How We Lost Our Moral Agency—And How to Reclaim It

Introduction: The Lost Meaning of Morality

We talk about morality as if it’s about feelings, kindness, or virtue, or doing what’s “right.” But we rarely stop to ask what “right” actually means. Where does morality come from? Why do we have such strong instincts about fairness, trust, and betrayal? Why do so many people feel that something is deeply wrong with modern life, but can’t quite put their finger on it?

This essay will argue something simple, but radical: morality is economics. Not economics in the narrow, academic sense that focuses on markets and metrics of production, but in the truest and broadest sense: the study of decision-making aligned with survival. Morality is the logic of cooperation, the operating mechanism that emerges when human beings live together without the ability to dominate one another by force. Our behavior is always governed by what is economically rational, and morality exists to define what is rational in a world where other people matter.

This framework is empirical. It is derived from observing how humans actually behave: how they build trust, how they respond to betrayal, how they organize social cooperation. Morality, understood properly, is a natural law rooted in our condition as human beings—a pattern written into our choices and incentives. It only functions properly when we are free agents, when no one else can seize our choices or shield us from the consequences of our actions.

This essay is about understanding morality from first principles, both what it is and why it exists. It is about understanding natural law, whether given to us by God or not, through our position as men living together on earth. After all, would God, or nature, or whatever we believe, endow us with something deeply ingrained in us that is unsuitable for our survival, that is contrary to it? This essay argues that morality is an economically correct choice that allows for man to trust and cooperate with other men, and immorality is an economically incorrect choice that forces man into a state of war with other men; it also seeks to clarify under what circumstances cooperation is truly rational, and when it is not, so we can better understand how morality emerges, and how to restore it in a world that has destroyed it.

Yet traditional accounts of natural law face a serious problem. If these moral rules are truly written into us by God, nature, or reason, why do human beings so often violate them? Why do entire societies behave immorally, even when these laws are said to be universal? If natural law is purely prescriptive, it struggles to explain human behavior that repeatedly defies it. A law that cannot describe reality is no law at all. This essay takes a different view: that natural law is both descriptive and prescriptive. It emerges from observing how people actually behave, and why they behave that way. It prescribes morality as the proper operating mechanism for cooperation because, in the long run, that is what works best. But it also describes why people abandon morality whenever systems reward its violation, and what conditions must exist for morality to reliably guide human behavior. A true natural law must account for both.

Morality as Economics

Morality is best understood through the lens of economics, and by economics I mean our behavior, or how we decide how to behave. This calculus of behavior, how we weigh costs, benefits, and consequences, is at the heart of both economics and moral reasoning. And it’s not just a human activity. It’s what drives action in all living creatures.

We often call it instinct when animals behave in ways we can’t fully explain. But even lacking clear understanding of what instinct is, or why animals behave the way they do, we know it’s optimized behavior. Animals behave economically: they act in ways that they believe maximize energy returns and survival odds. The lioness, for instance doesn’t hunt when she’s full, for this would waste energy for no gain. But nor does she wait until she’s starving to begin the hunt, because by then her chances of success might be lower. She doesn’t consciously plan any of this, she just knows it. She’s acting in a way that has been honed to be economically sound. If she misjudges and chases prey she has no chance of catching, she may not survive. And if she repeatedly fails, her offspring won’t survive either. Nature has a way of weeding out poor economic reasoning.

In contrast, an economic model that does not reflect reality will result in poor economic decisions and behavior.

So what about man? What is our version of this decision-making?

For centuries, philosophers have tried to define virtue. Plato’s dialogues wrestle with whether virtue can be taught. In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, Socrates asks why the most virtuous men often fail to pass virtue onto their sons, even though they teach them every other kind of skill. The answer seems to be that virtue isn’t a skill in the usual sense, rather it’s a form of judgment, an ability to recognize the right action in any given moment. And that’s precisely what economics is.

