https://mises.org/mises-daily/society-without-state
In attempting to outline how a “society without a state” — that is, an anarchist society — might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.
The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (1) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (2) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the state can do so; only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.
Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way “coercive.” Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term “coercion” can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it “physical violence or the threat thereof,” with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.
It need hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In short, the state, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, “claims and exercises a monopoly of crime” over its territorial area.
The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common charge that anarchists “assume that all people are good” and that without the state no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society. I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.
A further point: in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are “good” in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos. Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection. The anarchist view holds that, given the “nature of man,” given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.
We cannot of course deal here with the numerous arguments in favor of anarchism or against the state, moral, political, and economic. Nor can we take up the various goods and services now provided by the state and show how private individuals and groups will be able to supply them far more efficiently on the free market. Here we can only deal with perhaps the most difficult area, the area where it is almost universally assumed that the state must exist and act, even if it is only a “necessary evil” instead of a positive good: the vital realm of defense or protection of person and property against aggression. Surely, it is universally asserted, the state is at least vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced. My contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.
One important caveat before we begin the body of this paper: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist system works to perfection. Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the state is doing its self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection. We cannot here go into the reasons why the state is bound to suffer inherently from grave flaws and inefficiencies in such a task. All we need do now is to point to the black and unprecedented record of the state through history: no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the state’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder. No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind.
This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: “We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other.” I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of “who will guard the guardians?” becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.
A final caveat: the anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services, on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874 and that someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio-manufacturing industry. To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what technology and marketing techniques they would use, and so on? Obviously, such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities on the market. Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society.
One important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible. Take, for example, the case of lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light. Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private lighthouses in earlier days, as in England in the eighteenth century, another vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each ship for the light far more feasible. Thus, the ship would have to have paid for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned on for those ships which had paid for the service.
Let us turn now to the problem of how disputes — in particular disputes over alleged violations of person and property — would be resolved in an anarchist society. First, it should be noted that all disputes involve two parties: the plaintiff, the alleged victim of the crime or tort and the defendant, the alleged aggressor. In many cases of broken contract, of course, each of the two parties alleging that the other is the culprit is at the same time a plaintiff and a defendant.
An important point to remember is that any society, be it statist or anarchist, has to have some way of resolving disputes that will gain a majority consensus in society. There would be no need for courts or arbitrators if everyone were omniscient and knew instantaneously which persons were guilty of any given crime or violation of contract. Since none of us is omniscient, there has to be some method of deciding who is the criminal or lawbreaker which will gain legitimacy; in short, whose decision will be accepted by the great majority of the public.
In the first place, a dispute may be resolved voluntarily between the two parties themselves, either unaided or with the help of a third mediator. This poses no problem, and will automatically be accepted by society at large. It is so accepted even now, much less in a society imbued with the anarchistic values of peaceful cooperation and agreement. Secondly and similarly, the two parties, unable to reach agreement, may decide to submit voluntarily to the decision of an arbitrator. This agreement may arise either after a dispute has arisen, or be provided for in advance in the original contract. Again, there is no problem in such an arrangement gaining legitimacy. Even in the present statist era, the notorious inefficiency and coercive and cumbersome procedures of the politically run government courts has led increasing numbers of citizens to turn to voluntary and expert arbitration for a speedy and harmonious settling of disputes.
Thus, William C. Wooldridge has written that

Wooldridge adds the important point that, in addition to the speed of arbitration procedures vis-à-vis the courts, the arbitrators can proceed as experts in disregard of the official government law; in a profound sense, then, they serve to create a voluntary body of private law. “In other words,” states Wooldridge, “the system of extralegal, voluntary courts has progressed hand in hand with a body of private law; the rules of the state are circumvented by the same process that circumvents the forums established for the settlement of disputes over those rules…. In short, a private agreement between two people, a bilateral “law,” has supplanted the official law. The writ of the sovereign has cease to run, and for it is substituted a rule tacitly or explicitly agreed to by the parties. Wooldridge concludes that “if an arbitrator can choose to ignore a penal damage rule or the statute of limitations applicable to the claim before him (and it is generally conceded that he has that power), arbitration can be viewed as a practically revolutionary instrument for self-liberation from the law….”2
It may be objected that arbitration only works successfully because the courts enforce the award of the arbitrator. Wooldridge points out, however, that arbitration was unenforceable in the American courts before 1920, but that this did not prevent voluntary arbitration from being successful and expanding in the United States and in England. He points, furthermore, to the successful operations of merchant courts since the Middle Ages, those courts which successfully developed the entire body of the law merchant. None of those courts possessed the power of enforcement. He might have added the private courts of shippers which developed the body of admiralty law in a similar way.
How then did these private, “anarchistic,” and voluntary courts ensure the acceptance of their decisions? By the method of social ostracism, and by the refusal to deal any further with the offending merchant. This method of voluntary “enforcement,” indeed proved highly successful. Wooldridge writes that “the merchants’ courts were voluntary, and if a man ignored their judgment, he could not be sent to jail…. Nevertheless, it is apparent that … [their] decisions were generally respected even by the losers; otherwise people would never have used them in the first place…. Merchants made their courts work simply by agreeing to abide by the results. The merchant who broke the understanding would not be sent to jail, to be sure, but neither would he long continue to be a merchant, for the compliance exacted by his fellows … proved if anything more effective than physical coercion.”3 Nor did this voluntary method fail to work in modern times. Wooldridge writes that it was precisely in the years before 1920, when arbitration awards could not be enforced in the courts,

It should also be pointed out that modern technology makes even more feasible the collection and dissemination of information about people’s credit ratings and records of keeping or violating their contracts or arbitration agreements. Presumably, an anarchist society would see the expansion of this sort of dissemination of data and thereby facilitate the ostracism or boycotting of contract and arbitration violators.
How would arbitrators be selected in an anarchist society? In the same way as they are chosen now, and as they were chosen in the days of strictly voluntary arbitration: the arbitrators with the best reputation for efficiency and probity would be chosen by the various parties on the market. As in other processes of the market, the arbitrators with the best record in settling disputes will come to gain an increasing amount of business, and those with poor records will no longer enjoy clients and will have to shift to another line of endeavor. Here it must be emphasized that parties in dispute will seek out those arbitrators with the best reputation for both expertise and impartiality and that inefficient or biased arbitrators will rapidly have to find another occupation.
Thus, the Tannehills emphasize:

If desired, furthermore, the contracting parties could provide in advance for a series of arbitrators:

