Herbert Spencer is an important and neglected libertarian thinker. His thoughts on the right of every person to ignore the state would fit very nicely as the Fr33 Agent Network manifesto:
As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit
the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state — to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying towards its support.
It is self-evident that in so behaving he in no way trenches upon the liberty of others; for his position is a passive one; and whilst passive he cannot become an aggressor. It is equally self-evident that he cannot be compelled to continue one of a political corporation, without a breach of the moral law, seeing that citizenship involves payment of taxes; and the taking away of a man’s property against his will is an infringement of his rights.
Government being simply an agent employed in common by a number of individuals to secure to them certain advantages, the very nature of the connection implies that it is for each to say whether he will employ such an agent or not. If any one of them determines
to ignore this mutual-safety confederation, nothing can be said except that he loses all claim to its good offices, and exposes himself to the danger of maltreatment — a thing he is quite at liberty to do if he likes. He cannot be coerced into political combination without a breach of the law of equal freedom; he can withdraw from it without committing any such breach; and he has therefore a right so to withdraw.
“Voluntary outlaw” seems a very appropriate term for those libertarians more concerned with escaping government intrusion in their own lives through agorism and other non-political means than with bringing down or reforming the system. “Ignore the State!” also seems like a very good slogan.
Brad Taylor is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He blogs at 
Awesome post Brad. Thanks for helping to put Spencer and this classic essay on the radars of more folks.
State? What state?
I loved this brief piece; unlike Mike, ironically or not, I’m not quite personally at the stage wherein I can claim to simply ignore the State — though we all should, from a moral point of view, be able to.
The inability of free people to “opt out” of the state (in other words, to declare the state’s contracts null and void), without threat of violence, is what makes any State evil and coercive. I might even argue that there are no small acts of civil disobedience if undertaken as a strategy to ignore the state.
While I am less the protesty kind of activist, I think taken en masse, the more people who adopt a conscious posture of either ignoring the state, or acting, through the power of the purse, to make it obsolete by choosing conscious contracts in direct competition with the state, the greater our visibility as a movement (or anti-movement), and the less effective and relevant the state shall be.
The points at which free individuals encounter force by the state in their effort to opt out, will cast in sharp relief the violent methods and tyrannical approach of the state and its agents.
I don’t think anyone can ignore the state completely. I think the important thing is to increase your freedom on whatever margins you can (and that you feel comfortable with) and show others that they can do likewise. When the state interferes, you’ll normally have to acquiesce since it has the guns. That doesn’t mean you should accept it as legitimate, any more than you accept an armed robber’s demands on your property as legitimate.
I’m coming to the same conclusion. I’ll do my part to warn and rebuke, but I don’t confidence in the people’s desire to be free. I however am working on getting out of the system. If the people are dumb enough to love their chains, I can still break out of mine.
Reminds me of “Rational Anarchy”, which is basically ignoring annoying laws when the benefits of ignoring the law exceed the cost and/or risk of obeying the law, making a sincere effort to escape detection. In other words, minimize the damage that the state does in your personal life.
If you’re somewhere like New Hampshire, surrounded by other activists intent on ignoring the state, you could even set up whole businesses with no state contact, if you were willing to accept the modest lifestyle as the cost of the pleasure of not doing business with them.
Of course risk exists, which means you want a good activist network to do this, so that if you go to jail, at least you have a bunch of tailgaters outside the jail letting you know they still care.
http://freestateproject.org/