Virtue is economic understanding. It’s the knowledge of which action best advances survival, harmony, or flourishing in a given moment. It deals in uncertainty, in risk, in probabilities. It requires reading the situation, reading others, and anticipating the effects of different decisions. That’s economic calculation at its core. And when someone repeatedly makes correct economic calculations, we call them virtuous.

Plato even suggests that virtue might be a natural gift given by the gods. Just like instinct. But rather than seeing this as mysterious or unteachable, we can understand economics as a model of reality, and not the physical reality which is accurately modeled by mathematics and physics, but the reality of nature, of the living, which physical reality acts on, but does not completely control. Economics deals in modeling the behavior of living actors, of understanding what is true—specifically the truth of ourselves and others.

Lets examine the lioness’s instinct as an economic model of reality. If her instinctual model accurately reflects reality, then she makes make good economic decisions about when to hunt, and who to target on any given hunt; she has an accurate assessment of her speed and endurance, as well as that of her prey, and so on.

So to be virtuous is to be economic and to be economic is to have a proper model of reality. Then to understand what is virtuous we must understand, descriptively, the human condition and the social structures in which we live. But the reality of man is far more complex than that of animals because man has reason.

Is there truly a difference between instinct and reason? Maybe not. Our reason seems, first and foremost, to give us the ability to explain the world around us. Often, we act without being able to fully articulate or sometimes even understand why, so our behavior is in many ways a kind of script. Yet reason allows us to observe, analyze, and explain our actions and their outcomes after the fact, and to refine our script, improving our understanding of reality. It is a uniquely human advantage that lets us iterate on that understanding, gradually reshaping our script over time. In this way, our reason is like a refined form of instinct that is constantly learning and adapting, far more flexible and complex than any animal’s inborn program.

So when I say economics is about survival, we also need to be clear about what that survival looks like for man. It’s not just day-to-day living. Reason has extended our time horizon. We can store food, preserve energy, and plan far into the future. We farm, freeze, salt, and save. We build institutions, families, and legacies. This gives us safety not just for the day, but for decades, even generations. That’s something animals can’t do. And once that safety is secured and we’re surviving well, we start asking other questions. What’s the point of this survival? What should we aim for? What makes life good?

And again, we find ourselves circling the same truth: what is economic is what is virtuous.

Virtue and Morality Distinguished

Throughout history, philosophers have often blended virtue and morality, but these are distinct ideas. Virtue concerns the cultivation of character and the pursuit of excellence. It is partly subjective, shaped by our personal desires, natural abilities, and social context. The line between bravery and recklessness depends on the likelihood of success. The difference between honesty and cruelty depends on social awareness. Virtue also helps guide what our goals should be and how best to pursue them. But these goals cannot be identical for everyone: the athlete should not be forced to become a philosopher, nor the philosopher an athlete, nor the warrior a caregiver. Morality, in contrast, refers to the universal rules that make cooperation possible—boundaries that respect human agency and allow people to pursue their own virtuous aims. It is precisely this moral framework that preserves the freedom to live virtuously, according to our nature and choices.

Virtue is judgment in uncertainty. It’s the ability to assess a situation, weigh consequences, and choose the best path given your goals. But those goals vary. One man wants discipline, another wants pleasure. Some seek power, others peace. Virtue is how well you navigate your values to achieve your desired ends, not which values you choose.

Morality, on the other hand, is about the structure that makes any of those values achievable. It is the minimum requirement for peaceful cooperation. Morality is the decision to respect agency, life, and property, even of those who live differently than you. It doesn’t care what your goals are. It only asks: are you violating the ability of others to pursue theirs?

Morality is the rulebook for coexistence.
Virtue is the art of playing your hand well.

This distinction helps us understand a major tension in classical philosophy, especially in Plato’s Protagoras, where Socrates suggests that all virtue is knowledge. But what kind of knowledge? Socrates struggles to define it. Virtue seems to involve perception, intuition, and wisdom in uncertain situations. It looks more like a cultivated habit than a transferable skill, and it's not easy to teach.