Arbitration, then, poses little difficulty for a portrayal of the free society. But what of torts or crimes of aggression where there has been no contract? Or suppose that the breaker of a contract defies the arbitration award? Is ostracism enough? In short, how can courts develop in the free-market anarchist society which will have the power to enforce judgments against criminals or contract breakers?
In the wide sense, defense service consists of guards or police who use force in defending person and property against attack, and judges or courts whose role is to use socially accepted procedures to determine who the criminals or tortfeasors are, as well as to enforce judicial awards, such as damages or the keeping of contracts. On the free market, many scenarios are possible on the relationship between the private courts and the police; they may be “vertically integrated,” for example, or their services may be supplied by separate firms. Furthermore, it seems likely that police service will be supplied by insurance companies who will provide crime insurance to their clients. In that case, insurance companies will pay off the victims of crime or the breaking of contracts or arbitration awards and then pursue the aggressors in court to recoup their losses. There is a natural market connection between insurance companies and defense service, since they need pay out less benefits in proportion as they are able to keep down the rate of crime.
Courts might either charge fees for their services, with the losers of cases obliged to pay court costs, or else they may subsist on monthly or yearly premiums by their clients, who may be either individuals or the police or insurance agencies. Suppose, for example, that Smith is an aggrieved party, either because he has been assaulted or robbed, or because an arbitration award in his favor has not been honored. Smith believes that Jones is the party guilty of the crime. Smith then goes to a court, Court A, of which he is a client, and brings charges against Jones as a defendant. In my view, the hallmark of an anarchist society is one where no man may legally compel someone who is not a convicted criminal to do anything, since that would be aggression against an innocent man’s person or property. Therefore, Court A can only invite rather than subpoena Jones to attend his trial. Of course, if Jones refused to appear or send a representative, his side of the case will not be heard. The trial of Jones proceeds. Suppose that Court A finds Jones innocent. In my view, part of the generally accepted law code of the anarchist society (on which see further below) is that this must end the matter unless Smith can prove charges of gross incompetence or bias on the part of the court.
Suppose, next, that Court A finds Jones guilty. Jones might accept the verdict, because he too is a client of the same court, because he knows he is guilty, or for some other reason. In that case, Court A proceeds to exercise judgment against Jones. Neither of these instances poses very difficult problems for our picture of the anarchist society. But suppose, instead, that Jones contests the decision; he then goes to his court, Court B, and the case is retried there. Suppose that Court B, too, finds Jones guilty. Again, it seems to me that the accepted law code of the anarchist society will assert that this ends the matter; both parties have had their say in courts which each has selected, and the decision for guilt is unanimous.
Suppose, however, the most difficult case: that Court B finds Jones innocent. The two courts, each subscribed to by one of the two parties, have split their verdicts. In that case, the two courts will submit the case to an appeals court, or arbitrator, which the two courts agree upon. There seems to be no real difficulty about the concept of an appeals court. As in the case of arbitration contracts, it seems very likely that the various private courts in the society will have prior agreements to submit their disputes to a particular appeals court. How will the appeals judges be chosen? Again, as in the case of arbitrators or of the first judges on the free market, they will be chosen for their expertise and their reputation for efficiency, honesty, and integrity. Obviously, appeals judges who are inefficient or biased will scarcely be chosen by courts who will have a dispute. The point here is that there is no need for a legally established or institutionalized single, monopoly appeals court system, as states now provide. There is no reason why there cannot arise a multitude of efficient and honest appeals judges who will be selected by the disputant courts, just as there are numerous private arbitrators on the market today. The appeals court renders its decision, and the courts proceed to enforce it if, in our example, Jones is considered guilty — unless, of course, Jones can prove bias in some other court proceedings.
No society can have unlimited judicial appeals, for in that case there would be no point to having judges or courts at all. Therefore, every society, whether statist or anarchist, will have to have some socially accepted cutoff point for trials and appeals. My suggestion is the rule that the agreement of any two courts, be decisive. “Two” is not an arbitrary figure, for it reflects the fact that there are two parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, to any alleged crime or contract dispute.
If the courts are to be empowered to enforce decision against guilty parties, does this not bring back the state in another form and thereby negate anarchism? No, for at the beginning of this paper I explicitly defined anarchism in such a way as not to rule out the use of defensive force — force in defense of person and property — by privately supported agencies. In the same way, it is not bringing back the state to allow persons to use force to defend themselves against aggression, or to hire guards or police agencies to defend them.
It should be noted, however, that in the anarchist society there will be no “district attorney” to press charges on behalf of “society.” Only the victims will press charges as the plaintiffs. If, then, these victims should happen to be absolute pacifists who are opposed even to defensive force, then they will simply not press charges in the courts or otherwise retaliate against those who have aggressed against them. In a free society that would be their right. If the victim should suffer from murder, then his heir would have the right to press the charges.
What of the Hatfield-and-McCoy problem? Suppose that a Hatfield kills a McCoy, and that McCoy’s heir does not belong to a private insurance, police agency, or court, and decides to retaliate himself? Since under anarchism there can be no coercion of the noncriminal, McCoy would have the perfect right to do so. No one may be compelled to bring his case to a court. Indeed, since the right to hire police or courts flows from the right of self-defense against aggression, it would be inconsistent and in contradiction to the very basis of the free society to institute such compulsion.
Suppose, then, that the surviving McCoy finds what he believes to be the guilty Hatfield and kills him in turn? What then? This is fine, except that McCoy may have to worry about charges being brought against him by a surviving Hatfield. Here it must be emphasized that in the law of the anarchist society based on defense against aggression, the courts would not be able to proceed against McCoy if in fact he killed the right Hatfield. His problem would arise if the courts should find that he made a grievous mistake and killed the wrong man; in that case, he in turn would be found guilty of murder. Surely, in most instances, individuals will wish to obviate such problems by taking their case to a court and thereby gain social acceptability for their defensive retaliation — not for the act of retaliation but for the correctness of deciding who the criminal in any given case might be. The purpose of the judicial process, indeed, is to find a way of general agreement on who might be the criminal or contract breaker in any given case. The judicial process is not a good in itself; thus, in the case of an assassination, such as Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, on public television, there is no need for a complex judicial process, since the name of the murderer is evident to all.
Will not the possibility exist of a private court that may turn venal and dishonest, or of a private police force that turns criminal and extorts money by coercion? Of course such an event may occur, given the propensities of human nature. Anarchism is not a moral cure-all. But the important point is that market forces exist to place severe checks on such possibilities, especially in contrast to a society where a state exists. For, in the first place, judges, like arbitrators, will prosper on the market in proportion to their reputation for efficiency and impartiality. Secondly, on the free market important checks and balances exist against venal courts or criminal police forces. Namely, that there are competing courts and police agencies to whom victims may turn for redress. If the “Prudential Police Agency” should turn outlaw and extract revenue from victims by coercion, the latter would have the option of turning to the “Mutual” or “Equitable” Police Agency for defense and for pressing charges against Prudential. These are the genuine “checks and balances” of the free market, genuine in contrast to the phony check and balances of a state system, where all the alleged “balancing” agencies are in the hands of one monopoly government. Indeed, given the monopoly “protection service” of a state, what is there to prevent a state from using its monopoly channels of coercion to extort money from the public? What are the checks and limits of the state? None, except for the extremely difficult course of revolution against a power with all of the guns in its hands. In fact, the state provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax theft, and the coerced monopoly of “protection.” It is the state, indeed, that functions as a mighty “protection racket” on a giant and massive scale. It is the state that says: “Pay us for your ‘protection’ or else.” In the light of the massive and inherent activities of the state, the danger of a “protection racket” emerging from one or more private police agencies is relatively small indeed.
Moreover, it must be emphasized that a crucial element in the power of the state is its legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the public, the fact that after centuries of propaganda, the depredations of the state are looked upon rather as benevolent services. Taxation is generally not seen as theft, nor war as mass murder, nor conscription as slavery. Should a private police agency turn outlaw, should “Prudential” become a protection racket, it would then lack the social legitimacy which the state has managed to accrue to itself over the centuries. “Prudential” would be seen by all as bandits, rather than as legitimate or divinely appointed “sovereigns” bent on promoting the “common good” or the “general welfare.” And lacking such legitimacy, “Prudential” would have to face the wrath of the public and the defense and retaliation of the other private defense agencies, the police and courts, on the free market. Given these inherent checks and limits, a successful transformation from a free society to bandit rule becomes most unlikely. Indeed, historically, it has been very difficult for a state to arise to supplant a stateless society; usually, it has come about through external conquest rather than by evolution from within a society.
Within the anarchist camp, there has been much dispute on whether the private courts would have to be bound by a basic, common law code. Ingenious attempts have been made to work out a system where the laws or standards of decision-making by the courts would differ completely from one to another.7 But in my view all would have to abide by the basic law code, in particular, prohibition of aggression against person and property, in order to fulfill our definition of anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression. Suppose, for example, that one group of people in society holds that all redheads are demons who deserve to be shot on sight. Suppose that Jones, one of this group, shoots Smith, a redhead. Suppose that Smith or his heir presses charges in a court, but that Jones’s court, in philosophic agreement with Jones, finds him innocent therefore. It seems to me that in order to be considered legitimate, any court would have to follow the basic libertarian law code of the inviolate right of person and property. For otherwise, courts might legally subscribe to a code which sanctions such aggression in various cases, and which to that extent would violate the definition of anarchism and introduce, if not the state, then a strong element of statishness or legalized aggression into the society.
But again I see no insuperable difficulties here. For in that case, anarchists, in agitating for their creed, will simply include in their agitation the idea of a general libertarian law code as part and parcel of the anarchist creed of abolition of legalized aggression against person or property in the society.
In contrast to the general law code, other aspects of court decisions could legitimately vary in accordance with the market or the wishes of the clients; for example, the language the cases will be conducted in, the number of judges to be involved, and so on.
There are other problems of the basic law code which there is no time to go into here: for example, the definition of just property titles or the question of legitimate punishment of convicted offenders — though the latter problem of course exists in statist legal systems as well.8 The basic point, however, is that the state is not needed to arrive at legal principles or their elaboration: indeed, much of the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law, and private law in general, grew up apart from the state, by judges not making the law but finding it on the basis of agreed-upon principles derived either from custom or reason.9 The idea that the state is needed to make law is as much a myth as that the state is needed to supply postal or police services.
Enough has been said here, I believe, to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil.

[Murray Rothbard delivered this talk 32 years ago today at the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (ASPLP), Washington, DC: December 28, 1974. It was first published in The Libertarian Forum, volume 7.1, January 1975, available in PDF and ePub.]

https://mises.org/mises-daily/society-without-state
In attempting to outline how a “society without a state” — that is, an anarchist society — might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.
The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (1) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (2) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the state can do so; only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.
Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way “coercive.” Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term “coercion” can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it “physical violence or the threat thereof,” with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.
It need hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In short, the state, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, “claims and exercises a monopoly of crime” over its territorial area.
The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common charge that anarchists “assume that all people are good” and that without the state no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society. I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.
A further point: in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are “good” in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos. Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection. The anarchist view holds that, given the “nature of man,” given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.
We cannot of course deal here with the numerous arguments in favor of anarchism or against the state, moral, political, and economic. Nor can we take up the various goods and services now provided by the state and show how private individuals and groups will be able to supply them far more efficiently on the free market. Here we can only deal with perhaps the most difficult area, the area where it is almost universally assumed that the state must exist and act, even if it is only a “necessary evil” instead of a positive good: the vital realm of defense or protection of person and property against aggression. Surely, it is universally asserted, the state is at least vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced. My contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.
One important caveat before we begin the body of this paper: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist system works to perfection. Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the state is doing its self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection. We cannot here go into the reasons why the state is bound to suffer inherently from grave flaws and inefficiencies in such a task. All we need do now is to point to the black and unprecedented record of the state through history: no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the state’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder. No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind.
This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: “We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other.” I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of “who will guard the guardians?” becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.
A final caveat: the anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services, on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874 and that someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio-manufacturing industry. To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what technology and marketing techniques they would use, and so on? Obviously, such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities on the market. Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society.
One important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible. Take, for example, the case of lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light. Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private lighthouses in earlier days, as in England in the eighteenth century, another vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each ship for the light far more feasible. Thus, the ship would have to have paid for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned on for those ships which had paid for the service.
Let us turn now to the problem of how disputes — in particular disputes over alleged violations of person and property — would be resolved in an anarchist society. First, it should be noted that all disputes involve two parties: the plaintiff, the alleged victim of the crime or tort and the defendant, the alleged aggressor. In many cases of broken contract, of course, each of the two parties alleging that the other is the culprit is at the same time a plaintiff and a defendant.
An important point to remember is that any society, be it statist or anarchist, has to have some way of resolving disputes that will gain a majority consensus in society. There would be no need for courts or arbitrators if everyone were omniscient and knew instantaneously which persons were guilty of any given crime or violation of contract. Since none of us is omniscient, there has to be some method of deciding who is the criminal or lawbreaker which will gain legitimacy; in short, whose decision will be accepted by the great majority of the public.
In the first place, a dispute may be resolved voluntarily between the two parties themselves, either unaided or with the help of a third mediator. This poses no problem, and will automatically be accepted by society at large. It is so accepted even now, much less in a society imbued with the anarchistic values of peaceful cooperation and agreement. Secondly and similarly, the two parties, unable to reach agreement, may decide to submit voluntarily to the decision of an arbitrator. This agreement may arise either after a dispute has arisen, or be provided for in advance in the original contract. Again, there is no problem in such an arrangement gaining legitimacy. Even in the present statist era, the notorious inefficiency and coercive and cumbersome procedures of the politically run government courts has led increasing numbers of citizens to turn to voluntary and expert arbitration for a speedy and harmonious settling of disputes.
Thus, William C. Wooldridge has written that

