Yes-yes, it sounds crazy: why support those who suffocate people with taxes, regulate every sneeze and impose new bans? Why applaud bureaucrats when we are against them wholeheartedly? But here’s the point: sometimes, to make a tree finally fall, you just need to stop propping it up. Let it collapse on its own, under the weight of its own rot.
What is libertarian accelerationism? If briefly: it’s the idea of not letting the state jump into the abyss. Let it increase taxes, ban everything, print money, save “its own” – the faster it brings everything to absurdity, the sooner even the most stubborn citizens will understand: the system doesn’t work! When you have to pay for toilet paper at the supermarket in installments and the queue at the MFC takes longer than in a Soviet canteen—that’s when people will suddenly snap into understanding, and conversations about freedom won’t be “philosophy for geeks,” but common sense.
When control is taken to madness, as it was in the USSR, there inevitably comes a moment: people who were happy with statism yesterday suddenly wake up. “What the hell did we let them control every step?” they ask. And they reach for freedom. Not because they read Hayek and Mises, but because the refrigerator proved to be more convincing than television. That’s the essence of accelerationism: life teaches you to value freedom better than any propaganda. Want people to believe in the market? Let them live under a planned economy first. Want them to understand why taxes are theft? Let them fill out tax returns for a month or two on thirty pages, and then they’ll be fined for a comma in the wrong place.
And now about the USA. Why is it advantageous for libertarians there to vote for Democrats?! It sounds like heresy, but think: Republicans are the party of status quo. They’re against high taxes, yes, but they support a huge amount of their own regulations – from morality to migration. When they’re in power, ordinary people sleep through it: “Well, everything is more or less stable, taxes aren’t rising, you can live.” There’s no motivation to think about the principles of freedom. It’s quiet, cozy, and very unfree. But when Democrats are at the helm – things start to go wild. New taxes, new bans, new bureaucracies, new subsidies “to combat subsidies.” And then ordinary Republicans, conservatives, and just normal people who yesterday considered libertarians weirdos suddenly begin to understand: “Hey, wait a minute… maybe these guys with the slogan ‘Taxes are theft!’ aren’t so wrong?” Every additional regulator, every new form, every inflationary wave turns our apolitical citizens into potential allies. Paradoxically, the path to freedom can lie through bureaucratic hell.
A simple analogy: imagine that the state is a dependent, power-hungry teenager. As long as our parents (that’s us, taxpayers) put up with its tantrums, it will never grow up. Let it crash and burn in a crisis itself, waste all the money, and realize that “control” isn’t a solution. Sometimes you need to let a system go through its own collapse so that it gives up. That’s why libertarian accelerationism is not about capitulation – it’s about strategy. We aren’t “ceding ground” – we allow the enemy to shoot themselves in the foot. Because the tighter they screw things down, the faster the threads strip!
Why does this work? Firstly, people learn best through pain. Without personal experience of dependence and impoverishment, they won’t understand that freedom is not an abstraction. Secondly, the system overheats itself. The more laws there are, the harder they are to enforce. The more taxes there are, the fewer incentives there are to work. Eventually, the state mechanism freezes up. Thirdly, every crisis breeds new proponents of liberty. A crisis is ideal time for ideas that previously seemed “too radical.”
And now honestly: haven’t you noticed that the more the state controls you, the more you want to say: “Leave us alone, let people live in peace”? That’s where it begins!
