“The Axioms of Agorism
A free society is the goal of many people, not all of them agorists or even libertarians. Agorists can see nothing but a free market in a free society; after all, who or what will prevent it?
The First Axiom of Agorism: the closest approach to a free society is an uncorrupted agora (open marketplace).
An axiom is a principle or premise of a way of thinking. It is arrived at by insight, induction, and observation of nature. Theorems are arrived at deductively from axioms. A "zeroeth" axiom of agorism might be "there are no contradictions in reality and theory must be consistent with reality." Commonly known axioms in philosophy are "existence exists" and "A is A." Well-known mathematical axioms are "things equal to another thing are equal to each other" and "a statement leading to a contradiction with a theorem or axiom is false."
The first six chapters of this "primer" preceded the actual presentation of agorism to give you, the reader, enough understanding of economics, Counter-Economics, and libertarianism to see from where the insights that produced agorism were derived. They were not chosen arbitrarily but rather as a result of years of bitter experience and, in some cases, furious battles and acts of resistance. The "hard core" agorists had to have something worth dying for, and, far more important, worth living for.
The Second Axiom of Agorism: the agora self-corrects for small perturbations of corruption.
This axiom leads us to a far more detailed picture of what our nearly free society would look like. It means simply that free-market entities will defend the free market. People have to choose to do it, of course, but the incentive (offering of subjective-value satisfaction) will be present to motivate them to do so and will be sufficient to motivate enough people to do so. Occasional criminals will be discovered, sought, found, apprehended, tried, sentenced, compelled to deliver restitution, and (if possible) deterred from further actions.
The Third Axiom of Agorism: the moral system of any agora is compatible with pure libertarianism.
This axiom means that life and property are safe from all those who act morally in this society. We will describe this in the next section. But let us complete the axioms first.
The Fourth Axiom of Agorism: agora in part is agora in whole; to a workable approximation, the corruption of an agora raises protection costs and risks.
This axiom's use will become blindingly clear when we deal with the path.
Agorism has more theory, but it is derived from these axioms. For the professional logicians tripping across the theory for the first time, I need to add a fifth axiom for completion: agorism qua theory is an open system. This simply means that we may discover and add on other axioms, then check to see how consistent they are with what we already have.” - Samuel Edward Konkin III, ‘An Agorist Primer’ (2008) [p. 76 - 78]