Wooldridge adds the important point that, in addition to the speed of arbitration procedures vis-à-vis the courts, the arbitrators can proceed as experts in disregard of the official government law; in a profound sense, then, they serve to create a voluntary body of private law. “In other words,” states Wooldridge, “the system of extralegal, voluntary courts has progressed hand in hand with a body of private law; the rules of the state are circumvented by the same process that circumvents the forums established for the settlement of disputes over those rules…. In short, a private agreement between two people, a bilateral “law,” has supplanted the official law. The writ of the sovereign has cease to run, and for it is substituted a rule tacitly or explicitly agreed to by the parties. Wooldridge concludes that “if an arbitrator can choose to ignore a penal damage rule or the statute of limitations applicable to the claim before him (and it is generally conceded that he has that power), arbitration can be viewed as a practically revolutionary instrument for self-liberation from the law….”2
It may be objected that arbitration only works successfully because the courts enforce the award of the arbitrator. Wooldridge points out, however, that arbitration was unenforceable in the American courts before 1920, but that this did not prevent voluntary arbitration from being successful and expanding in the United States and in England. He points, furthermore, to the successful operations of merchant courts since the Middle Ages, those courts which successfully developed the entire body of the law merchant. None of those courts possessed the power of enforcement. He might have added the private courts of shippers which developed the body of admiralty law in a similar way.
How then did these private, “anarchistic,” and voluntary courts ensure the acceptance of their decisions? By the method of social ostracism, and by the refusal to deal any further with the offending merchant. This method of voluntary “enforcement,” indeed proved highly successful. Wooldridge writes that “the merchants’ courts were voluntary, and if a man ignored their judgment, he could not be sent to jail…. Nevertheless, it is apparent that … [their] decisions were generally respected even by the losers; otherwise people would never have used them in the first place…. Merchants made their courts work simply by agreeing to abide by the results. The merchant who broke the understanding would not be sent to jail, to be sure, but neither would he long continue to be a merchant, for the compliance exacted by his fellows … proved if anything more effective than physical coercion.”3 Nor did this voluntary method fail to work in modern times. Wooldridge writes that it was precisely in the years before 1920, when arbitration awards could not be enforced in the courts,

It should also be pointed out that modern technology makes even more feasible the collection and dissemination of information about people’s credit ratings and records of keeping or violating their contracts or arbitration agreements. Presumably, an anarchist society would see the expansion of this sort of dissemination of data and thereby facilitate the ostracism or boycotting of contract and arbitration violators.
How would arbitrators be selected in an anarchist society? In the same way as they are chosen now, and as they were chosen in the days of strictly voluntary arbitration: the arbitrators with the best reputation for efficiency and probity would be chosen by the various parties on the market. As in other processes of the market, the arbitrators with the best record in settling disputes will come to gain an increasing amount of business, and those with poor records will no longer enjoy clients and will have to shift to another line of endeavor. Here it must be emphasized that parties in dispute will seek out those arbitrators with the best reputation for both expertise and impartiality and that inefficient or biased arbitrators will rapidly have to find another occupation.
Thus, the Tannehills emphasize:

If desired, furthermore, the contracting parties could provide in advance for a series of arbitrators:

Arbitration, then, poses little difficulty for a portrayal of the free society. But what of torts or crimes of aggression where there has been no contract? Or suppose that the breaker of a contract defies the arbitration award? Is ostracism enough? In short, how can courts develop in the free-market anarchist society which will have the power to enforce judgments against criminals or contract breakers?
In the wide sense, defense service consists of guards or police who use force in defending person and property against attack, and judges or courts whose role is to use socially accepted procedures to determine who the criminals or tortfeasors are, as well as to enforce judicial awards, such as damages or the keeping of contracts. On the free market, many scenarios are possible on the relationship between the private courts and the police; they may be “vertically integrated,” for example, or their services may be supplied by separate firms. Furthermore, it seems likely that police service will be supplied by insurance companies who will provide crime insurance to their clients. In that case, insurance companies will pay off the victims of crime or the breaking of contracts or arbitration awards and then pursue the aggressors in court to recoup their losses. There is a natural market connection between insurance companies and defense service, since they need pay out less benefits in proportion as they are able to keep down the rate of crime.
Courts might either charge fees for their services, with the losers of cases obliged to pay court costs, or else they may subsist on monthly or yearly premiums by their clients, who may be either individuals or the police or insurance agencies. Suppose, for example, that Smith is an aggrieved party, either because he has been assaulted or robbed, or because an arbitration award in his favor has not been honored. Smith believes that Jones is the party guilty of the crime. Smith then goes to a court, Court A, of which he is a client, and brings charges against Jones as a defendant. In my view, the hallmark of an anarchist society is one where no man may legally compel someone who is not a convicted criminal to do anything, since that would be aggression against an innocent man’s person or property. Therefore, Court A can only invite rather than subpoena Jones to attend his trial. Of course, if Jones refused to appear or send a representative, his side of the case will not be heard. The trial of Jones proceeds. Suppose that Court A finds Jones innocent. In my view, part of the generally accepted law code of the anarchist society (on which see further below) is that this must end the matter unless Smith can prove charges of gross incompetence or bias on the part of the court.
Suppose, next, that Court A finds Jones guilty. Jones might accept the verdict, because he too is a client of the same court, because he knows he is guilty, or for some other reason. In that case, Court A proceeds to exercise judgment against Jones. Neither of these instances poses very difficult problems for our picture of the anarchist society. But suppose, instead, that Jones contests the decision; he then goes to his court, Court B, and the case is retried there. Suppose that Court B, too, finds Jones guilty. Again, it seems to me that the accepted law code of the anarchist society will assert that this ends the matter; both parties have had their say in courts which each has selected, and the decision for guilt is unanimous.
Suppose, however, the most difficult case: that Court B finds Jones innocent. The two courts, each subscribed to by one of the two parties, have split their verdicts. In that case, the two courts will submit the case to an appeals court, or arbitrator, which the two courts agree upon. There seems to be no real difficulty about the concept of an appeals court. As in the case of arbitration contracts, it seems very likely that the various private courts in the society will have prior agreements to submit their disputes to a particular appeals court. How will the appeals judges be chosen? Again, as in the case of arbitrators or of the first judges on the free market, they will be chosen for their expertise and their reputation for efficiency, honesty, and integrity. Obviously, appeals judges who are inefficient or biased will scarcely be chosen by courts who will have a dispute. The point here is that there is no need for a legally established or institutionalized single, monopoly appeals court system, as states now provide. There is no reason why there cannot arise a multitude of efficient and honest appeals judges who will be selected by the disputant courts, just as there are numerous private arbitrators on the market today. The appeals court renders its decision, and the courts proceed to enforce it if, in our example, Jones is considered guilty — unless, of course, Jones can prove bias in some other court proceedings.
No society can have unlimited judicial appeals, for in that case there would be no point to having judges or courts at all. Therefore, every society, whether statist or anarchist, will have to have some socially accepted cutoff point for trials and appeals. My suggestion is the rule that the agreement of any two courts, be decisive. “Two” is not an arbitrary figure, for it reflects the fact that there are two parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, to any alleged crime or contract dispute.
If the courts are to be empowered to enforce decision against guilty parties, does this not bring back the state in another form and thereby negate anarchism? No, for at the beginning of this paper I explicitly defined anarchism in such a way as not to rule out the use of defensive force — force in defense of person and property — by privately supported agencies. In the same way, it is not bringing back the state to allow persons to use force to defend themselves against aggression, or to hire guards or police agencies to defend them.
It should be noted, however, that in the anarchist society there will be no “district attorney” to press charges on behalf of “society.” Only the victims will press charges as the plaintiffs. If, then, these victims should happen to be absolute pacifists who are opposed even to defensive force, then they will simply not press charges in the courts or otherwise retaliate against those who have aggressed against them. In a free society that would be their right. If the victim should suffer from murder, then his heir would have the right to press the charges.
What of the Hatfield-and-McCoy problem? Suppose that a Hatfield kills a McCoy, and that McCoy’s heir does not belong to a private insurance, police agency, or court, and decides to retaliate himself? Since under anarchism there can be no coercion of the noncriminal, McCoy would have the perfect right to do so. No one may be compelled to bring his case to a court. Indeed, since the right to hire police or courts flows from the right of self-defense against aggression, it would be inconsistent and in contradiction to the very basis of the free society to institute such compulsion.
Suppose, then, that the surviving McCoy finds what he believes to be the guilty Hatfield and kills him in turn? What then? This is fine, except that McCoy may have to worry about charges being brought against him by a surviving Hatfield. Here it must be emphasized that in the law of the anarchist society based on defense against aggression, the courts would not be able to proceed against McCoy if in fact he killed the right Hatfield. His problem would arise if the courts should find that he made a grievous mistake and killed the wrong man; in that case, he in turn would be found guilty of murder. Surely, in most instances, individuals will wish to obviate such problems by taking their case to a court and thereby gain social acceptability for their defensive retaliation — not for the act of retaliation but for the correctness of deciding who the criminal in any given case might be. The purpose of the judicial process, indeed, is to find a way of general agreement on who might be the criminal or contract breaker in any given case. The judicial process is not a good in itself; thus, in the case of an assassination, such as Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, on public television, there is no need for a complex judicial process, since the name of the murderer is evident to all.
Will not the possibility exist of a private court that may turn venal and dishonest, or of a private police force that turns criminal and extorts money by coercion? Of course such an event may occur, given the propensities of human nature. Anarchism is not a moral cure-all. But the important point is that market forces exist to place severe checks on such possibilities, especially in contrast to a society where a state exists. For, in the first place, judges, like arbitrators, will prosper on the market in proportion to their reputation for efficiency and impartiality. Secondly, on the free market important checks and balances exist against venal courts or criminal police forces. Namely, that there are competing courts and police agencies to whom victims may turn for redress. If the “Prudential Police Agency” should turn outlaw and extract revenue from victims by coercion, the latter would have the option of turning to the “Mutual” or “Equitable” Police Agency for defense and for pressing charges against Prudential. These are the genuine “checks and balances” of the free market, genuine in contrast to the phony check and balances of a state system, where all the alleged “balancing” agencies are in the hands of one monopoly government. Indeed, given the monopoly “protection service” of a state, what is there to prevent a state from using its monopoly channels of coercion to extort money from the public? What are the checks and limits of the state? None, except for the extremely difficult course of revolution against a power with all of the guns in its hands. In fact, the state provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax theft, and the coerced monopoly of “protection.” It is the state, indeed, that functions as a mighty “protection racket” on a giant and massive scale. It is the state that says: “Pay us for your ‘protection’ or else.” In the light of the massive and inherent activities of the state, the danger of a “protection racket” emerging from one or more private police agencies is relatively small indeed.
Moreover, it must be emphasized that a crucial element in the power of the state is its legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the public, the fact that after centuries of propaganda, the depredations of the state are looked upon rather as benevolent services. Taxation is generally not seen as theft, nor war as mass murder, nor conscription as slavery. Should a private police agency turn outlaw, should “Prudential” become a protection racket, it would then lack the social legitimacy which the state has managed to accrue to itself over the centuries. “Prudential” would be seen by all as bandits, rather than as legitimate or divinely appointed “sovereigns” bent on promoting the “common good” or the “general welfare.” And lacking such legitimacy, “Prudential” would have to face the wrath of the public and the defense and retaliation of the other private defense agencies, the police and courts, on the free market. Given these inherent checks and limits, a successful transformation from a free society to bandit rule becomes most unlikely. Indeed, historically, it has been very difficult for a state to arise to supplant a stateless society; usually, it has come about through external conquest rather than by evolution from within a society.
Within the anarchist camp, there has been much dispute on whether the private courts would have to be bound by a basic, common law code. Ingenious attempts have been made to work out a system where the laws or standards of decision-making by the courts would differ completely from one to another.7 But in my view all would have to abide by the basic law code, in particular, prohibition of aggression against person and property, in order to fulfill our definition of anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression. Suppose, for example, that one group of people in society holds that all redheads are demons who deserve to be shot on sight. Suppose that Jones, one of this group, shoots Smith, a redhead. Suppose that Smith or his heir presses charges in a court, but that Jones’s court, in philosophic agreement with Jones, finds him innocent therefore. It seems to me that in order to be considered legitimate, any court would have to follow the basic libertarian law code of the inviolate right of person and property. For otherwise, courts might legally subscribe to a code which sanctions such aggression in various cases, and which to that extent would violate the definition of anarchism and introduce, if not the state, then a strong element of statishness or legalized aggression into the society.
But again I see no insuperable difficulties here. For in that case, anarchists, in agitating for their creed, will simply include in their agitation the idea of a general libertarian law code as part and parcel of the anarchist creed of abolition of legalized aggression against person or property in the society.
In contrast to the general law code, other aspects of court decisions could legitimately vary in accordance with the market or the wishes of the clients; for example, the language the cases will be conducted in, the number of judges to be involved, and so on.
There are other problems of the basic law code which there is no time to go into here: for example, the definition of just property titles or the question of legitimate punishment of convicted offenders — though the latter problem of course exists in statist legal systems as well.8 The basic point, however, is that the state is not needed to arrive at legal principles or their elaboration: indeed, much of the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law, and private law in general, grew up apart from the state, by judges not making the law but finding it on the basis of agreed-upon principles derived either from custom or reason.9 The idea that the state is needed to make law is as much a myth as that the state is needed to supply postal or police services.
Enough has been said here, I believe, to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil.

