How Raw Milk Helped Me Move Past Ancap and Minarchy - Guest Post by Andrew Grathwohl

I want to start with something I watched happen on my own property this past November.

The Libertarian Party of Tennessee held a Raw Milk Summit in Bon Aqua on November 8th, hosted on my land in cooperation with The Gorham Homestead. Over a hundred people came through the field across the day. The crowd ranged broadly in age and in lifestyle and in the specific reasons each person had come, but what united most of them was the same kind of concern reframed at different angles, whether it was a fourth-generation Tennessee farmer thinking about what he was responsible for putting on his own table, a young family thinking about what they were feeding their children, or a homesteader who had driven in from across the state because the issue mattered enough to make the trip. The speakers came from concerns that connected substantively even when their starting points did not. By the end of the day no vehicle had left tire marks on the field, which I noticed because I had been bracing for it. If only every libertarian-themed event could be so idyllic.

For too long the analytical attentions of libertarians have been focused on an abstract debate which, through its strong attachments to individual identity has allowed the more important uses of the libertarian mind to mire in the muck and the murk of political infighting. Here, I am referring to the classic ancap versus minarchy argument.

The framework I have been working on, which I have called Renewal Libertarianism, is an attempt to redirect libertarian analytical attention from that debate to a question that turns out to do more work. At one level the framework is an academic project, with formal results across seven modules and a long argument about substrate dynamics and political renewal. At another level it is the analytical apparatus for what the people on my field that day were doing without a name for it, and what the Libertarian Party of Tennessee has been articulating as their published strategy. The clearest way I know to bring the analytical work in is to walk through the move that opens the framework's first chapter, because that move is the one that demonstrates exactly how the ancap-versus-minarchy debate has been a misdirection.

Both libertarian traditions would look at the people on my field and try to claim them. The minarchist would point at the multi-generational farmers and the families taking responsibility for their own provisioning and call them the foundational constituency of a properly limited polity. The ancap would point at the herdshare arrangements and the voluntary food-freedom networks forming around state-mandated rules and call them the demonstration case for polycentric order. Both would be partly right. Neither is right. The people on my field were not there because they had read Rothbard or Nozick. They were there because they could see what the broader institutional apparatus around food and medicine had been doing to their ability to feed themselves and their families, and the libertarian movement under either of its dominant framings had not been the project that named what they were seeing.

They were seeing the thing I see when I take either side to its natural conclusion. Picture the minarchy at full realization. A night-watchman state confined to defense, courts that adjudicate property and contract and stop at the door, an apparatus that defends the population from external threat, all of it funded by voluntary tax because coerced taxation is the kind of rights violation the minarchy was supposed to prevent. Now picture the anarcho-capitalist polity at full realization. Polycentric law produced through competing private defense agencies, dispute resolution through subscription arbitration, property and contract enforced by firms exposed to genuine market discipline. Walk a hundred years forward in each. The minarchy has by then accumulated a regulatory apparatus that does not look anything like its founding charter. The anarcho-capitalist polity's largest defense agency has acquired effective monopoly in its region, its dominant arbitration providers have developed standing relationships that look uncomfortably like a court system, and its property registries have become coordination points whose terms of service everyone nominally agreed to and no one can practically refuse. The two endpoints are not identical. They rhyme in ways the founding documents promised they would not. Minarchism produced a state larger and more strategic than its theorists permitted. Anarcho-capitalism produced a private order whose dominant nodes do work that earlier theorists would have called governance.

Both sides have explanations for this. The minarchist blames erosion, public choice failure, the absence of constitutional discipline. The ancap blames residual statism and the absence of full market exit. Each explanation captures something real. Neither is sufficient, because both leave intact the assumption that the relevant analytical category is government. Whatever is wrong with the minarchist endpoint is wrong because government, and whatever is wrong with the ancap endpoint is wrong because residual government. The convergence of the two endpoints is the clue that this assumption is wrong. Something is producing the convergent dynamic in both cases that is not government as the libertarian tradition has defined it.

