I don't sleep enough and dream too much

​In an uncoerced, mutualist society, where access to land, capital, and banking is completely decentralized and free from state-backed monopolies, we find the baseline reality that corporate slide decks labor to obscure: "the natural wage of labor is its product."

​Under these liberated conditions, the goose would naturally retain ownership of the literal egg it toiled to produce. If it chose to bring that asset to market, the egg would exchange evenly against other goods requiring a similar effort to produce, ie the average subjective disutility of toil.

​There is no mystical surplus here. There is only the honest trade of labor for labor.

​The factory, therefore, introduces no creative spark to this equation, despite what the quarterly earnings report might suggest. It introduces only an enclosure. It erects a legal fence around the pasture, claims a state sanctioned monopoly over the nest, and uses institutional coercion to sever the avian worker from its biological output. The factory takes the egg, alienates it in the marketplace to capture its full exchange value, throws a handful of cheap, subsidized feed back into the cage just to sustain the goose's baseline capacity to ovulate tomorrow, and proudly pockets the remaining surplus as shareholder value.

​Imagine stepping off the hard granite of the memorials and onto a winding, soft-surface walking trail. Instead of a sterile concrete lip dropoff, the water's edge softens into a vibrant, selfsustaining wetland ecosystem.

​The perimeter would be alive with indigenous plants, sweeping weeping willows, native reeds, cattails, sedges, and rushes. Deep-water zones would feature floating water lilies, while the banks would bloom with wild irises and buttonbush. This wouldn't just be a scenic landscape, it would be a critical urban sanctuary. It would invite a massive return of biodiversity to the National Mall providing a rich habitat for migratory waterfowl, dragonflies, frogs, and beneficial pollinators.

​The wetland plants and their root systems would act as a massive biofilter, naturally consuming the excess nutrients that cause toxic algae blooms. Nature would do the maintenance work for us, entirely free of heavy chemicals.

It would offer a different kind of reflection. ​A common argument for the concrete basin is that a natural wetland would ruin the iconic reflections of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. But anyone who has ever stood on the edge of a quiet Pacific Northwest lake or a still marsh at dawn knows that nature provides some of the most breathtaking, glassy mirrors on earth.

​In a rewilded pool, the reflection would change character entirely. Instead of a stark, monolithic image framed by cold stone, you would get a series of dynamic, shifting glimpses of history. As you walked the surrounding trail, the monuments would appear beautifully framed between willow branches, shimmering through a bed of rushes, or reflecting perfectly off a quiet, sunlit clearing in the water. ​It would be a living reflection, one that changes with the seasons, the weather, and the time of day.

​It would offer a new symbolism for the National Mall.

​As the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre sharply noted, the State mimics the Church's gatekeeping. Just as the Church claims you cannot reach God except through their clergy, the State claims you cannot reach "Justice" except through their bureaucracy. If you wish to speak to the "State," you are told to speak with a representative—an intercessor. You are never allowed to touch the "Sovereign" directly; you must always go through the temple's authorized personnel. This human sovereignty was identified by the Bible not as progress, but as a fall from grace. In 1 Samuel 8, when the Israelites demanded a king "to be like all the other nations," God told the prophet Samuel that the people had not rejected the prophet, but had rejected God from being king over them. The warning that followed is a chillingly accurate description of the "Divine State": the king will take your sons for his wars, your daughters for his service, and a tenth of your fields. To demand a human sovereign is to explicitly fire the Creator from the position of Protector.

​This rejection of human agency was mirrored in the life of Jesus, who was confronted by three distinct forms of the "State-as-Religion" and rejected all of them. The Sanhedrin tried to make him a blasphemer under their legalistic code; Herod tried to make him a miracle-worker for the regime's entertainment; and Pilate tried to make him a political revolutionary. Jesus refused to participate in any of their games. He did not argue his legal rights under Roman law nor try to reform the Sanhedrin from within; he stood as a representative of a different reality entirely, declaring his kingdom was not of this world. The question then arises for the modern believer: how does one live under the rule of God without a human agent?