[Murray Rothbard delivered this talk 32 years ago today at the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (ASPLP), Washington, DC: December 28, 1974. It was first published in The Libertarian Forum, volume 7.1, January 1975, available in PDF and ePub.]

Hi all,
Looking to buy my first new bike and want to go the gravel route.
Looking at the Specialized E5, Giant Revolt 2, and the Salsa Journeyer Apex 1 or the Salsa Journeyer Sora.
I intend to use the gravel bike primarily for long rides on dirt roads in national forests and racing. Likely a little bit of bike packing but bike packing is secondary.
I’m trying to figure out which bike to buy. Right now I’m thinking of buying a “base level” bike and can upgrade components as I get more into biking. If I can find something on sale that is Orignally $2k-$2.5k might be attainable as I’m selling a used road and gravel bike to help pay for the new bike.
Thanks for the input! It’s fun to talk shop about bikes and I don’t have lot of people to talk to.

Timestamp: https://imgur.com/LpRn9u5
Sup dudes, moving from SC to SD next month, so wife and I are purging. All prices are OBO. Shits either getting sold or trashed before the move.
pelican case not for sale, I just don't want oil on my floor lol
** 2x sets of AK mags, complete with East German pouches. $60 each**
All mags are steel 7.62 mags, I have zero idea on manufacture besides being NOT Chinese. They all seem to rock in to my SAR1. Some have minor rusting, as any good AK mag does.
- PHLSTER Engima with PHLSTER G48 holster. $120
- TRex Arms Sidecar for g19 with TLR1, black and green. Used. $80
- Unknown G48 w/ TLR-7sub holster. $30
- Surefire Can Pouch, came with RC2. Free with anything
- Ruger basic stock. $20
- Silencer shop mitten. Free with anything else
I am definitely not up to speed on resale values. Buying and selling has taken a massive backseat in the past 2 years compared to where I once was. If my prices are off, feel free to offer. Will certainly work deals for multiple items.

"With the release of 3.23.1, we wanted to provide players with a less brutal experience when getting back into action. To help with this, we are making all Medical Bed Tiers be capable of being set as a regen location."
"#refundmycarrack" has already hit the Spectrum, less than a minute after this was announced.
For those that don't know, this is a fundamental retraction on game design. From ultimately punishing, hardcore, "death of a spaceman" perma-death to insta-respawn, Call of Duty fast action. In prior patches the only way to skip the incredibly tedious respawn process was to buy giant ships for hundreds of dollars. No mas.
The rage on Spectrum has flopped from logout changes to the awful new flight model and now this is the latest distraction. It's fantastic stuff, best value I've gotten from CIG in a decade.
Edit: As others have rightly pointed out, a new, cheap, mobile medical vehicle is about to go up for sale, taking advantage of this new change, just in time for their mid-year sales event.

From what I’m reading, Beelzebufo, as the largest frog to exist, is 16”. When you compare that to a pixie frog, which is like a foot tops, it’s only 4 inches longer than a modern species.
Meanwhile, Koolasuchas was 15’ long, and the modern Chinese giant salamander is 6’.
Why did frogs never reach such big sizes? Why were salamanders that much more successful?