The thing producing it is what a recently developed analytical framework called Renewal Libertarianism names as substrate. Substrate is whatever institution at scale acquires strategic capacity against the people who depend on it. The state is the most virulent and best-studied instance of substrate. The state is not the category. The minarchist endpoint is substrate operating in the institutional form of constitutional government. The ancap endpoint is substrate operating in the institutional form of dominant private firms. The form differs. The dynamic is the same. They are running the same algorithm on different hardware.

Once substrate is named as the category, the libertarian project's analytical situation changes in ways the tradition has not been organizing around. The goal of eliminating the state was always too narrow. Eliminating the state, on the framework's analysis, eliminates one institutional form of substrate and produces space in which substrate emerges through other forms. This is not speculation. It is what we observe in stateless regions and what we infer from the trajectory of supposedly post-state institutional ecologies. The libertarian who has been organizing for state abolition has been organizing for a substitution of substrate forms, not for the elimination of anything underlying. The substitution is sometimes worth making and sometimes not, but the libertarian was not getting what the libertarian thought.

The Libertarian Party of Tennessee, by contrast, has not been organizing for that substitution. Their three-pillar strategy of running local with nullification powers, forming issue coalitions across substrate domains, and building Liberty Culture across the state is a faithful state-level implementation of the strategic vision Michael Heise articulated when he founded the Mises Caucus, and it is the model the other state chapters of the Libertarian Party should be studying. Heise's diagnosis was that the Gary Johnson campaign had produced 4.3 million votes and no lasting movement and no return on investment on those votes, which in the framework's language is the diagnosis that vote-chasing produces absorbable reform that does not accumulate handicap on substrate. LPTN has internalized that diagnosis and is operating on the alternative.

The analytical work the tradition has done on the state mostly transfers to non-state substrate. Public choice theory, regulatory capture, rent-seeking analysis, principal-agent problems, the knowledge problem, all of it was developed against the state and applies with full force to dominant private institutions that have acquired scale-strategic capacity. The libertarian tradition has been carrying analytical tools it has only been deploying against half its targets. The work the tradition has yet to do is to apply those tools systematically against substrate as such.

The cycle the libertarian tradition has implicitly assumed it could escape is also part of the situation. Substrate emerges. It accumulates strategic capacity over operational time. It either consolidates or is challenged. Renewal events, when they come, either produce substrate-favorable consolidation or substrate-handicapping reform. The determining factor is the institutional condition the polity is in when the event arrives. The American founding was a renewal event that produced substrate-handicapping reform under unusually favorable conditions. The Constitution is the substrate-favorable outcome of that event, designed with the most sophisticated anti-substrate features of its era, and it has been decaying across two and a half centuries the way the framework predicts. Renewal events that produce libertarian-favorable outcomes are rare. Most produce more concentrated substrate, not less, because the institutional preconditions for libertarian-favorable outcomes do not assemble themselves.

The framework calls itself Renewal Libertarianism because the cycle is the analytical center. Strategicity-handicap is the achievable goal. The cumulative reduction of substrate's capacity to optimize against the population, sustained across operational time and punctuated by renewal events. The minarchist target of stable constitutional minimal government is structurally unreachable for the same reason the ancap target of substrate-free polycentric order is structurally unreachable. Both endpoints are unstable under operational time. What is reachable is sustained handicap on whatever substrate exists, achieved through institutional design that forces substrate's strategic adaptations into publicly identifiable forms whose cumulative legitimacy cost erodes substrate's capacity to optimize against the population.

The forcing-into-the-open principle is the operational core of the framework's prescriptive program. It is the move the libertarian tradition has not made and the move that changes what reform looks like. Substrate's strategic adaptation cannot be prevented. The optimization function is structural, and Module 2 of the underlying paper proves the result holds across every relaxation of the standard assumptions you might bring against it. What can be done is to design rules that force substrate's adaptations to take publicly identifiable forms. A rule against off-budget spending does not prevent substrate from finding ways to spend off-budget. It forces substrate to invoke explicit emergency authority, to build documented carve-outs, to create off-balance-sheet vehicles whose legal structure has to be openly defended. Each adaptation is now legible as an adaptation. The cost substrate bears is not the cost of complying with the rule, which substrate will not fully do. It is the legitimacy cost of having to publicly justify each workaround. That cost compounds across operational time. The substrate that has been forced to publicly justify thirty years of strategic adaptation is in worse shape, by every metric the framework characterizes, than the substrate that has been allowed to adapt quietly under terms of service nobody reads.

