The longest chapter in Machiavelli’s masterpiece, Discourses On Livy, is titled “On Conspiracies.” He praises conspiracy as the finest mode of overthrowing any regime, because, “… to be able to make open war … is granted to few; to be able to conspire against them is granted to everyone.” In typical Machiavellian fashion, the chapter praises fraud, deception, and lying to further one’s private advantage as the proper mode of action - that is, if they seek to effect regime change.
Contrast this with the doctrines of anarcho-capitalism, which are founded from principle and deduction, the root principle being that of natural law. It begins with assertions, all of its ethics, politics and economics growing from that root.
For decades, their prospects looked grim. Cries to return to the gold standard, grow the libertarian “party,” run in local elections, and infiltrate think tanks — or worse, the Senate — was the predominant strategy. By their logic, even revolution was questionable, as it would essentially be “throwing out one gang of thieves for another” (“Democracy, The God That Failed”). The study of natural law is reached a priori - that is, knowledge deduced from principles alone, for example: no two parallel straight lines can ever cross, 2 + 2 = 4, etc. On the other hand, their a posteri conclusions (empirical observations) were this: the world is governed by a tyrannical elite utilizing the central bank, resulting in the perpetual destruction of wealth, continuous warfare and an expanding bureaucracy hellbent on regulating every aspect of the individual’s private life. They made it clear what the actions of these tyrants will result in, and what they intend to do. They never made it clear what we ought to do about them. It took bitcoin, a technology, to reveal
