to exacerbate oppression, not emancipate queer and trans people.
Resources, including resources used for production, are scarce. They have competing uses. Therefore, using them for one productive project entails foregoing the benefits of another productive project. Given the multiplicity of possible projects we could pursue, and the variety of production techniques people could choose to use for those projects, they need some way to decide how to allocate scarce resources among competing ends. Moreover, these productive goods are heterogeneous. Therefore, while a piece of productive property can be used for multiple different kinds of projects, it cannot be easily shifted to producing just any other good. Mining equipment used to extract metal from the ground cannot be easily repurposed into farm equipment. This means that if scarce resources are used for productive projects that turn out to be unwanted, there are real costs to shifting production plans. Decisions about which production plans to pursue therefore have real costs, costs that would be concealed by treating capital as homogeneous, as some neoclassical economists do. Given the opportunity cost of pursuing one production project over another, how are people to choose among the diverse range of possible projects? How are they to assess which have benefits that exceed the costs? This is the problem of economic calculation.
5. Economics as a Constraint on Utopias If radical institutional changes are needed to challenge militarism, policing, and repressive gender roles, what form should these changes take? What strategy and aims should we pursue in our efforts to build a better world? Mainline economics is vital to answering this question because economic reasoning helps us analyze what institutional arrangements are feasible and what their likely consequences are.
This helps explain the organization of state violence in our society. Executives and lobbyists for defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing face low transaction costs when it comes to making deals with public officials. Often they are former public officials themselves, as a revolving door operates between the Pentagon, congress, and politically connected businesses and lobbying firms. This further lowers the transaction costs associated with making political exchanges. Those who benefit from militarized policies reap concentrated benefits from these policies, which gives them strong incentives to invest time and resources advocating for militarism. By contrast, many of the costs of militarism are widely dispersed throughout society, which reduces the incentive for ordinary people to invest time and energy in anti-militarist activities. As for those most directly impacted by militarism, they face incredibly steep costs when it comes to influencing U.S. policies. Many of them reside abroad, and even those who live in the U.S. are often poor, marginalized, and living a precarious life wherein they have relatively few resources to spend on efforts to influence national politics. These dynamics give rise to an entrenched military-industrial complex that rarely faces strong, well-organized political opposition (Coyne and Goodman 2022a; Goodman 2024a).
To make the case for a radical liberal approach to LGBTQ emancipation, I draw on a political economy tradition known as “mainline economics,” Mainline economics applies rational choice theory, which focuses on the purposeful actions of individuals. However, mainline economists emphasize that individuals always act within an institutional context. This includes not just formal legal institutions, but also informal institutions such as social norms. Using institutional analysis, mainline economists analyze how individual purposive action under alternative institutional arrangements can give rise to different patterns of social cooperation, including social cooperation and coordination that arises from the bottom-up without central command. This social scientific approach allows us to examine how existing liberal institutions have enabled some expansion of LGBTQ freedom, while also enabling us to analyze analyze the institutional incentives and feedback mechanisms that underly the oppressive systems queer radicals seek to resist. Moreover, it gives us a framework for analyzing the likely implications of alternative institutional arrangements that have not yet been observed. We can use this to offer a plausible account of how a radical liberal variety of left-wing market anarchism could enable social cooperation, human flourishing, and LGBTQ emancipation.
Throughout this literature, the word “liberal” largely takes on a pejorative tone. Liberalism is seen as something to resist, an embodiment of the system we live under as well as reform movements that merely seek inclusion within that system. However, I will argue that liberalism and radical queer and trans politics can be complementary. While radical queer and trans scholars and activists see themselves as challenging liberalism, I contend that many of their arguments can fruitfully inform a radical liberal politics that seeks to abolish prisons, borders, police, militarism, and the state itself. This radical liberal variety of anarchism is part of the left-wing market anarchist tradition, which traces its roots to 19th century thinkers who called their ideas by various names, including liberalism, individualist anarchism, and mutualism (see Chartier and Johnson 2011).
Spade’s work is part of a broader literature that contests mainstream liberal approaches to LGBTQ politics, instead advocating a more revolutionary approach to queer and trans liberation (Conrad 2014; Daring, Rogue, Shannon, and Volcano 2012; Stanley and Smith 2015). These scholars argue that liberal reforms promote inclusion within systems that remain fundamentally violent, oppressive, and unequal. Rather than seeking inclusion within these systems, they advocate challenging these systems. For example, they argue that rather than focusing on ensuring that LGBTQ soldiers can openly serve in the military, efforts should instead be aimed at ending imperialist wars. Rather than seeking to establish and enforce hate crime statutes that impose mandatory minimum sentences for those who target victims based on sexual orientation or gender identity, they argue that such statutes further strengthen oppressive systems of policing and mass incarceration. They want these systems abolished.
Yet not all LGBTQ scholars and activists are so sanguine about liberal legal orders. For instance, Dean Spade (2015) argues that excessive focus on formal legal equality can leave behind the most vulnerable and marginalized members of the LGBTQ community. Even if the laws on paper appear to respect LGBTQ rights, the most vulnerable members of LGBTQ communities may still be vulnerable to police violence, incarceration, deportation, and other legally sanctioned oppression. Even if this violence arises from laws that do not appear to violate formal constitutional guarantees of equal protection or privacy, this state violence is still clearly oppressive. A strategy that focuses merely on what the law says about LGBTQ people, rather than on a more thorough examination of power, the distribution of wealth and opportunities, and state violence, is likely to leave the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQ community behind.