On August 18, 2015 the Boston Red Sox hired the late General Manager of the Detroit Tigers, Dave Dombrowski, to run the team, replacing Ben Cherrington. The development focused Cherrington had failed to follow up the Red Sox miracle 2013 season with even winning records in the two years since, though the farm system ranked among the very best in baseball and a wave of prospects had just hit the majors (among them, Xander Bogaerts, Jackie Bradley Jr., Mookie Betts, and Blake Swihart). Thus, the swapping of Cherington for Dombrowski was rightly interpreted as the Red Sox moving to a more assertive phase, to win now even at the expense of the player development system.
Ironically Dombrowski had been fired by the Tigers because of his belief that the organization’s competitive window had closed and that the team needed to rebuild; the Tigers gave the job to his former assistant who got one more winning season out of their aging core before the inevitabilities became insurmountable. By that time the Red Sox were in the midst of their second straight division crown of three, which climaxed with the single greatest season in franchise history. This is how Dombrowski built that team, as well as the fiscal panic that cost the Red Sox the greatest all around player in franchise history following it:
~2015~
November 13, 2015: Traded Logan Allen, Carlos Asuaje, Javy Guerra and Manuel Margot to the San Diego Padres. Received Craig Kimbrel.
The first major transaction of the Dave Dombrowski era set the pace for the next four years; trading four prospects for a relief pitcher constitutes the classic win-now move. In this case the Red Sox won the deal in both the long and short terms, as only Manuel Margot developed in regular at the major league level, and that at a position where the Red Sox were not in need (center field). Meanwhile Craig Kimbrel made the all-star team in each of his three seasons in Boston, the second of which was one of the greatest relief performances in the game’s history.
December 4, 2015: Signed David Price as a free agent, 217 million dollars over seven years.
At once the most maligned and most underrated move of the Dombrowski era as well as being the biggest, the David Price signing saw the Red Sox for the first time handout a nine figure contract to a free agent pitcher. This was all the more dramatic as they had alienated and traded away their own homegrown southpaw ace (Jon Lester) less than eighteen months before. This was also the first time with the Red Sox that Dave Dombrowski acquired a player he was he previously familiar with, perhaps slightly overpaying for that familiarity. Did we mention that this was largest contract ever given to a pitcher at time, too?
Price had a solid first season in Boston, leading the league in innings pitched with 230 and striking out nearly a man per inning. Nonetheless the first three years of his tenure were marked with mutual hostility towards the ever-ravenous Boston sports media, only alleviated after his fantastic 2018 postseason run. Aging and injuries limited both the quantity and quality of his performance in 2017 and 2019; this trend as well as his 31 million annum salary contributed to owner John Henry’s decision to offload Price even at the cost of Mookie Betts. If only for that last reason alone the David Price signing is one the Red Sox would likely not repeat in hindsight.
December 7, 2015: Traded Jonathan Aro and Wade Miley to the Seattle Mariners. Received Roenis Elías and Carson Smith.
The first of many times Dombrowski would be burned in pursuit of bullpen arms, this deal with Seattle comes down to Wade Miley for Carson Smith. Miley had been signed as a reclamation project by Cherrington before 2015 in the hopes that Miley could serve as a solid mid-rotation option, which he more or less fulfilled with just short of 200 league average innings. Smith on the other hand was coming off his first full season in the majors where he gave the Mariners seventy brilliant innings of high leverage relief pitching (2.31 ERA, 11.8 K/9, and only two home runs allowed).
In a twist of fate, this trade hurt both teams as Smith immediately got injured and only pitched 24 innings in the rest of his career while Miley bombed in Seattle en route to a midseason jettisoning. Yet he rebounded with Baltimore in 2017 and remains an effective if oft-injured starting pitcher to this day, currently with the Milwaukee Brewers.
~2016~
June 10, 2016: Drafted Bobby Dalbec in the 4th round of the 2016 amateur draft.
The once and future Red Sox, Quad A superstar Bobby Dalbec!
July 7, 2016: Traded Wendell Rijo and Aaron Wilkerson to the Milwaukee Brewers. Received Aaron Hill and cash.
With Pablo Sandoval well into his career of eating his way out of Boston, the Red Sox carried a gaping hole at third base from August 2012 to July 2017. One of the short term attempts at a fix featured the acquisition of infielder Aaron Hill, hoping that he and Travis Shaw could platoon for the rest of the 2016 season. The thirty four year old Hill had been decent in Milwaukee in the first half after two bad seasons, but he reverted to that form as soon as he put on a Red Sox uniform, posting a 54 OPS+ in 137 plate appearances. After another terrible eighty plate appearances for the Giants in 2017 Hill was done. On the bright side, the two players Dombrowski gave up for him never amounted to anything.
July 9, 2016: Traded Jose Almonte and Luis Alejandro Basabe to the Arizona Diamondbacks. Received Brad Ziegler.
Ziegler was an accomplished submarine righty who the Red Sox acquired for basically free to get same-sided batters out, a role which he fulfilled to perfection (1.52 ERA in 30 innings). Another clearly won trade for DD.
July 14, 2016: Traded Anderson Espinoza to the San Diego Padres. Received Drew Pomeranz.
At the time, Anderson Espinoza was a teenager in Single A while Drew Pomeranz had appeared to finally unlock his long-salivated over potential with an all-star appearance. Ideally the Padres were hoping Espinoza could eventually develop to that same quality while the Red Sox expected Pomeranz to fill the fourth spot in the rotation. Neither team got what they wanted, at least in 2016 or for most of thereafter; Espinoza immediately went down with a major arm injury which kept him from pitching professionally for five years. Pomeranz himself reverted to his pre-breakout level for the rest of the season, bounced back with a big 2017 (17-6, 3.32 ERA, a strikeout per inning across 174 frames) and then finally was the forgotten man on the 2018 pitching staff due to injuries and ineffectiveness (6.08 ERA in 74 innings, 66 strikeouts to 44 walks). At this point the thirty year old southpaw looked like the quintessential example of TNSTAAPP (There’s No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect), another electric arm who would never match his potential due to injuries and command woes. Anyways, Pomeranz then seemed to resuscitate his career out of the bullpen for the 2019 Brewers and 2020-21 Padres with a sub-2 ERA across 70 innings in those three seasons…before injuries again struck. Though he has not pitched in the majors in three years he remains in the Dodgers minor league system, currently (where else) on the injured list.
December 6, 2016: Traded Victor Diaz, Luis Alexander Basabe, Michael Kopech and Yoán Moncada to the Chicago White Sox. Received Chris Sale.
It’s easy to forget now, but Moncada was not only a can’t miss prospect but one of the three best in all of baseball at the time, and Kopech was another Top 100 type. I’ve covered Kopech in my previous article on Red Sox pitching prospect busts but Moncada’s own failure to reach his ceiling was due more to injuries and a passive approach at the plate. Thus far into his career, Moncada has had two good seasons out of seven and played in at least 130 games in only three. With a strikeout rate of thirty percent, a declining walk rate, little power and less defense, he’s become a fourteen million dollar albatross even when on the field for the White Sox.
Sale, of course, had two Cy Young Award worthy campaigns before injuries and an ill-advised extension soured his final five seasons as a Red Sox. That extension will be discussed further when we come to it, but the trade on its own was inarguably a major victory.
Traded a player to be named later, Josh Pennington, Mauricio Dubón and Travis Shaw to the Milwaukee Brewers. Received Tyler Thornburg. The Boston Red Sox sent Yeison Coca (June 5, 2017) to the Milwaukee Brewers to complete the trade.
Yet another ill-fated trade for a relief pitcher, this time costing the Red Sox heavily in terms of value lost; Shaw went to become an all-star power bat at second and third base for the next two seasons in Milwaukee before his career petered out. Thornburg on the other hand contracted thoracic outlet syndrome from which he never recovered. Even if he had pitched well, the Red Sox could have used Shaw more than any setup man due to Dustin Pedroia’s career ending knee injury.
December 8, 2016: Signed Mitch Moreland as a free agent.
Mitch Moreland was a decent first baseman, but could Dave really not find someone better to play first over the next three years? Even if they cost more than $18.5 million?
December 20, 2016: Traded Clay Buchholz to the Philadelphia Phillies. Received Josh Tobias.
This was more of a psychic relief to Red Sox Nation than anything else, finally alleviating them of the constant confusion over which Bucholz would show up on the mound—the oft-injured and easy to hit version, or the dominating ace? Fittingly Clay’s last three seasons in the majors featured two horrid starts for Philly, sixteen dominating starts in Arizona, and then finally split the difference with a final dozen poor performances as a Blue Jay.
~2017~
June 12, 2017: Drafted Tanner Houck in the 1st round (24th pick) of the 2017 amateur draft.
Houck’s selection constitutes one-third of the total number of draft picks by Dombrowski that made which helped the Red Sox at the major league level (the other two being fourteenth round pick Kutter Crawford in 2016 and fellow first rounder Triston Casas in 2018); inability to find even depth pieces in the draft left the Red Sox farm system utterly void of impact talent by 2018.
June 23, 2017: Selected Doug Fister off waivers from the Los Angeles Angels.
As alluded to in my previous article, veteran GMs tend to reacquire players they were familiar with from previous stops. Fister had been an excellent fourth starter for the Tigers early in the 2010s but by 2017 the end was clearly staring him in the face; a 4.88 ERA in eighteen appearances (fifteen starts) just underlined this inevitable and unenviable conclusion.
July 26, 2017: Traded Shaun Anderson and Gregory Santos to the San Francisco Giants. Received Eduardo Núñez.
Nunez was the short-term solution to Pedroia’s knee injury. He turned out to be the medium-term solution too, as the degenerate condition of the incumbent’s affliction led DD to resign Nunez that winter. While fantastic down the stretch in 2017 this was a stretch of the infielder’s capabilities; Nunez suffered his own knee injuries and posted a remarkable -2.3 WAR as Boston’s primary keystone occupant over the 2018 and 2019 seasons.
July 31, 2017: Traded Gerson Bautista, Jamie Callahan and Stephen Nogosek to the New York Mets. Received Addison Reed.
Another deadline, another deal to reinforce the bullpen. Reed was inconsistent for the Red Sox during his two month stay, which turned out to be the penultimate chapter for his career—a poor 2018 in Minnesota marked the end of his major league career, an astonishingly quick demise even for a reliever.
~2018~
February 26, 2018: Signed J.D. Martinez as a free agent, five years and 110 million dollars.
The best free agent signing of the Dombrowski era, JD provided the power bat the Red Sox sorely lacked after Big Papi’s retirement. In his first and best season in Boston Martinez led the majors in both runs batted in and total bases, placed third in MVP voting, and earned Silver Sluggers at two different positions! He declined linearly from there, but remains a productive member of any team’s lineup to this day; he has spent the last two seasons as the Dodgers and now Mets’ DH, attempting to compensate for declining bat speed by sacrificing contact for power.
March 4, 2018: Signed Ryan Brasier as a free agent.
The quality of Brasier’s pitching is inversely proportional to the quality of the expectations laid upon him. Thus he alternates excellent if limited seasons with ostensibly healthier but more erratic contributions.
March 24, 2018: Traded Deven Marrero to the Arizona Diamondbacks. Received a player to be named later. The Arizona Diamondbacks sent Josh Taylor (May 15, 2018) to the Boston Red Sox to complete the trade.
Deven Marrero was the prototypical good-field/no-hit infielder. Taylor is yet another oft-injured reliever, though he at least gave the Red Sox two solid seasons as the primary southpaw in 2019 and 2021. After missing all of 2022, he was traded to the Royals for Adalberto Mondesi and a teenage infielder named Angel Pierre; while Mondesi knee injuries seem to have ended his career Pierre posted a .415 OBP in rookie ball last year. Keep an eye and ear out for him as he climbs through the minor league ranks.
June 4, 2018: Drafted Triston Casas in the 1st round (26th pick) of the 2018 amateur draft.
Get well soon. There’s only so much Bobby Dalbec a fan can take.
June 28, 2018: Traded Santiago Espinal to the Toronto Blue Jays. Received Steve Pearce and cash.
Moreland had never and would never hit southpaws, but it took until the middle of his second season in Boston for the Red Sox to provide him with a platoon partner. When they finally did so at least they chose one of the very best platoon players in the major leagues in Steve Pearce; Pearce of course would win the World Series MVP that should have gone to Price later that year.
July 25, 2018: Traded Jalen Beeks to the Tampa Bay Rays. Received Nathan Eovaldi.
Even had he not resigned with the team during the offseason, Eovaldi would have earned his place in Red Sox lore for his heroic six inning relief appearance in the World Series. We’ll discuss the extension later, but also note that Beeks is perhaps the only pitcher who the Rays failed to turn into a Cy Young contender. What’s the opposite of adding insult to injury?
July 30, 2018: Traded Ty Buttrey and Williams Jerez to the Los Angeles Angels. Received Ian Kinsler and cash.
With Nunez playing well below replacement level, the Red Sox needed a replacement for the replacement. Kinsler in his penultimate season at least provided a solid glove; just in case the Red Sox also picked up Brandon Phillips.
November 16, 2018: Signed Steve Pearce as a free agent. AND, December 6, 2018: Signed Nathan Eovaldi as a free agent.
These were covertly two of the worst transactions of the Dave Dombrowski era. Refusing to say goodbye to midseason rentals is risky enough, but the amount of money given to Pearce and Eovaldi also baffled reasonable explanations; a thirty-six-year-old platoon hitter at first base is replaceable enough, even when he’s not the weak side of the arrangement. Had Pearce played well and been healthy in 2019, perhaps the six and quarter million would have seemed mostly worth it; instead, he “hit” .180 in twenty nine games before retiring.
Meanwhile, Eovaldi’s lengthy injury history made it a minor miracle that he was healthy enough for the Red Sox during his three months in Boston—bringing him back for four years and sixty-eight million dollars can only be explained as a sentimental move, an excessive reward for that World Series performance. As could have been reasonably expected in December 2018, Nitro Nate only proved worthy of that contract in one out of four seasons; in the other three he was either injured for most of the season, ineffective, or both.
~2019~
March 23, 2019: Extended Chris Sale for five years, 145 million dollars.
It wasn’t the David Price contract that caused the fiscal panic that cost the Red Sox their best player since at least Carl Yastrzemski, not really. The Red Sox could have eaten that sunken cost, had it been the sole albatross on their pitching staff. But, of course, it was only one of three unnecessary contracts that Dave Dombrowski issued to injury-prone starting pitchers on the wrong side of thirty. Sale had already shown long term red flags in 2018, which argued for letting him play out his walk year in 2019 before possibly ponying up the cash to keep him. After all, the Red Sox also had to extend Xander Bogaerts as well as the inestimable Betts; those two would cost at least sixty million a year to retain. Since they were coming off the most dominant single season in franchise history, perhaps now was the best time to let go some of the chief contributors, before the Red Sox tricked themselves into trying to recapture lightning in a bottle…Well, you know what happened in reality.
Between them, Eovaldi, Sale, and Price cost the Red Sox $52 million in 2019 alone, then $67 million in 2020; accounting for other contracts (JBJ’s arbitration rang up $11 million, Bogey was extended for $20 million, and JD was on the books for about $24 million) that was at least $122 million dollars already assigned to six players entering 2020. Assuming a payroll of effectively $200 million, this would have left about thirty million to spend on the other twenty-odd players required to field a team after giving Mookie his presumed megadeal. Turning back to 2019, just like with the Tigers in 2015, Dave couldn’t even make his customary July trade for pitching; the acquisition of Andrew Cashner from the Orioles felt like a low-budget parody of his previous deadline splashes, which of course it was.
There’s the real reason Dave Dombrowski was fired—just as in Detroit his full throttle commitment to a win-now mandate from ownership eventually led to a top-heavy roster and barren farm system. Have fun while you can, Phillies Phans.
Final Note/Small Self Promotion I forget to add: You could have read this post ten days earlier if you follow my blog

In an OP today titled, "Would Amazon exist in a purely socialist country?" socialist after socialist claimed quickly and with little to no qualifiers resounding "yes".
These "Yes" really told us nonsocialists a lot about you socialists. This was mind boggling. Mind boggling because the majority socialists on here reject Marxist-Leninist history (e.g., not socialism), but here many of you claim that Amazonon existing in a socialist country would be so obviously, "Yes". We are talking about an innovation company that is probably the most significant market global impact in the world since Ford's assembly line.