But morality is teachable, because it operates at a general, logical level rather than as a skill or habit. It follows from a descriptive understanding of the human condition: that we have desires, that we wish to choose and pursue those desires ourselves, that we act to secure what we find valuable, and that we cannot exist in perfect isolation. From these observations, the logic of morality emerges—defining the rules that allow us to coexist peacefully while preserving our ability to choose and act freely.

If you want to survive and flourish,
and if others also want to survive and flourish,
then cooperation is rational.
And if cooperation is rational,
then violating it through coercion, theft, or deceit is irrational.
It is uneconomical. It is immoral.

The only rational reason to violate cooperation is if you believe the other party you are supposed to cooperate with is untrustworthy, and the only reason not to trust them is if they have behaved immorally.

These are universal economic truths. They are not contingent on culture. They are not inherited. They are discovered, understood, and learned.

Even a selfish man, once convinced that cooperation benefits him more than domination, can be moral. And even a wise, noble soul, if he violates that logic, becomes immoral.

Morality is not some lofty ideal we can never reach, nor is it some sort of spiritual aim detached from the physical world and our existence in it. Morality is based in reality, and it serves the purpose of facilitating cooperation by distinguishing good actors from bad actors.

Morality defines the basic rules that make cooperation and trust possible—rules that protect agency, consent, and truth. These rules are justified because they enable human flourishing and peaceful coexistence. Once these moral rules are established, virtue takes shape within them: the personal habits, skills, and judgments that help an individual achieve excellence and thrive. Virtue is concerned with consequences, with making wise and effective choices among permissible actions, while morality sets the boundaries that protect cooperation itself. Together, they form a coherent system: morality makes virtue possible, and virtue gives moral action its fullest expression.

Identifying Natural Laws

Natural law has long anchored moral philosophy. Thinkers like John Locke invoked it to explain universal rights, and I agree with him on its necessity—but I part ways with how he grounds its existence. Locke saw natural law as divine, implanted by God, and maybe it was. But why should a moral framework depend on belief alone? If there is a God, and if He wishes us to live rightly, surely He would give us the means to discover this law through observation, not just revelation, and surely this law would not be at odds with our survival; therefore it would be economical.

Reason, then, and a clear view of reality will allow us to grasp natural law.

We see the most obvious natural laws in physics: gravity, thermodynamics, relativity. These rules do not care about our beliefs. Disobey them, and you pay the price, whether you believe or not.

Yet human society is governed by other natural laws as well: rules of cooperation, power, trust, risk, and reward. These are economic and social laws. They do not operate instantaneously like gravity, but they are no less real. If you break them, consequences follow, though often delayed and collective rather than personal and immediate. Whole tribes, nations, even civilizations collapse under the weight of violating these laws.

But how are we to differentiate right from wrong, what is moral from what is immoral? Let’s start with a simple question: would you want to be a slave? To have your life, labor, or choices stolen from you? Of course not. And neither would anyone else. This is not preference, but a reflection of human nature. Man was born free, and is meant to live free to act in order to achieve his desires. And morality applies even to men who wish to live isolated and alone in the middle of nowhere, because he cannot remain alone, for we are all tied to one another. Even the most isolated man will one day interact with others—by trade, trespass, or accident—and must then choose: cooperation or conflict.

What makes cooperation stable? A moral code, freely adopted, that recognizes everyone’s self-ownership and right to pursue their desires without coercion. Why? Because respecting those rights prevents conflict from escalating into endless war. It is strategically rational, not just sentimentally virtuous.

Morality, then, exists in us as an economic truth: how we ought to behave if we want to achieve our desires. Morality acts to preserve cooperation and check abuses of might. If someone tries to overpower others unjustly, their reputation suffers, and others band together to resist—maintaining a balance of power and discouraging domination. This is the game-theoretic backbone of moral order: trust works only if bad actors are identifiable and their misdeeds cannot be hidden.

So here is the test of a natural moral law:

• A behavior that destroys cooperation and trust violates natural law.

