Incentive-based order without government

Morality, efficiency, and order cannot result from threats

May 07, 2025

The fundamental difference between state and statelessness is the method they use to achieve social order: either via threat or incentive.

Carrot and stick

The state is threat-based, which means that every single one of its laws and regulations is enforced only via the threat of violence… from an unaccountable monopoly of violence, no less. This is suspect: If those regulations cannot be adhered to organically by a society whose majority wants them enough, then these regulations are misaligned with what that society wants… or in satists lingo, “undemocratic.”

Granted, oftentimes, the state uses a carrot-and-stick combination of both threats and incentives to get you to comply with its arbitrary and selectively enforced dictates. However, incentives attached to threats (such as tax cuts or funding incentives) are still threats by proxy, threats that nullify the ethics and benefits of incentives (i.e. economic efficiency and morality). Besides, if you offer either a benefit or a punishment, this is blackmail, and the threat still remains, despite the incentive. “Either with us or against us” is still a threat.

Statelessness promotes desired behaviours through incentives. Most of your everyday interactions are already self-regulated this way, without the need for any state enforcer. Your entire personal life is self-regulated, and so is most of your professional life; you play ball and respect people’s boundaries, not because of fear of state enforcement, but because people provide incentive for you to do so. If you abuse people, then you lose your privilege of their company. If you harm them, they retain the right to fight back; something that the government limits almost to the point of self-defence prohibition.

Note that the promotion of desired behaviours is not the same as discouraging aggression. Even though you can still provide incentives to make aggressive behaviour less desirable, you still retain the right to respond to aggression using defensive or reciprocal violence. Providing incentives for good behaviour still maintains your right to brutal and unrelentless defensive violence against those who insist on infringing upon your self-sovereignty. However, you can’t defend yourself against the all-powerful state, which we ourselves empower, no less, whenever we plead with it to help us.

Statelessness achieves social order through the decentralised and spontaneous emergence of systems of voluntary incentives. It’s already happening all around you. This way, you are presented with incentives to “follow rules” rather than facing a threat. Read ‘Laws without government’ or ‘Regulations do not require government force’ to see how rules already emerge without the threat of force from a centralised perceived “authority.”

Differences between threat and incentive

A threat does not give you a reward or benefit for submitting to it. A threat simply spares you punishment if you submit to it. If you don’t submit, your intimidation will then forcibly take what is already yours, even if he was never harmed by your non-submission to his arbitrary, inorganic, and entitled demands. Those issuing threats usually take your property, your freedom, and your bodily integrity; things you already own. So when you are threatened, you gain nothing by complying other than avoiding being hurt, and you are robbed of what you already have if you stand your ground.

An incentive, on the other hand, rewards you with an over-and-above benefit if you voluntarily choose to comply. If you choose not to comply, there can be no punishment, otherwise, that would be a threat. Unless, of course, your non-compliance means taking action that directly produces a real victim, but directly harming others does not fall under incentives. Besides, you cannot harm or infringe on someone by NOT doing something.

When I say “incentive”, I mean the promotion of desired behaviours, not the discouraging of harmful ones (self-defence takes care of that). By maintaining a FAFO posture, you’re not incentivising nor threatening anyone; self-defence is neither of those things.

Back to incentives: If you don’t adopt a desired behaviour, you cannot be punished, because you did not create a victim; therefore, nothing can be taken from you that you already had. Besides, you aren’t obligated to comply with anyone’s arbitrary calls for desired behaviours. We all have them, so who gets to decide which is ideal for all? The answer is: the person with the right incentives for the right people at the right time; not with everyone, not always. And this is fine, except for totalitarian autists with crippling mental rigidity they dub “moral objectivity,” or as I like to call it: moralism.

With incentives, the only thing that can be taken from you for not adopting a desired behaviour is a privilege, not a right. And sometimes, this is a greater driver of behaviour than a threat of punishment.

Note that authoritarians tend to confuse rights and privileges. During the COVID insanity that revealed the true authoritarians among us (at least 70% of the species), the foaming-at-the-mouth pontificators thought that the privilege of having you “protect” their health was their entitlement and right. Yet they treated your right to wear or not wear whatever the fuck you wanted on your face, or even resume your work, somehow as a privilege. Truly psychotic. Read ‘Pandemic ethics’ and ‘How to manufacture a pandemic’ for context.

Practical applications

The few free interactions we have left already function through incentives alone. For example, a gym issues its rules, such as using a towel and wearing shoes on its floors. If you don’t comply, no one will fine you or abduct you to take you to a concentration camp (prison). The gym staff may choose to pester you, thus taking away your good standing with the gym’s community. This is a privilege, not a right. A privilege is something you have to earn, if you want it. If you keep refusing to comply, the business owners can simply deny you entry next time - yes, even violently if you choose to force your way into trespassing. They choose to refuse to associate with you. If you deny them their right of free association, you become the aggressor. So, if you don’t follow the rules, you lose a privilege, not a right. You lose the privilege of their company, but you still have options elsewhere. So, the incentive here is to gain good standing in the business and community. For the vast majority of people, this is more than enough. No government is needed. And for the few violent anti-socials? Still, no government is needed.