The audience reading this has likely been doing more of this work than they have been credited for. The institutional building you have funded over the past several decades, the parallel media and the religious institutions and the homeschool networks and the charitable trust litigation and the substrate-equivalent infrastructure that the political organizing implicitly treated as the consolation prize, is the part of the project that has actually held ground. The political organizing that took center stage has mostly not. The framework reverses the valuation. The institutional work was the project. The political organizing was the supporting effort, and most of it has been absorbable by substrate's adaptive moves anyway.

Substrate's strategic capacity has been bounded historically by enforcement capacity, by informational capacity, and by the cost of hiding strategic adaptations from population evaluation. AI changes all three. Enforcement capacity goes up because monitoring at scale becomes possible. Informational capacity goes up because population response becomes modelable. The cost of opacity goes down because volume of formal compliance can be produced cheaply enough to overwhelm population evaluation while substantive adaptation runs underneath. This is not a forecast about future AI capabilities. It is an analysis of what AI deployment is doing right now, in payment processing and credit scoring and content moderation, in regulatory enforcement, in CBDC architecture, in AI-augmented surveillance under existing FISA authorities, in AI-driven IRS audit selection, in the treatment of frontier AI as national security infrastructure subject to export controls. Each of these is an existing substrate acquiring capacity, through software, to do its strategic work more effectively at lower cost and higher resolution than was possible a decade ago.

The libertarian reflex against AI regulation is engaging the wrong question. The question is not whether AI development should be regulated. The question is whether substrate's deployment of AI will be forced into publicly identifiable forms or allowed to occur quietly under terms of service. Right now most of it is occurring quietly. The forcing-into-the-open principle, applied to AI, calls for public default states for AI use, documented exceptions, pattern-visible aggregation of AI deployment, and capture-resistant aggregation institutions. None of this requires constraining AI capability development. It requires that substrate's deployment of those capabilities be visible the way the framework requires substrate's deployment of any other strategic capacity to be visible. The libertarian reflexively against any AI rules at all is leaving the field to substrate at the moment when substrate is acquiring the largest single capacity expansion in the history of state-population relations.

The people on my field at the Raw Milk Summit have every reason to be paying attention to this. The same substrate logic that produces FDA bans on raw milk and selective enforcement against farmers operating outside the regulatory framework produces AI-driven license plate readers in their towns, payment processor decisions about which farms can sell direct, and the broader apparatus that decides which of their economic activities is permitted to be visible. The question for them is not whether AI is good or bad. It is whether substrate's deployment of AI gets forced into the open or gets to expand quietly. The clearest recent demonstration of how this kind of forcing actually works was carried out by, of all people, an insufferable leftist. The musician and YouTuber Benn Jordan, working with the security researcher Jon Gaines, exposed severe vulnerabilities in Flock Safety's AI-driven ALPR cameras in November of last year. Outdated operating systems running for years past their support window, no mandatory two-factor authentication, hard-coded credentials, unencrypted footage, retention beyond advertised limits, accounts for sale on the dark web. The video went viral, hit half a million views in days, forced mainstream media coverage, prompted policy responses from city councils and police departments, and put Flock's deployment practices into a public legitimacy crisis they had not been operating under the previous month. None of this required new federal regulation. It required someone refusing to let the deployment remain quiet. The forcing-into-the-open principle in operation, executed by a political opponent of the libertarian movement, on a substrate-deployed AI system that the libertarian movement should have been doing this kind of work on already. The lesson is not that libertarians need to imitate Benn Jordan. The lesson is that the analytical apparatus the framework provides describes what he did and prescribes more of it across the institutional ecology that AI deployment is currently expanding through.

The raw milk people should be able to see the relevance immediately. The pattern of regulatory surveillance against farmers operating outside FDA and USDA frameworks is familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the past two decades of enforcement actions. The historical rate-limiting step has been the cost of building a case, which used to require months of human surveillance per target. AI changes that cost. ALPR cameras logging every vehicle that visits every farm, payment processor data, cellular location records, and licensing cross-references can now assemble passively what used to take ten human-months of federal personnel time. The work for the audience here is not to wait for the cases to be built. It is to do for the rural surveillance ecology what Jordan did for the urban one, before the framework's predicted capacity expansion produces the next round of cases against the people on my field.