• Cooperation, in this sense, means voluntary, peaceful exchange and coexistence between individuals; trust means confidence that others will not violate your freedom, safety, or agency.

• And what, exactly, is the foundation of that individual freedom? It is self-ownership: each person has exclusive dominion over their own body, their will, and the products of their labor as an extension of their person.

• If someone abandons these principles, they forfeit the protections of morality, and moral actors are no longer obliged to cooperate with them.

• These consequences are not speculative or dependent on uncertain predictions, but arise necessarily from the nature of human social behavior. They are as predictable as physical laws, because they follow from the reality of how human beings respond to violations of agency and trust.

This is empirical. Just as you test gravity by dropping an apple, you test moral rules by observing their social effects. Do they build trust, or destroy it? Do they protect liberty, or erode it? Do they encourage long-term flourishing, or collapse?

Natural law is nothing more than the emergent logic of coexistence, revealed wherever cooperation is required and domination is resisted.

And when violations occur, we feel them. We recoil. Because the immoral man is not simply unpleasant, he is a saboteur of the human project. He weaponizes reason to betray trust. That is why we see him as worse than a lion killing prey: the lion cannot lie, but the immoral man can. Even if the immoral act is not directed at us, it is a declaration of war against everyone. If a man can behave immorally toward another, why not toward us?

Morality is therefore the first defense of peace. It is the precondition for human society. Without it, trust collapses. And without trust, the social order fails.

Questions around original appropriation of land or natural resources such as what may rightly be claimed, by whom, and under what conditions are profound, and deserve a treatment beyond the scope of this essay. Here I focus on self-ownership in the sense of man’s person and the direct fruits of man’s labor.

The Nature of Cooperation

Cooperation is often misunderstood. It is not conformity of thought, nor the merging of cultures, values, or preferences. True cooperation begins with the recognition of individual agency: each person as a self-owning, self-determining being. From this moral foundation, everything else flows. If a man owns himself, then he must also own his time, labor, and the products of that labor. Property rights, therefore, are not a mere cultural invention but a natural moral extension of agency itself.

Harming another, stealing, or deceiving are moral failures because they destroy the trust that cooperation depends on. Cooperation requires a fundamental assumption: that others act in good faith. When that trust is broken, the moral ground for cooperation collapses.

Yet cooperation does not demand one universal social or political structure. If people, acting freely and without coercion, choose to pool their property and live communally, they are not immoral. They are exercising their agency by voluntarily relinquishing certain rights. But we must first acknowledge them as rights in order to acknowledge our right to relinquish them. A capitalist and a communalist can coexist morally, so long as neither forces the other into submission.

Consent, then, is the true boundary of moral cooperation. It is not the system’s shape that defines morality, but whether people enter it freely.

The Moral Right to Exit

A core yet often overlooked principle of morality is the right to exit. This is more than having the option to retreat into isolation; it includes the freedom to build new systems of cooperation with others who share our values. Moral systems, or agreements, must respect agency, and agency becomes meaningless if we cannot withdraw consent. Participation in any cooperative arrangement is only truly voluntary if we are free to leave without being coerced or forcibly integrated into another collective.

A just order allows for moral pluralism within the boundaries of objective morality. Individuals may form communes, religious orders, trade-based societies, or individualist enclaves—so long as no one is forced to remain against their will, and so long as no arrangement violates the basic rights of its members: life, property, truth, and consent. The freedom to exit is not only about physically departing, though that is included; it is above all the freedom to exit an agreement itself, and to form new agreements with others who dissent from the existing one. This is precisely what prevents even decentralized societies from hardening into moral monopolies or tribal tyrannies.

Freedom cannot exist without this possibility. A choice is only meaningful if you retain the power to refuse it altogether. When you must pick among pre-approved options, while being denied the possibility to create an alternative, you are not truly free. As Locke argued, no man can be subject to another’s political power without consent, but consent is hollow if there is no legitimate way to withdraw it. Robert Nozick likewise warned that any system denying people the possibility of exit amounts to coercion. If you cannot leave, you cannot consent. If you cannot build your own option, you are not free.