Ranking fifth in the world in terms of market cap with a staggering $1.045 trillion (CompaniesMarketCap, 2023), Amazon has been able to cement itself as a global giant that has altered how we shop and live. Expanding beyond just delivering goods, it is also a media streaming service and manufactures other technologies such as “Alexa”. Amazon has quickly become one of the most recognizable company names throughout the world. It has achieved such success that it has become commonly used as a verb in everyday language, much like “Google.” However, like many other large corporations today such as Google and Facebook, Amazon started out as a small business building its way up to being a large corporation. The History of Amazon and its Rise to Success – Michigan Journal of Economics (umich.edu)

This leads me to conclude a few things about socialists on here:

• The most obvious is most on that thread are delusional
• Some on that thread are closeted about your true ideals with your public ideals of anarchist and libertarian ideals and do want a centralized authoritarian system of socialism like the USSR.
• Some want Dengist Chinese flavor socialism%2C) that overseas capitalism where a person did cite BABA - Chinese Amazon.

The reason most of you are in denial is how much leadership and venture capital businesses like Amazon take. These concepts are the antithesis of what most of you hold dear to "socialism". These are disruptors to the economy.
I cannot understate the following enough and why socialists are particularly bad at the following. If you seek benefits then what are the costs???
In this case, Amazon is going to change jobs for millions of workers and even workers are going to lose jobs. Right now, Amazon has a pharmacy. It is going to put a strain on local pharmacies and some will go under. How is that pro workers?
Pro consumers? YES
Then, mostly Amazon is not a producer but a third party. So they are almost no matter what you do a capitalist model. As they are going in order to function have to profit off of other industries - profit off of workers. Thus this means for most of you socialists you have to enact forms of laws, edicts, or some form of constitutional framework to protect "the workers" from being exploited by Amazon.

• How are you going to do that?
• How are you going to do that and yet have all the wonderful benefits of "Amazon"?

The simplest answer is to nationalize Amazon. Hence my last two bullet points of either being a full-blown Soviet Union centrally planned economy (or similar form) or going the Dengist route and overseeing the company by the socialist worker's party. These simple answers leaves out most if not all libertarian and anarchist socialists on this sub. So the answer is most all socialists should be "NO!" to that op. But where are they?
Lastly, that's me working through the problem. Those reading this may have other ideas. I'm not saying I have all the answers. I'm saying it is really sad I have more ideas than the socialists on that thread. The socialists on the thread just seem to go, "Yes" like it will be no problem - smh. And that is really telling how in the clouds most socialists are and don't take the economic realities of their ideology.
tl;dr Something stinks and isn't on the so-called capitalism side.

Hi - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Each week I post a summary recap of the week's top stories, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition. Let's dive in...
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STAT OF THE WEEK: Kohl's sales have shrunk by $2.3B since 2019. During that same period of time, the company lost 1.3M customers who no longer shop with the retailer.
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BigCommerce is exploring a sale after attracting takeover interest, according to sources who chose to remain anonymous due to the confidentiality of the information. The sources said that BigCommerce asked investment bank Qatalyst Partners to solicit interest from potential buyers that include private equity firms, but that the discussions are at an early stage and no deal is certain.
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Squarespace announced that it will be going private in a $6.9B all-cash deal with private-equity firm Permira, who agreed to pay $44 per share (a roughly 30% premium). Although Squarespace never lost 90% of its share price like BigCommerce, it has experienced a tumultuous time on the market since its IPO in May 2021 — opening around $49.50 and at times trading in the low $20s. Shares rose nearly 13% to $43 in pre-market trading upon release of the news.
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ByteDance filed a lawsuit in US federal court seeking to block the new law that would force the sale or ban of the app within the country. The lawsuit challenges the law on constitutional grounds, also citing commercial, technical, and legal hurdles, as well as opposition from Beijing. Legal experts say the legal battle will play out in the courts in coming months and likely will reach the Supreme Court.
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OpenAI unveiled its newest model, GPT-4o, designed to turn ChatGPT into a digital personal assistant that can engage in real-time, spoken conversations and interact with users using text, screenshots, photos, documents, and charts. The new version of ChatGPT also has memory capabilities, which means it can learn from previous conversations. It will be available to both unpaid and premium customers alike. OpenAI also announced that it would be launching a desktop app with the GPT-4o capabilities, giving users another platform to interact with the technology outside of a web browser.
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Amazon launched in South Africa last week, marking its first marketplace in sub-Saharan Africa, and bringing its total number of marketplaces worldwide to 22. To launch the new marketplace, Amazon is offering free delivery on first orders and on subsequent orders above R500 (about $27), access to 3,000 pick-up points, status updates via WhatsApp to track orders, 30 day refunds, and 24/7 customer support. The marketplace was supposed to launch in the country in 2023, but got delayed due to changes in priorities within Amazon.
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In an unlikely partnership, Instacart is partnering with Uber Eats to expand into the restaurant delivery business. Instacart will add a new tab for restaurant delivery to its app in the coming weeks, the listings will be provided by Uber, and the food will be picked up and delivered by Uber Eats drivers. Customers will receive the same prices on both apps and Instacart will receive an affiliate commission on orders. It's a strange partnership though given that Instacart and Uber Eats actively compete on grocery delivery. Are they planning to merge? Uber says no.
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Apple's advertisement for its latest iPad Pro sparked criticism for showing an animation of musical instruments, paint cans, cameras, record players, and other symbols of creativity being crushed by a giant machine, with the output being the new iPad Pro, which the company says is the thinnest Apple product ever. In this context, “crushing” was supposed to symbolize “consolidating” and “compacting” — with the visuals meant to showcase how the new iPad Pro puts the power of all these tools into the hands of creators in one thin device. However online commenters criticized the ad as insensitive and as symbolizing a “destruction of the human experience.” The ad hit the web on Tuesday, and by Thursday, Apple issued a mea culpa and apologized for the campaign.
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Google is encouraging merchants to enable conversion annotations on their Google Shopping ads, which offer social proof that highlight a product's popularity. Conversion annotations like “best selling” or “3K shopped here recently” would provide visual cues about a product’s popularity or sales performance directly in the ad unit. Annotations like these are par for the course with e-commerce retailers including Amazon, Walmart, and Temu, which all employ similar tactics. They can provide valuable info for shoppers and also help with conversions. However they also open data privacy concerns, given that Google is not the actual retailer or marketplace selling the items, so a merchant would have to share this purchase history data from their e-commerce platform with Google — which technically most already do by giving access to GA4.
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Shein is attempting to join the National Retail Federation as it pursues regulatory approval to go public in the US. The company believes that NRF membership would boost its chances of receiving SEC approval. However so far, Shein has been rejected numerous times. An anonymous source familiar with the matter said someone with heavy influence at the NRF is strongly against the Shein's admittance. However board members who spoke to CNBC said that Shein's membership application hadn't come up in meetings, and that they aren't involved in deciding which companies are granted access.
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Amazon is leading the way with selling home goods, capturing 18.8% of consumer home furnishings spending, compared to Walmart's 7.3% market share. Notably, Amazon’s gains in the furniture category come in spite of the company’s decision to phase out two of its three furniture brands last year.
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Stanley, which is projected to do $750M in sales this year, up from $73M in 2019, after seeing its water bottles become a status symbol thanks to TikTok, is now expanding into trendier accessories. The company is launching a line of bags called the All-Day Collection which include a mini cooler, backpack cooler, and Quencher Carry-All, designed for someone to sling their Stanley over their hip.
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Jack Dorsey left the Bluesky board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart, claiming that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. Dorsey says he never intended Bluesky to be an independent company, but rather, an open source protocol that Twitter was supposed to be the first client of. He also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder.
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Amazon is deploying 50 electric trucks in California, which it claims is the largest EV fleet in the country, as part of its mission to eliminate pollution from its global operations. The trucks will be integrated into first-mile operations, moving goods from container ships at the ports to fulfillment centers, as well as middle-mile operations, transporting packages from fulfillment centers to delivery centers.
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Wix launched a new tool called AI Portfolio Creator, which allows a user to upload and organize large-scale image collections, select the type of portfolio they want, and then have the AI tool sort and generate a portfolio with clustered images, recommended titles and descriptions, and personalized layout options.
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Amazon is now requiring all dietary supplements to be verified by a third-party testing, inspection, and certification organization — which is something that not even the FDA requires. Amazon is the largest supplement retailer in the US ahead of Walmart and Target, and its new requirements are expected to put more pressure on the industry, which is being scrutinized more than ever.
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Alibaba is revamping its flagship retail website Taobao for the first time in seven years with a focus on providing a smoother search and buying process. The website overhaul comes ahead of the 618 sales event, China's second-largest annual shopping event. A few weeks ago I reported that Eddie Wu, the CEO of Alibaba Group, would now be directly overseeing its domestic e-commerce arm which includes Taobao and Tmall Group, and it sounds like he's hitting the ground running with his new responsibilities.
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Amazon is hosting its first-ever Amazon Book Sale, a new shopping event starting on May 15th that offers up to 50% off print best sellers and up to 80% off Kindle Books. The six day shopping event will exclusively run in the US, and Prime-membership is not required to take advantage of the deals.
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FTX reported that nearly all of its customers will receive the money back that they are owed, two years after the cryptocurrency exchange imploded. The company owes about $11.2B to its customers and estimates that it has between $14.5B and $16.3B to distribute to them. The caveat is that customers will receive the USD value of their holdings at the time of the exchange collapse, and not the actual crypto holdings themselves, which means that they'll miss out on all gains during the past two years during which BTC went from around $16k to now over $60k. Better than nothing though, that's for sure.
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800,000 consumers in Europe and the US were duped into sharing card details and other sensitive personal data with a network of fake online designer shops operated from China, which comprised one of the largest scams of its kind with 76,000 fake websites created. The scammers used expired domains to host its fake shops in order to help avoid detection by websites or brand owners, and more than 1M orders were processed in the past three years alone.
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Beyond Inc, which owns Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock, and Zulily, reported that its Q1 net loss swelled to $72M from $10M a year ago, while its operating loss widened to $58M from $8M. The company's active customers grew to 6M, up 26% from nearly 5M a year ago, however, its average order value dropped to $173 from $220 a year earlier.
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TikTok will begin automatically labeling AI generated content when it is uploaded from certain platforms like DALL.E 3, Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, and Microsoft Copilot. TikTok will also start attaching Content Credentials to content, which will remain on the media when downloaded, allowing other platforms to read the metadata.
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eBay is testing an Add To Cart button in search results that opens a Quick View window, allowing buyers to skip the listing page. Technically the button should probably not be labeled “Add To Cart” since it doesn't perform that action, but rather, displays a quick view window with three buttons: Buy It Now, Add To Cart, View All Details. Sellers are worried that buyers will miss crucial details in the product description that may lead to increased returns and negative feedback.
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Amazon is planning to launch its fleet of drones in Tolleson, Arizona, but the city's extreme temperature is hampering its efforts. Drones can't operate in temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that Tolleson crosses for a full three months of the year.
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A US district judge dismissed X's lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X system and violating X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data. The judge basically said that if X owned the data, it could perhaps argue that it has exclusive rights to control it, but then X wouldn't be able to enjoy the safe harbor of Section 230, which allows the platform to avoid liability for third-party content. Can't have it both ways!
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Nintendo is discontinuing its X integration for the switch on June 10th, which means users will no longer be able to post screenshots or videos to the platform from their device. The drop in support also affects games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which had game-specific options to send out tweets. Microsoft Xbox dropped support for X in April 2023 and Sony Playstation dropped the service in October 2023 due to the increase in X's API access fees.
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Amazon claimed that its recordable incident rate — a metric that comprises all injuries requiring “more than basic first-aid treatment” — at its US warehouses has improved by 24% since 2019. However the National Employment Law Project challenged Amazon's injury data in a report last week, claiming that Amazon's overall injury rate in 2023 was 71% higher than that of other employers in the sector at 6.5 cases per 100 workers.
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Amazon Ads announced three new advertising formats for streaming TV including shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive trivia ads. Amazon did not say when the new ad types would officially launch, but noted that it will formally present them at a presentation on May 14th.
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Meta is rolling out an expanded set of generative AI ad tools that can create full image variations with text overlays, expand images to fit across different aspect ratios, and generate alternate versions of headlines and other ad text. The features will become available globally to advertisers by the end of the year.
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Square introduced a tool called Square Kiosk to allow self-service ordering at fast food restaurants. The device is a combined software, hardware, and payment solution that allows customers to select exactly what they want with customization options, upgrades, and add-ons.
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The European Parliament announced new measures to make packaging more sustainable and reduce packaging waste in the EU, including reduction targets of 15% by 2040 — which sounds far away but is only 16 years away?! As part of the new rules, the EU will set maximum empty space ratios for e-commerce transportation, ban certain single-use plastic packaging types, and beverage distributors and take-away food will have to offer consumers the option of bringing their own container.
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Indians who pre-ordered Teslas in 2016 are giving up and seeking refunds of their deposits after Elon Musk canceled another visit to the country last month. Disillusioned Tesla enthusiasts in India say they will now buy a car from the company only if they see it in a showroom, or they'll buy a different electrical vehicle from a company that actually exists in the country.
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Target is limiting its Pride Month collection to select stores this year instead of rolling out the merchandise nationwide like it typically has for the past decade, due to backlash the retailer experienced last year. Last May customers in certain stores knocked down LGBTQ+ merchandise displays, angrily approached store employees, and posted threatening videos on social media from inside the stores.
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E-commerce spending from Jan 1 to April 30, 2024 rose 7% YoY to $331.6B, according to Adobe Analytics. One trend Adobe identified during the period is a shift of online spending to purchasing the cheapest goods across personal care, electronics, apparel, home & garden, furniture, and grocery.
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Plus 7 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest, including Shopify's acquisition of Peel, a tool that integrates with a merchant's tech stack including Klaviyo and Recharge and helps them analyze their sales data to improve customer retention.
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I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!
PAUL Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter
PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments.