AI changes the renewal question too, and the picture there is uncertain in a way the rest of the framework's analysis is not. Substrate gains unprecedented tools for managing what the population perceives, from synthetic media through algorithmic amplification and suppression. The population gains unprecedented tools for the reverse direction, aggregating what substrate is actually doing across institutions and across time, with investigative work that used to require teams of researchers now achievable through appropriate prompting in an afternoon. Which side benefits more from the new capabilities depends on the institutional configuration the polity is in when those capabilities mature. Substrate's natural advantage is lower coordination cost. The population's potential advantage is the asymmetry of investigation against secrecy, which AI amplifies even more sharply than it amplifies secrecy itself. Whether the population's advantage is realized depends on whether the institutional design work gets done in time, which is the libertarian project's responsibility for this period whether the libertarian movement recognizes the responsibility or not.

The next decade will compress decades of substrate strategic-capacity expansion into years. The libertarian movement will live through this period whether it does the work or not. The work the movement does in this period is what determines whether the next renewal event, when it comes, produces a substrate closer to libertarian preferences or substantially worse than what we have now. The institutional preconditions for libertarian-favorable renewal do not assemble themselves, and the AI deployment trajectory is shortening the window during which they can be assembled. There is no neutral position. Failing to do the work is choosing the second outcome.

What the framework asks the audience to give up is the abolition-of-substrate target. Substrate cannot be eliminated, even if some or most of the state can be. Forty years of organizing pointed at the substrate-elimination target has produced no observable progress because the target was never on offer. The libertarian who keeps the abolition target after reading the framework is not doing libertarian work, on the framework's analysis. They are doing identity work. The two are different.

What the framework offers in return is a goal reachable in the lifetime of the people doing the work, an apparatus for telling the difference between reforms that bite into substrate and reforms that get absorbed by it, and a project more demanding than the abolition target ever was rather than less. The framework does not require giving up the moral position on the state. Substrate is structurally inevitable at scale, which does not make it good, and the libertarian who holds that the state should not exist on normative grounds keeps that position intact. The framework is a theory of what to do given that fact, not a defense of it.

The next renewal event is coming. The cycle is structural. The current arrangement is operating well past the point where its substrate is doing legitimate-function work. Substantial portions of the population have already withdrawn legitimacy from it, and most readers of this post can feel that something is going to break. What condition the libertarian project is in when it does is determined by the work between now and then. The framework prescribes that work. The libertarian tradition has been doing some of it without recognizing what it was doing. The framework names what it was doing and names what remains to be done.

The historical pattern worth noting is that political movements producing major realignment have generally done so by relocating their target from formal government action to the broader institutional ecology that sustains the problem. The English abolition movement engaged the trading houses, insurance industry, sugar economy, and parliamentary patronage networks that sustained slavery rather than limiting itself to colonial trade regulation. The Irish Land League under Parnell and Davitt made the move in 1879, engaging the landlordism ecology rather than continuing to lobby exclusively for parliamentary Home Rule. The American civil rights movement made it in the 1950s and 1960s, engaging the broader institutional ecology of segregation rather than relying on federal court litigation alone. Solidarity made it in Poland in the 1980s, engaging the labor, religious, and cultural networks the Communist regime depended on rather than treating the regime as a government to be reformed. Each of these movements opened coalitions the prior framing had been excluding. Each produced realignment the prior framing had not been able to produce.

The pattern itself is structural rather than ideological. Substrate-engagement coalitions form when a movement relocates from government action to the broader institutional ecology that sustains the problem, regardless of whether the resulting realignment ends up libertarian-favorable. The historical cases above produced libertarian outcomes on their central questions but expanded substrate in other domains, because the institutional preconditions for libertarian-leaning outcomes were not in place at the moment those renewal events arrived. The English abolition coalition was not engineering for limited imperial enforcement reach when it engaged the slavery ecology. The Land League was not engineering for state authority over property to remain bounded when it engaged the landlordism ecology. The civil rights movement was not engineering for limited federal regulatory authority when it engaged segregation. Each movement made the substrate-relocation move that produces coalition energy and realignment, but none of them was engineering the institutional conditions under which the realignment would tilt libertarian. The realignments tilted in whatever direction the legitimacy resources, the constraint apparatus, and the existing institutional configurations of those polities pointed at the moment the renewal arrived.

