How the State Will Die

Written by Jeffrey Tucker for Laissez Faire Today.

Today, YouTube hosts vast quantities of material that, two years ago, was considered to be pirated and illegal. It is all there serving hundreds of millions of users who don’t pay a dime to get to it. It is doing what Napster did at the turn of the century, before it was destroyed by the government. But this free access is funded through peaceful forms of advertising. What the law had turned into a war of all against all the market converted to a system of peace and plenty for everyone.

This is an absolutely brilliant solution and a fantastic example of how the market is capable of providing peaceful solutions to problems that the law would otherwise handle with coercive brutality. The market solution here is “breaking bad” in the sense that it is an open rejection of everything the state is trying to stop. But because the costs of the coercive approach grew too high, the market found another way. War is expensive.
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