Hi - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Each week I post a summary recap of the week's top stories, which I cover in depth in the newsletter. Let's dive in...
___
STAT OF THE WEEK: Kohl's sales have shrunk by $2.3B since 2019. During that same period of time, the company lost 1.3M customers who no longer shop with the retailer.
___
BigCommerce is exploring a sale after attracting takeover interest, according to sources who chose to remain anonymous due to the confidentiality of the information. The sources said that BigCommerce asked investment bank Qatalyst Partners to solicit interest from potential buyers that include private equity firms, but that the discussions are at an early stage and no deal is certain.
___
Squarespace announced that it will be going private in a $6.9B all-cash deal with private-equity firm Permira, who agreed to pay $44 per share (a roughly 30% premium). Although Squarespace never lost 90% of its share price like BigCommerce, it has experienced a tumultuous time on the market since its IPO in May 2021 — opening around $49.50 and at times trading in the low $20s. Shares rose nearly 13% to $43 in pre-market trading upon release of the news.
___
ByteDance filed a lawsuit in US federal court seeking to block the new law that would force the sale or ban of the app within the country. The lawsuit challenges the law on constitutional grounds, also citing commercial, technical, and legal hurdles, as well as opposition from Beijing. Legal experts say the legal battle will play out in the courts in coming months and likely will reach the Supreme Court.
___
OpenAI unveiled its newest model, GPT-4o, designed to turn ChatGPT into a digital personal assistant that can engage in real-time, spoken conversations and interact with users using text, screenshots, photos, documents, and charts. The new version of ChatGPT also has memory capabilities, which means it can learn from previous conversations. It will be available to both unpaid and premium customers alike. OpenAI also announced that it would be launching a desktop app with the GPT-4o capabilities, giving users another platform to interact with the technology outside of a web browser.
___
Amazon launched in South Africa last week, marking its first marketplace in sub-Saharan Africa, and bringing its total number of marketplaces worldwide to 22. To launch the new marketplace, Amazon is offering free delivery on first orders and on subsequent orders above R500 (about $27), access to 3,000 pick-up points, status updates via WhatsApp to track orders, 30 day refunds, and 24/7 customer support. The marketplace was supposed to launch in the country in 2023, but got delayed due to changes in priorities within Amazon.
___
In an unlikely partnership, Instacart is partnering with Uber Eats to expand into the restaurant delivery business. Instacart will add a new tab for restaurant delivery to its app in the coming weeks, the listings will be provided by Uber, and the food will be picked up and delivered by Uber Eats drivers. Customers will receive the same prices on both apps and Instacart will receive an affiliate commission on orders. It's a strange partnership though given that Instacart and Uber Eats actively compete on grocery delivery. Are they planning to merge? Uber says no.
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Apple's advertisement for its latest iPad Pro sparked criticism for showing an animation of musical instruments, paint cans, cameras, record players, and other symbols of creativity being crushed by a giant machine, with the output being the new iPad Pro, which the company says is the thinnest Apple product ever. In this context, “crushing” was supposed to symbolize “consolidating” and “compacting” — with the visuals meant to showcase how the new iPad Pro puts the power of all these tools into the hands of creators in one thin device. However online commenters criticized the ad as insensitive and as symbolizing a “destruction of the human experience.” The ad hit the web on Tuesday, and by Thursday, Apple issued a mea culpa and apologized for the campaign.
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Google is encouraging merchants to enable conversion annotations on their Google Shopping ads, which offer social proof that highlight a product's popularity. Conversion annotations like “best selling” or “3K shopped here recently” would provide visual cues about a product’s popularity or sales performance directly in the ad unit. Annotations like these are par for the course with e-commerce retailers including Amazon, Walmart, and Temu, which all employ similar tactics. They can provide valuable info for shoppers and also help with conversions. However they also open data privacy concerns, given that Google is not the actual retailer or marketplace selling the items, so a merchant would have to share this purchase history data from their e-commerce platform with Google — which technically most already do by giving access to GA4.
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Shein is attempting to join the National Retail Federation as it pursues regulatory approval to go public in the US. The company believes that NRF membership would boost its chances of receiving SEC approval. However so far, Shein has been rejected numerous times. An anonymous source familiar with the matter said someone with heavy influence at the NRF is strongly against the Shein's admittance. However board members who spoke to CNBC said that Shein's membership application hadn't come up in meetings, and that they aren't involved in deciding which companies are granted access.
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Amazon is leading the way with selling home goods, capturing 18.8% of consumer home furnishings spending, compared to Walmart's 7.3% market share. Notably, Amazon’s gains in the furniture category come in spite of the company’s decision to phase out two of its three furniture brands last year.
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Stanley, which is projected to do $750M in sales this year, up from $73M in 2019, after seeing its water bottles become a status symbol thanks to TikTok, is now expanding into trendier accessories. The company is launching a line of bags called the All-Day Collection which include a mini cooler, backpack cooler, and Quencher Carry-All, designed for someone to sling their Stanley over their hip.
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Jack Dorsey left the Bluesky board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart, claiming that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. Dorsey says he never intended Bluesky to be an independent company, but rather, an open source protocol that Twitter was supposed to be the first client of. He also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder.
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Amazon is deploying 50 electric trucks in California, which it claims is the largest EV fleet in the country, as part of its mission to eliminate pollution from its global operations. The trucks will be integrated into first-mile operations, moving goods from container ships at the ports to fulfillment centers, as well as middle-mile operations, transporting packages from fulfillment centers to delivery centers.
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Wix launched a new tool called AI Portfolio Creator, which allows a user to upload and organize large-scale image collections, select the type of portfolio they want, and then have the AI tool sort and generate a portfolio with clustered images, recommended titles and descriptions, and personalized layout options.
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Amazon is now requiring all dietary supplements to be verified by a third-party testing, inspection, and certification organization — which is something that not even the FDA requires. Amazon is the largest supplement retailer in the US ahead of Walmart and Target, and its new requirements are expected to put more pressure on the industry, which is being scrutinized more than ever.
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Alibaba is revamping its flagship retail website Taobao for the first time in seven years with a focus on providing a smoother search and buying process. The website overhaul comes ahead of the 618 sales event, China's second-largest annual shopping event. A few weeks ago I reported that Eddie Wu, the CEO of Alibaba Group, would now be directly overseeing its domestic e-commerce arm which includes Taobao and Tmall Group, and it sounds like he's hitting the ground running with his new responsibilities.
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Amazon is hosting its first-ever Amazon Book Sale, a new shopping event starting on May 15th that offers up to 50% off print best sellers and up to 80% off Kindle Books. The six day shopping event will exclusively run in the US, and Prime-membership is not required to take advantage of the deals.
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FTX reported that nearly all of its customers will receive the money back that they are owed, two years after the cryptocurrency exchange imploded. The company owes about $11.2B to its customers and estimates that it has between $14.5B and $16.3B to distribute to them. The caveat is that customers will receive the USD value of their holdings at the time of the exchange collapse, and not the actual crypto holdings themselves, which means that they'll miss out on all gains during the past two years during which BTC went from around $16k to now over $60k. Better than nothing though, that's for sure.
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800,000 consumers in Europe and the US were duped into sharing card details and other sensitive personal data with a network of fake online designer shops operated from China, which comprised one of the largest scams of its kind with 76,000 fake websites created. The scammers used expired domains to host its fake shops in order to help avoid detection by websites or brand owners, and more than 1M orders were processed in the past three years alone.
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Beyond Inc, which owns Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock, and Zulily, reported that its Q1 net loss swelled to $72M from $10M a year ago, while its operating loss widened to $58M from $8M. The company's active customers grew to 6M, up 26% from nearly 5M a year ago, however, its average order value dropped to $173 from $220 a year earlier.
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TikTok will begin automatically labeling AI generated content when it is uploaded from certain platforms like DALL.E 3, Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, and Microsoft Copilot. TikTok will also start attaching Content Credentials to content, which will remain on the media when downloaded, allowing other platforms to read the metadata.
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eBay is testing an Add To Cart button in search results that opens a Quick View window, allowing buyers to skip the listing page. Technically the button should probably not be labeled “Add To Cart” since it doesn't perform that action, but rather, displays a quick view window with three buttons: Buy It Now, Add To Cart, View All Details. Sellers are worried that buyers will miss crucial details in the product description that may lead to increased returns and negative feedback.
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Amazon is planning to launch its fleet of drones in Tolleson, Arizona, but the city's extreme temperature is hampering its efforts. Drones can't operate in temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that Tolleson crosses for a full three months of the year.
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A US district judge dismissed X's lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X system and violating X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data. The judge basically said that if X owned the data, it could perhaps argue that it has exclusive rights to control it, but then X wouldn't be able to enjoy the safe harbor of Section 230, which allows the platform to avoid liability for third-party content. Can't have it both ways!
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Nintendo is discontinuing its X integration for the switch on June 10th, which means users will no longer be able to post screenshots or videos to the platform from their device. The drop in support also affects games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which had game-specific options to send out tweets. Microsoft Xbox dropped support for X in April 2023 and Sony Playstation dropped the service in October 2023 due to the increase in X's API access fees.
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Amazon claimed that its recordable incident rate — a metric that comprises all injuries requiring “more than basic first-aid treatment” — at its US warehouses has improved by 24% since 2019. However the National Employment Law Project challenged Amazon's injury data in a report last week, claiming that Amazon's overall injury rate in 2023 was 71% higher than that of other employers in the sector at 6.5 cases per 100 workers.
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Amazon Ads announced three new advertising formats for streaming TV including shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive trivia ads. Amazon did not say when the new ad types would officially launch, but noted that it will formally present them at a presentation on May 14th.
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Meta is rolling out an expanded set of generative AI ad tools that can create full image variations with text overlays, expand images to fit across different aspect ratios, and generate alternate versions of headlines and other ad text. The features will become available globally to advertisers by the end of the year.
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Square introduced a tool called Square Kiosk to allow self-service ordering at fast food restaurants. The device is a combined software, hardware, and payment solution that allows customers to select exactly what they want with customization options, upgrades, and add-ons.
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The European Parliament announced new measures to make packaging more sustainable and reduce packaging waste in the EU, including reduction targets of 15% by 2040 — which sounds far away but is only 16 years away?! As part of the new rules, the EU will set maximum empty space ratios for e-commerce transportation, ban certain single-use plastic packaging types, and beverage distributors and take-away food will have to offer consumers the option of bringing their own container.
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Indians who pre-ordered Teslas in 2016 are giving up and seeking refunds of their deposits after Elon Musk canceled another visit to the country last month. Disillusioned Tesla enthusiasts in India say they will now buy a car from the company only if they see it in a showroom, or they'll buy a different electrical vehicle from a company that actually exists in the country.
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Target is limiting its Pride Month collection to select stores this year instead of rolling out the merchandise nationwide like it typically has for the past decade, due to backlash the retailer experienced last year. Last May customers in certain stores knocked down LGBTQ+ merchandise displays, angrily approached store employees, and posted threatening videos on social media from inside the stores.
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E-commerce spending from Jan 1 to April 30, 2024 rose 7% YoY to $331.6B, according to Adobe Analytics. One trend Adobe identified during the period is a shift of online spending to purchasing the cheapest goods across personal care, electronics, apparel, home & garden, furniture, and grocery.
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Plus 7 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest, including Shopify's acquisition of Peel, a tool that integrates with a merchant's tech stack including Klaviyo and Recharge and helps them analyze their sales data to improve customer retention.
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I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!
For more details on each story and sources, see the full edition: https://www.shopifreaks.com/bigcommerce-for-sale-openai-gpt-4o-instacarts-unlikely-partnership/
What else is new in e-commerce? Share stories of interesting in the comments below (including in your own business) or on shopifreaks.
-PAUL Editor of Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter
PS: Want the full editions delivered to your Inbox each week? Join free at www.shopifreaks.com