The right to opt out is a moral test. Any system that claims to be just must allow its members to depart from an agreement and carry their agency with them. A society that punishes exit, blocks self-sufficiency, or criminalizes independent association is, by its very structure, coercive thus immoral.

Morality, Might, and Scarcity

There is only one morality—one set of principles that align with survival, cooperation, and natural law. Yet its expression can look different depending on circumstances.

In a world of absolute scarcity, of true, immediate survival conditions, there is no room for moral negotiation. If sharing food guarantees everyone dies, then people will fight, for this is what is economic. Under these conditions, cooperation has no chance to gain a foothold, because its rewards cannot outweigh its costs. In such a world, might rules. The strongest eat, and the weakest starve, just as among animals.

But mankind escaped that permanent animal struggle. By producing even modest abundance, we created space for cooperation to thrive. Once there is enough to store, to trade, and to plan for the future, the incentives shift radically. What is economic changes. People become free to specialize, to trust, to build alliances that are mutually beneficial. A man no longer needs to be an apex hunter to secure food; he can provide value in an infinite number of ways. At this point, morality becomes the greatest form of might because it alone attracts allies, preserves cooperation, and sustains prosperity across time. And under conditions of abundance, people who cooperate can generate more power than people who don’t.

Morality has always rested on a foundation of power: the power to act, to defend, and to uphold moral rules. In scarcity, that power expresses itself through brute force. In abundance, it expresses itself through cooperation. But its root is the same: strength, directed toward either predation or morality; the situation, the environment, determines what is economic. Still, someone might object:

But how do we know cooperation is economic, even in a world of abundance? Couldn’t an individual conclude that extorting his fellow moral companions would be more profitable, especially if they have become “soft targets,” softened by moral rules?

It is true that the first violator of moral cooperation stands to gain in the short term, assuming he escapes retaliation. However, we must remember three things. First, human beings, unlike animals, act across extended time horizons. We project our goals far into the future, often beyond our own lives, through our children, our families, or even our communities. Second, man is capable of inflicting violence on a scale far greater than any animal, and this capacity also operates across time and space. Even if an immoral actor wins today, his descendants may suffer revenge tomorrow. Third, conflict is costly by its very nature. The question is not merely “will I win?” but “if I win, what will I lose?” Most would agree that no stolen wealth is worth the death or potential death of their own child.

Because of these realities, even the strong are unlikely to benefit from predation. The difference of might between men is rarely so overwhelming as to guarantee risk-free domination. Finally, morality itself acts to shift might over time: it attracts allies, builds trust, and unites people in common defense. Thus the balance of power tilts toward those who uphold moral cooperation, making morality the best and most stable economic strategy for men in the long run.

Yet if cooperation should prevail under abundance, why do we find ourselves living in a world ruled by fear and domination? Once a centralized state takes hold, it captures the power that should belong to moral agents, and uses it for its own purposes. Morality, separated from its basis in voluntary cooperation and defense, is left defenseless. The moral rules that should govern society can once again be overrun by raw, unaccountable power just as in the world of scarcity, only in modern times it is cloaked by laws and bureaucracies. If not for the monopoly on violence, we would live in a world of abundance where morality becomes the strongest form of might because cooperation is in everyone’s best interest. Let us examine what happens when the state replaces morality itself, and how this monopoly of power arose and maintains itself.

When the State Replaces Morality

A society grounded in moral agency cannot remain so once it surrenders that agency to the state. Morality in its true form can flourish only in what John Locke described as a state of nature: an anarchic society where people are free to act, where no single entity monopolizes violence, and where moral agency is preserved. In such a setting, power is decentralized. It flows naturally toward those who build trust, form alliances, and defend themselves. Moral behavior creates cooperation, and cooperation creates strength. By contrast, immorality isolates, divides, and ultimately collapses. Immoral behavior creates fear in everyone else, and this fear acts as a rallying cry against the immoral actors. In this environment, morality becomes the most stable form of might because it attracts allies, earns trust, and sustains cooperation over time.