The framework's prescriptive program is what makes engineering possible. The forcing-into-the-open principle, refresh capacity for legitimacy resources, capture rotation, and resource diversity across the constraint apparatus together determine what direction a renewal event tilts. Libertarians have not previously been organizing around these conditions, which is why historical renewal events have produced mixed libertarian outcomes even when libertarians participated in them. The framework articulates the conditions explicitly. With those conditions explicitly in place, the next renewal event can be steered toward libertarian-leaning outcomes in a way the historical cases were not.

The recent failures bracket the pattern. The Tea Party in 2009 had genuine coalition energy and analytically serious leadership in some quarters but did not relocate to substrate. It engaged government spending and the ACA as discrete governmental actions while leaving the broader financial-regulatory-academic ecology that produced the crisis untouched. The movement was absorbed by the existing GOP apparatus by 2014, with its anti-establishment energy eventually flowing into a different coalition under different leadership.

A movement that thought structurally about incentives and hierarchies would have gone upstream. Occupy Wall Street in 2011 made the relocation move but failed at the analysis. The slogan correctly identified that the institutional ecology mattered and that government was not the sole problem. The targeting did not. Occupy occupied Wall Street when the institution that produced the conditions for Wall Street's concentration of wealth and power sits a level upstream in the monetary apparatus. The financial firms were downstream nodes in an ecology whose structural node is the Federal Reserve and the broader system of central-bank-permissioned credit creation.

Occupy did not because the left analytical apparatus generally treats distribution of effects as the political problem and is uncomfortable with the kind of incentive-and-hierarchy analysis that traces upstream to monetary structure. The same inadequacy produced the lack of institutional infrastructure. A movement that does not think in terms of incentives and hierarchies cannot build institutions that operate on incentives and hierarchies. The encampments dispersed and nothing survived.

Beyond the analytical failure, Occupy stayed identifiably and exclusively left in its cultural positioning, and the audience available to a culturally positioned movement is bounded by the positioning. The libertarian movement has had its own version of this on the right side of the political spectrum for forty years. In both cases the cultural narrowness has been the limit of what the coalition could become without the analytical relocation that broadens it.

The Mises Caucus's recent success inside the LP demonstrates that this is not a hypothetical. The Caucus has expanded the coalition over the past several years by engaging substrate dynamics that the abolition framing has nothing to say about, and the Libertarian Party of Tennessee in particular has articulated this work as a published three-pillar strategy: Run Local, Form Issue Coalitions, Build Liberty Culture. The first pillar puts the work into local races with nullification powers across operational time, building bench depth that compounds rather than burns out in single-cycle campaigns. The second pillar follows Ron Paul's example of working with anyone who agrees on substantive issues, which is what the Defend the Guard legislation produced when LPTN brought together two state House sponsors and a coalition of constituencies that the abolition framing could not have organized. The third pillar is the cultural-institutional work that maintains legitimacy resources over operational time, which is the framework's name for what events like the Raw Milk Summit on my property in November are doing. LPTN's strategy document does not use the framework's vocabulary, but reading it with the framework in mind I see the prescriptive program articulated in their own words. They have committed publicly to operational-time work, cross-coalition substrate engagement, and substrate-equivalent infrastructure building. The framework is not asking them to do anything they have not already published as their strategy. The framework offers the analytical apparatus that systematizes what they have already worked out, and an account of why the work matters that goes deeper than instinct or intuition. The constituencies LPTN has been reaching, the ones who showed up on my field in November and have been showing up at LPTN events across the state, came in because the work was finally being done at the level substrate was operating. They will stay if the analytical apparatus gives the project the systematic capacity that the instinctive engagement has been hinting at.

The full paper is at https://www.grathwohl.me/renewal-libertarianism. It develops the analytical apparatus across seven modules and proves the structural results this post has summarized. Further volumes will address specific program recommendations, present case studies that validate and sustain the framework's broad viability, and offer a formalized analytical apparatus for assessing on-the-ground political conditions through a libertarian lens.