​The answer is found in the lived exegesis of the early church, which moved from a vertical relationship with a human king to a horizontal relationship with one another. In Acts 2:44-45 and 4:34-35, the followers of the Way lived in a state of "all things in common," selling their possessions to ensure that no one among them was in need. By Acts 11:29, we see this expanded into an international mutual aid network, where disciples determined to send relief to brothers living elsewhere, each according to their own ability. This was not a state-mandated tax, but a voluntary "tithe of the heart." In this model, God rules not through a throne in a capital city, but through the immediate, tangible needs of the neighbor.

​This radical shift in loyalty aligns with the sentiment of Abhijit Naskar, who in his poem "Let the Poor be Your God," suggests that the only true divinity to be served is the suffering humanity before us. Naskar posits that to serve a distant, abstract "Sovereign"—whether a god in a temple or a state in a palace—is to miss the point of spiritual existence, for "Service to man is service to God." When the poor become the "God" we serve, the State’s claim to moral authority dissolves. As Leo Tolstoy argued in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, the state is a machine that functions solely through the threat of violence, whereas the Kingdom of God functions through the non-resistance of love.

1) Belief in Social Hierarchy (e.g. The prioritization of straight, white, Christian males over the rights of women, the LGBTQ+ community, or immigrants of color.)

2) ​Territorial Expansionism (e.g. Ambitions regarding Greenland, Venezuela, Gaza, or Panama.)

3) ​Nationalism over Individual Liberty (e.g. Prioritizing national concerns—such as claims of immigrants "poisoning the blood" of the country—over the individual right to privacy and freedom from detention without reasonable suspicion.)

4) ​Propaganda and Censorship (e.g. Suing media outlets like CBS and threatening universities over their curricula.)

5) ​State Control over Capitalist Markets (e.g. Proposing a Sovereign Wealth Fund, federal stakes in companies like Intel, or exerting direct control over the Federal Reserve.)

6) ​Suppression of Political Opposition (e.g. Utilizing the DOJ to investigate and prosecute members of Congress, law enforcement adversaries, or the Federal Reserve Chairman.)

7) ​Authoritarianism or Dictatorship (e.g. Ruling via executive order to bypass Congress’s constitutional power of the purse or ignoring judicial mandates.)

Therefore, because the dark surrounds us,

Let us turn our faces toward the light. 

Let us endure hardship to be grateful for plenty. 

We have been given pain to be astounded by joy. 

We have been given life to deny death. 

We did not ask for this room or this music. 

Let the poor be your god, and your service to them, be your religion. Service to the poor - the helpless - is the real service to God - it is the real worship of the highest almighty. And this very worship is the highest form of practical holiness. No church, temple, mosque or synagogue can bring holiness into the world, for they are nothing but empty structures with pompous and often devastating orthodoxy. So, it is you my friend - who can bring the holiness into the world, which has long lost the very perception of holiness. Let your action glitter with real holiness - and then only will the world witness the manifestation of real religion - the religion of love - the religion of compassion - the religion of service."

This does seem a bit of a puzzle. But if money and markets do not emerge spontaneously, it actually makes perfect sense. Because this is the simplest and most efficient way to bring markets into being. Let us take a hypothetical example. Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men. Under ancient or medieval conditions, feeding such a force was an enormous problem-unless they were on the march, one would need to employ almost as many men and animals just to locate, acquire, and transport the necessary provisions. On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one's entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect.

This is a bit of a cartoon version, but it is very clear that markets did spring up around ancient armies; one need only take a glance at Kautilya's Arthasasatra, the Sassanian "circle of sovereignty," or the Chinese "Discourses on Salt and Iron" to discover that most ancient rulers spent a great deal of their time thinking about the relation be­tween mines, soldiers, taxes, and food. Most concluded that the creation of markets of this sort was not just convenient for feeding soldiers, but useful in all sorts of ways, since it meant officials no longer had to requisition everything they needed directly from the populace, or figure out a way to produce it on royal estates or royal workshops. In other words, despite the dogged liberal assumption-again, com­ing from Smith's legacy-that the existence of states and markets are somehow opposed, the historical record implies that exactly the opposite is the case. Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.”