Modern societies, however, have destroyed this balance. We handed over our power to the state. We created an institution meant to enforce morality, and in doing so, we destroyed morality itself. The state does not enforce what is right; it enforces what is legal. And legality is merely the will of those who control the state. Morality no longer matters—only the law does; the truth no longer matters—only perception does. And both the law and perception, in the modern age, can be bought.

When someone behaves immorally but legally, there are minimal consequences. With enough money, enough lawyers, enough political power, a person can do as he pleases. If not him, then someone else will. We no longer ask whether something is moral; we ask whether it is permitted, whether it will work, whether it will be punished. And if it will not, we treat it as fair game.

This is the true cost of centralization of might. It severs the moral feedback loop, and it makes resistance impossible or ineffective. You cannot gather allies to fight injustice if the state holds a monopoly on force—and on surveillance, propaganda, and institutional power. Dissent is contained. Morality is reduced to theater.

In this vacuum, nihilism takes root. Nothing is right, nothing is wrong; there is only legal or illegal, effective or ineffective, aligned or misaligned with power. We no longer bear the burden of moral agency, because we have outsourced it. We have handed it over to courts, bureaucrats, and a swarm of public servants who claim to think morally on our behalf. But they do not think morally. They think strategically. They respond to incentives. They play the game.

When morality is no longer permitted to gather power and the smallest of moral agents are restrained from acting, then it no longer matters whether something is wrong. It only matters who holds the sword.

But why can’t morality overcome the state? Or put another way, why can’t the might of the people overcome the might of the state? The state has many weapons for controlling its citizens—fear, propaganda, violence—but its ultimate weapon, the one that makes true morality impossible, is its control over money. Why is that? To answer, we must understand money.

Money as Human Energy

To grasp why control over money is a power so great that no man or entity should possess it, we must understand what money is. Man alone possesses the capacity to convert energy from living and nonliving things into value, to transform labor into stored potential for future survival. Money is the representation of this stored human energy: the time, effort, and resources expended by men to secure their lives. When a monopoly can print money and steal its worth, it is draining the energy of every human being, and by extension, of nature itself.

This is the sort of villainy described in myths and fantasy: a tyrant who drains the lifeforce of the world to strengthen himself. Yet this is no fantasy; it is the real power that exists today by those who can create and take money without consent. To continue producing value, knowing it will be stolen and weaponized against us, cannot be called moral. It is an act of cooperation with evil, and if money is human energy, then the theft of money is the theft of life itself. What does this mean for us, and the world we live in?

Restoring Moral Agency in Modern Society

Modern society has stripped us of our moral agency. We live in a game we did not choose and cannot escape, built on fear, deception, and the promise of security through domination. At some point, through fear, complacency, or manipulation, we handed over our moral responsibility to the state. We believed government would protect us, enforce morality, and maintain peace. But morality cannot be outsourced; it can only be lived. In surrendering our stewardship of morality, we corrupted it.

Today, legality has replaced morality. The rules are set by those who control violence, and violence itself is funded by something even more insidious: control over money. Governments no longer need to put a gun to your head to steal your labor and through it, your agency; they print money, inflating away your stored effort. Inflation is theft, subtle and slight, but constant and absolute. It erodes everything you build, then redirects its spoils to expand control: more police, more surveillance, more dependency, more war. As long as the state, or any entity, controls money, they control people. This is an immorality most people do not even see happening, or have been conditioned to defend as necessary for civilization, when the opposite is true.

And we can see the evidence of this corruption all around us. After all, isn’t our agency primarily exercised through choosing which ends, and which actions, are worth spending our energy on? If money represents our human energy, then control of it is a theft of our agency—others are directing our efforts, not us. So is it really any wonder that our society has become so immoral? Is it even wrong for us to behave immorally, or is it simply all of us revolting, in the only way we know how, against whoever we have identified as the violator of our agency and natural rights?

