Why Incentives, Rather Than Threats, Work Better Ethically And Productively

This is the fundamental theory of morality and efficiency in an orderly society that functions spontaneously without government:

All forms of state are government, be it monarchy, theocracy, and democracy. They all rely on the bluff of perceived authority, meaning, they get things done, not through providing incentives, but through threatening with the use of force. This is the fundamental difference between state and statelessness when it comes to morality and efficiency.

Statelessness is more moral than the state, regardless of fallacious arguments from incredulity by statists; they can’t believe, imagine or conceive how a civilized society can function without a state. It is moral because it is the default state of live-and-let-live, while the state presumes to enforce itself citing arbitrary definitions of “greater goods” that are unprovable and unfalsifiable.

Statelessness is also more efficient, because human behaviour is more predictable when humans face incentives, rather than threats. In other words, you can get people to do what you want much easier when you provide incentives for them to do so, instead of threatening them to “do it or else”. You can predict how people can respond to incentives, but you can’t predict as well how they will respond to fear. Fear might submit them completely, but it may provoke them to revolt, or pretend to go along and backstab you when the opportunity arrives.

This doesn’t mean that, in statelessness, you cannot use force to defend yourself. Incentives work when you want to make people do something for you outside of their default state of inaction. If someone takes action against you, then of course you can defend yourself appropriately, especially so without a state to forbid self-defense in most cases that matter. And with incentives in place to disincentivize violence against you, we wonder why we thought we needed government through all of history.

This is by no means an exhaustive argument for statelessness. There is way more theory, proof and application of free statelessness. The scope of this short article is not to analyse the ‘how’ of statelessness but, rather, the ‘why’.

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