Abstract Progress towards freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) people can largely be attributed to experimentation and entrepreneurship within markets and civil society. Liberal institutions of property, contract, consent, and free association enable this experimentation. However, some LGBTQ scholars and activists critique liberalism, arguing that rhetoric of legal rights and equality masks exploitation, oppression, and imperialism. They argue that liberal approaches to LGBTQ rights prioritize what formal legal rules say over realities on the ground. They are not entirely wrong. Formal rules can be written in a way that appears general, while simultaneously enabling state violence, cronyism, and restrictions on opportunity. These tend to harm the most vulnerable in society. Emancipation therefore requires more than a mere focus on what formal rules say. However, I argue that mainline economics offers the best explanation of the pervasive institutional dysfunctions that LGBTQ critics of liberalism wish to resist. Mainline economics also shows that attempting to address these issues by abolishing or restricting private property rights will cause serious dysfunctions. Therefore, I argue that the solution to the concerns of LGBTQ critics of liberalism is radical liberalism. Radical liberalism preserves and expands the freedom to experiment that has enabled substantial emancipation already. It also offers a way to overcome systemic issues that harm the most marginalized.
The cover of the book "Liberal Emancipation: Explorations in Political and Social Economy." It features a lot of pink as well as a photo with a stairway and a sunny blue sky with some white clouds.
A blue image of young F.A. Hayek in a suit in front of some icons representing scholarship, ideas, and podcasts. Text in an orange square says "EP. 218: Michael Clemens on the Trillion-Dollar Question of Immigration."
However, it took several decades for American law to render foreign-born anarchists into permanently deportable anticitizens. Only after President William McKinley's assassination at the hands of an (American-born) anarchist did Congress take action and pass the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903. This new law barred the entry of foreign-born anarchists and authorised their deportation within 3 years of their arrival. Within the context of the First World War and Red Scare, this legislation was radically expanded to allow for the post-entry deportation of the “anarchistic classes,” defined as all aliens who were (or became) anarchists, or who advocated, were affiliated with an organisation that advocated, or distributed literature advocating “opposition to all organized government,” the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States, the killing of public officials, the “unlawful damage, injury, or destruction of property,” or “sabotage” (Hutchinson, 1981, pp. 423–425). For the first time in American immigration law, no statute of limitations was included. With the stroke of a pen, all foreign-born anarchists, as well as numerous other varieties of radicals, became permanently “illegal”and deportable, and the citizenship of all immigrants became, as a result, “conditional” and contingent upon abstention from certain forms of political speech and affiliation (Kraut, 2020; Weil, 2012). The right to entertain anarchist views without risk of deportation effectively became a jus soli right that applied only to natural-born citizens (although, as discussed below, even they might face incarceration under statewide bans on “criminal anarchy” and“criminal syndicalism”). As Goldman and Berkman warned at the time, “Henceforth the naturalized citizen may be disenfranchised, on one pretext or another, and deported because of his or her social views and opinions”(Berkman & Goldman, 1919, p. 21).
Public choice and national defense: lessons for the Russian–Ukrainian war Nathan P. Goodman1 · Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili2 · Ilia Murtazashvili2 · Ali Palida2 Received: 1 May 2024 / Accepted: 29 July 2025 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025 Abstract This paper applies public choice theories of national defense to analyze key features of the Russian–Ukrainian war. A key aspect of Ukraine’s political reforms since 2014 has been strengthening the autonomy of local governments. Reforms to Ukraine’s defense system included both aspects of centralization—through the rapid assimilation of private defense organizations in 2014–15 and again in 2021–22—and decentralization, particularly through the creation of local military administrations after Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. The autonomy-enhancing local governance initiatives likely improved Ukraine’s crisis response capacity, while decentralizing aspects of the defense system appear to have bolstered territorial resilience. At the same time, decentralizing defense creates pressure on the autonomy of local governments and the centralizing aspects of defense sector reform raise concerns about declining individual rights and liberties. More broadly, the Russian– Ukrainian war illustrates how public choice theory can illuminate the complex institutional arrangements—both centralized and decentralized—that underpin the coproduction of national defense as a multifaceted public good. Keywords Defense economics · Polycentricity · Decentralization · Ukraine · Russian– Ukrainian war
Before we delve into the empirical case, it is worth pointing out that the left libertarian belief in and advocacy of such institutional rearrangements is far thicker than merely an empirical prediction. It is also that, but perhaps more fundamentally, they are normative commitments. In truth, there are many institutional forms that a stateless free market society could conceivably take place depending on the preferences, beliefs of the individuals within that market society, and technological status of such a society: from objectionably hierarchical technofeudalist dystopias, to highly localist economies with socialist tendencies, to the sort of cosmopolitan, broadly liberal and libertarian society. This is not to say any form of market order is equally likely to obtain in the absence of the state, given social scientific facts and human psychological propensities as well as the path dependent nature of sociopolitical evolution. However, the nomological possibilities of what a stateless market order could look like are quite varied and broad. What we insist is not simply that a freed market would magically lead to an egalitarian utopia, but that we are the market, and by the very act of morally advocating for and attempting to actively build less hierarchical economic and social arrangements, we are helping to bring such arrangements about. Unlike critics like Zwolinski, we do not take the existing preferences of the mean or modal market actor under capitalism as a mere given, but view it as something which itself can be shaped and reformed in the marketplace of ideas.