Consider how this manifests across society. People who loot stores during riots see businessmen as controlling a corrupt system, one that enslaves the working class. Liberals demand to tax the wealthy and give to the poor, convinced the rich did not gain their wealth justly, and that such extremes of inequality cannot be moral. Even conservatives, who claim to support business, use government funds to enrich military contractors and other favored industries, taking value from the poor through inflation to reward the politically connected, but considering it reasonable and justified because they are the producers of value, and they are the ones raising the standard of living for all.

These impulses all reflect a deeper moral frustration. We sense that a system in which some people are left unable to feed or shelter themselves, while others command resources equal to billions of lives, cannot be just. And the system of redistribution only makes this worse: it steals from the working and poor through inflation, while protecting the wealthy, who hold hard assets that cannot be printed. You can print money, but you cannot print real estate or scarce resources; the harder the asset, the more its value rises with inflation.

In this way, modern immoral behavior can be understood as a desperate attempt to revolt against a corrupt system that robs us of agency. This moral framework both describes current human behavior and points toward the path for restoring true moral agency.

So how can we reclaim moral agency?

Not through violence, which would more likely only replace one tyranny with another. In truth, it is control over money that prevents us from opting out. How can we truly withdraw from a corrupt system if we cannot keep the product of our own labor? Suicide or refusing to work are not meaningful choices; they are forms of surrender, not empowerment. The separation of money and state restores genuine agency. It allows individuals to direct the fruits of their labor as they see fit, and to exit corrupt systems while still providing for themselves. As long as the government does not control money, it cannot coerce the people except through naked violence, and violence alone is neither efficient nor guaranteed to succeed. When money is beyond the state’s reach, the state’s power collapses. It cannot fund oppression without resources, nor can it buy enforcers with worthless currency.

As F.A. Hayek noted in an interview, “We can’t take it [money] violently out of the hands of government; all we can do is, by some sly roundabout way, introduce something that they can’t stop.” A true restoration begins with an economic revolution: a system of value the state cannot corrupt.

And when the monopoly on violence dissolves, morality can return. The transition from a controlled society to a natural society will be dangerous. There will be fear, blame, and calls for revenge. But it was government coercion that created those resentments, and government inequality that provoked them. Once coercion is gone, once power is truly decentralized, humanity can begin again to live under the rules it was always meant to follow; not rules made by men, but rules written into reality itself: natural law.

Reclaiming Our Freedom

We have built a world in which morality has no place. Though we may act kindly toward neighbors or friends, we still participate in an immoral system whenever we vote for more spending, demand new entitlements, or celebrate subsidies that steal from others through inflation and taxation. We have come to treat the federal government as a prize to be looted, each group clamoring for its share, forgetting that every dollar must be taken by force from someone else.

This is not a natural society. It is a game of legalized plunder, made possible only by a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on money. In such a world, moral agency is impossible because there is no true consent, no right to exit, and no capacity to build alternatives. We have replaced a natural, cooperative order with a controlled, coercive one, and then wondered why morality withers.

If we wish to restore moral agency, we must break that monopoly. We must regain control of our own labor, our own property, and our own value. That begins with taking money out of the hands of the state. Only then can individuals truly cooperate, build alliances, and hold one another accountable according to natural law rather than political decree.

A free market for trust, for protection, and for cooperation, is the only place morality can survive. A monopoly on violence will always kill morality. If we hope to build a moral world again, we must reclaim our freedom to choose, to leave, and to create. Only then will human beings once more be moral agents, acting not from fear or coercion, but from reason, goodwill, and the desire for freedom.

Works Cited

• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999.

• Hayek, F.A. Interview by James U. Blanchard III. The Gold Standard: Perspectives in the Austrian School, New Orleans Investment Conference, 1984.

• Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Edited by C.B. Macpherson. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980.

• Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.

• Plato. Protagoras. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997.