“Thousands of people collaborated to build and defend a global monetary network with no CEO, no president, and no master,” Max Borders says of Bitcoin. “Nobody gave them permission, because nobody could. It was developed peacefully in freedom.”

Borders uses Bitcoin as an example of what he calls “subversive innovation” — finding ways to lower your transaction costs for the things you want to do, raise the costs of those who might want to interfere with your plans,  and reduce the costs of walking away from systems that don’t deliver what you want from them.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. No, really, I couldn’t. Which is why I recommend Borders’s “Underthrow” Substack. I don’t always agree with him, but he’s always interesting … and he reminds me of a late friend who doesn’t get talked about enough these days.

In 1973 — more than 20 years before he ran for president as a Libertarian, twice — Harry Browne wrote and published How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. The book describes various “traps” — social and political constraints that bully us into roles we might not prefer to play  — and how to escape those traps so as to maximize one’s own freedom.

I highly recommend the book, and was privileged to have known its author who, unfortunately, died in 2006. The highest compliment I can think of to offer Mr. Borders is that his “subversive innovation” concept widens the (already broad) horizons one joyfully carries away from How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.

Borders’s formula offers a path toward disarming and eliminating, rather than merely avoiding or escaping, the traps Browne describes. That’s the “subversive” part.

To subvert, according to the 193 edition of Webster’s dictionary, is “to overturn from the foundation.”

Subversive innovation isn’t about tearing down the existing system. It’s about building your own, stronger foundation and letting the old one fall apart without its ruins falling on you.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are the obvious current example — sound money that can be created and exchanged without the old system’s cooperation makes fiat currency passe — but they’re just one. Anything that improves your life without the state’s involvement or permission makes your situation better and the state’s worse.

People like Browne and Borders have a gift for dragging me away from my usual political pessimism and pointing me toward the promise of a better future. I hope you’ll come there with us!

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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