What about other rules, like speed limits? Even easier. These work exactly the same way without government. If speed limits were not enforced by the state, thus rendering us paralysed by the state’s traffic regulating monopoly, then speeding would become an insurance issue. The more you speed, the greater the risk you pose to your insurance provider. Your insurance company would have to monitor your driving habits, and “punish” you with a higher risk score, and thus increased premiums. If you choose not to have car insurance, then businesses or communities managing roads may choose not to grant you access to the privilege of their roads. That represents a risk to them, which they may decide is not worth taking for the privilege of your company. Without car insurance, you’d limit your ability to access certain establishments, which could be fine with you. But you wouldn’t be able to enter by car a community that decides that only insured vehicles could enter its commonly-owned roads. Fair enough. It’s up to you to decide what you want. You can still opt out of car insurance, assuming that, in the absence of government, some road operators would be more liberal with their approach to insurance. Yes, private roads already exist today without the need for government. Every mall, residential compound, apartment block, private school, or even private airport manages completely private roads. Complying with traffic regulations is as common sense as behaving in any business, so that you keep your privilege to keep using it, or avoid being harmed after you harm others.

With the way of incentives, we’d have more organic and meaningful rules. Businesses find the optimal middle ground between being too harsh and being too lax with their rules. Too harsh, and their business suffers. Too lax, and again the business suffers. The middle ground is found through free-market feedback mechanisms, just like pricing and quality are done today.

Let’s go back to speeding as an example. Those who speed represent a greater risk for insurance companies and for the community that owns the roads of a given region. So, the latter would have to monitor speeds and adjust premiums. But what about those rich enough not to care about extra insurance premiums? Wouldn’t that mean that the rich would pay for the privilege of speeding? Yes, this is exactly what is going on today. The rich keep breaking speed limits, then pay a fine to purchase the privilege of speeding, at your expense, though. This is what a fine is. The difference is that, without government, when insurance companies get the extra money from speeding instead of the state, then they would be able to compensate you, instead of the state enriching itself with every speed violation. Today, the state does not compensate you for anything harmful that happens on its streets. Imagine: under government, you take on the risk from the speeding of others (others who can afford the fines), but you don’t even get compensated for your risk from those fines. Remember, fines are the purchase of the privilege of speeding, a risk that you have to suffer. Instead, the government compensates itself for its failure to provide order. Fancy that. In a free market of competing insurance companies, you could be rewarded with lower premiums, a way for insurance companies to outcompete one another. The government faces no competition in its territories, so it has no incentive to be fair to you.

Besides, without government, there would be much narrower wealth disparities. Why? Because the state deliberately creates the filthy rich by selling its lawmaking powers to the highest bidder, thus creating monopolies/oligopolies through corrupt regulating (barriers for competitors), not to mention tax cuts and corporate funding/welfare only for the few who bribed their way to elitism. Yes, the state is why the filthy rich exist.

The state widens those wealth disparities through its arbitrary inorganic economic interventions, which suppress the economy, thus creating persistent unemployment. This government-induced unemployment robs workers of their negotiating advantage, which means they are willing to work much, much more for much, much less. Don’t blame the employers taking what they can get, or the employees willing to work for less: blame the government for unsettling the balance of the labour market, thus pitting worker against worker.

Without the apparatus of government, there is no centralised monopoly of violence for those who can afford it to hijack. This is why you are poor.

The bottom line

Incentives are a greater predictor of human behaviour than threats are. Threats are unpredictable because they create taboos and indignation from reluctant submission. People are more motivated to comply with rules when they are not threatened or coerced into following them. If anything, threatening makes it all the more attractive to disobey out of spite alone. A mandate makes people who would have already complied consider non-compliance.

The “but what if I’m attacked” objection

The dumb argument against incentives comes from those who don’t want to understand that incentives are to drive positive behaviour, not to stop negative behaviour. You can give all the incentives for people not to harm you, but if they still threaten you, then you can respond in kind. Discouraging aggression is beyond the scope of incentives; incentives are for making people DO something, not NOT DO something.

I wonder if you can respond in kind to the daily threats of the government.

Self-defence is not a threat nor an incentive. It’s just a predictabl response.

You can still follow an incentive-based approach while still maintaining a FAFO posture. Threats and incentives are used to encourage desired behaviours. To discourage undesirable behaviours, you can only retain your right to self-defence, something that the state limits.

Key takeaway

Besides, any desired behaviour you get from threats is inorganic and meaningless. If you have to threaten people to be good, then they aren’t truly good; they’re only pretending to be good when you’re looking.

Good behaviours don’t need enforcement. Bad behaviours don’t need prohibition; dissociation and self-defence are more than enough to discourage or marginalise them.

Lastly, if people can’t adopt your desired behaviours unless they are being threatened, are you sure your desired behaviours are good to begin with?

Carrot for thought…

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your time. All my work here is free.

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