Has anyone seen smallish Green Giant thuja/arborvitae for sale in the Ashland/Medford/Grants Pass vicinity? All I'm finding are the Emerald Green & they don't get big enough for my needs. Looking for smaller ones since I can't afford to spend $100 on each with the number I need. Thanks!

“Real gold is not afraid of the melting pot” - Old Chinese proverb
The core development team achieved a major milestone this week. They reached Certik KYC gold certification for providing the maximum amount of identification possible for the core team. This proves without a shadow of a doubt the team is dedicated to the long term goals they have talked about since launch. Out of all the protocols and teams Certik has looked at, a grand total of 74 projects have reached KYC gold. This is a rare feat that will allow people outside the PAW Chain community to trust that all aspects of the PAW Chain launch are being handled with integrity.
Certik voting is still in progress as we aim to be the top project to receive $20k in free services. With PAWswap coming in at #19 in overall Skynet security score, the goal is to get that rank even higher. The team as always is committed to security as the main priority, and grabbing an extra $20k in services from Certik can only improve the security of the network. Voting for PAWswap is available every 24 hours, and it is at the bottom of the page under “Monitoring”.
Build on PAW featured u/officialLXNK which is headed by DevilDog. His side-scrolling game is just a part of his plans to use in-game currency to get crypto into the hands of people from poorer countries. His goal is to expand the reach of cryptocurrency to those without the resources to consistently invest in their crypto future. PAW Chain will factor into the future of LXNK as the cheap fees and multichain accessibility will make it much easier to get money into the hands of more people.
Not only has the PAW Chain community been showing out on the voting for Killer Whales, the production team for the show is really taking notice. We have seen PAW Chain mentions from influential accounts rise over the last week. Because of the amazing job the community has done voting for PAW Chain, we will be featured on an X space hosted by CoinMarketCap along with the other top 5 projects for the previous week. This spotlight will give our speaker 10 minutes to pitch why we deserve to be on season 2. This will happen each week during the voting process, so we will have multiple opportunities to showcase our greatest assets in front of a massive audience.
PAW Chain has been the clear favorite to win the Killer Whales voting competition since it started. While we have slipped from first place a few times, the commitment from our community is going to make it hard for anyone else to keep up the voting pace. As of this writing PAW Chain has 349,800 votes. A staggering amount in 13 days.
We definitely bridged the gap on Bridging the Gap this past week. Ibrahym0x educated us on the possibilities of XFTs. These are basically NFTs with vault storage. You can place coins, tokens, or other NFTs inside of these vaults. This is a massive innovative jump for RWAs and their ties to NFTs. His collection of hyena XFTs is the first line of vault storage items for sale on his website.
Test-Net will be updated eventually, but we are currently waiting for it to be set up on an internal domain for Certik to perform their own testing. We will make an official announcement when Test-Net is released.
Thank you for taking the time to tune in to this week’s newsletter. There are so many exciting things happening at once, and we appreciate the amazing community that shows up day after day. Without everyone doing their part to support the project, no matter what support that is, we wouldn’t have this amazing launch to look forward to.

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Folks, I want to speak directly into an issue that's stirring up quite the controversy — the idea of the Biden administration imposing a whopping 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle (EV) imports. Now, here's where things get intriguing: as of right now, there are no Chinese electric cars officially being offered for sale in our great United States. You heard that right — none!
Let's peel back the layers on this, shall we? We're looking at a proposal that, on the face of it, might seem preventative or protective of our domestic industries but scratch a little deeper, and it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. How do you slap a 100% tariff on something that isn't even being sold here?
Now, let us briefly step back and understand the broader scenario. Chinese vehicles like the Dongfeng Nammi 01 hatchback are priced remarkably lower than, say, a Chevy Bolt — which is almost triple the price for similar or less range. Now, imagine if these Chinese EVs were sold here even with the current 25% tariff. They could potentially reshape the market by offering more affordable options, uplifting the average American consumer's ability to transition to greener tech. But of course, the current administration wants to prevent that, under the guise of protectionism.
Now, China could retaliate considering General Motors sold over 2 million cars there last year. Yet, they might not, understanding this game of tariffs could spiral out detrimentally for both parties. But isn't it curious? While they’re promoting such prohibitive measures, American automakers are actually deepening their tech ties with China. Giants like GM and Ford are not just collaborating but are fundamentally reliant on Chinese tech for their EV advancements.
The truly enlightening bit here comes from the way tariffs are being positioned. Former president Donald Trump, whom I did support for his straightforward approach, also proposed the same measure back in his tenure. Except he was open to negotiation and adjustment, showing leadership by balancing protection with progress.
What happens next? We might see a significant pushback from various sectors within our own borders — industries that understand the crippling effect such restrictive measures could have on technological advancement and international trade relations.
In closing, this move by the Biden administration raises more questions than it answers. It seems less about protecting American jobs or industries and more about political posturing, adding layers of complexity without clear benefits. A tariff on a product that doesn’t even enter the American market? That’s not policy; that’s paradox.