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Essay

Libertarianism Is Not “Approved” Contained Opposition

Neema Parvini (Academic Agent) calls libertarianism contained opposition. Elite theory itself shows why free markets threaten entrenched power instead.

Neema Parvini, better known as Academic Agent, has spent years applying elite theory to contemporary politics. In a series of Substack posts and theses he has argued that modern power maintains itself less through open repression than through containment: the deliberate generation or toleration of limited subversion that drains dissident energy without threatening the ruling class. He has been explicit that this category includes much of what presents itself as opposition on the right.

In his “59 Theses” (and the shorter “Ten Theses”) he states the claim directly:

“Libertarianism has almost nothing to offer the current predicament and is a discredited political philosophy since it fundamentally misrecognises the problem.”

He pairs this with broader assertions that “Liberalism is an entropic force with few if any redeeming features” and that “Power can generate its own subversion as a form of containment.” Containment, in his usage, is more effective than outright oppression because it gives people the feeling of resistance while ensuring the effort goes nowhere.

These statements mark a sharp turn from his earlier work. In 2020 Parvini published The Defenders of Liberty: Human Nature, Individualism, and Property Rights, a book that treated classical liberalism and the free-market tradition as a serious intellectual project grounded in realism. He chronicled figures from Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke through the Austrians and argued that liberty rests on human nature, methodological individualism, and secure property rights. The later theses treat that same tradition as largely irrelevant or actively misleading.

The containment diagnosis is not empty. Elite theory correctly notes that organized minorities dominate disorganized majorities, that institutions converge under pressure, and that regimes prefer managed dissent to genuine challenges. Large parts of contemporary “conservatism” function exactly as Parvini describes: they offer rhetorical opposition on culture-war issues while protecting the same fiscal, regulatory, and foreign-policy status quo. Center-right parties, think tanks, and media outlets often serve as release valves. That pattern is real.

It does not follow, however, that a consistent free-market or minarchist position is itself approved containment. The evidence points the other way. Positions that actually reduce the scale of state and corporate power—secure property rights for ordinary people, open entry into markets, lower taxes on labor and exchange, ending regulatory privileges that protect incumbents—are routinely marginalized, distorted, or actively suppressed by the same managerial class Parvini analyzes.

The Free-Market Position Is Not the Managed One

If libertarianism were useful containment, we would expect it to be platformed, funded, and rewarded within the existing power structure the way limited cultural conservatism often is. The opposite occurs. Economic-freedom indices (Fraser Institute, Heritage Foundation) consistently show that countries with stronger protections for property, trade, and voluntary exchange have higher incomes, lower poverty, and longer life expectancy. In the Fraser Institute’s 2026 report, the freest quartile of countries averaged $65,596 in per-capita income against $9,552 for the least free, a poverty rate of 2.1 percent against 41.1 percent (people living on less than $4.20 a day), and a life expectancy of about 81 years against 67. These correlations hold across hundreds of studies. Yet the policy implications—reducing barriers to entry, limiting the regulatory state, treating land and capital according to productive use rather than political allocation—are treated as fringe or dangerous by major institutions.

Regulatory capture, occupational licensing far beyond safety needs, zoning that restricts housing supply, and corporate-state partnerships all function to protect existing holders against new competitors. These are not free-market outcomes; they are the opposite. Large corporations frequently lobby for rules that raise rivals’ costs. The revolving door between agencies, legislatures, and industry is well documented. Federal lobbying topped $5 billion for the first time in 2025, the largest one-year jump since quarterly disclosure began, and the number of organizations lobbying on tariffs more than tripled, from 120 to 382, as firms sought carve-outs from the new duties. Every tariff schedule with an exemption process is a privilege worth paying lobbyists to win. So is a government equity stake: when Washington took a 9.9 percent share of Intel in 2025, it tied taxpayers’ money and federal policy to one company’s fortunes, and when Intel’s stock fell roughly 28 percent on October 30, 2026, more than $10 billion of the government’s paper value vanished in a day. A genuine free-market stance threatens those arrangements by removing the privileges that make the revolving door valuable. That is why it faces consistent institutional resistance rather than quiet encouragement.

Popular sentiment frequently aligns more closely with free-market premises than with the managed alternatives. Majorities in the United States and elsewhere support lower taxes, fewer occupational barriers, school choice, and the right to keep the fruits of one’s labor. In Gallup’s March 2026 survey, 59 percent of Americans said their federal income taxes are too high; EdChoice’s 2026 Schooling in America survey found 78 percent of adults backing education savings accounts once the idea was explained. These preferences are repeatedly channeled into package deals that preserve or expand state direction in other domains. The uniparty pattern Parvini correctly identifies does not amplify free-market priorities; it dilutes or redirects them. When voters express support for reducing the size of government or ending specific privileges, the response from both major parties is typically delay, complexity, or substitution of new interventions. Ballot measures are one of the few places voters can answer a single question instead of a bundle: on November 3, voters in California, Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, and Washington decide nine statewide measures on income and wealth taxes, from California’s proposed one-time wealth tax to Washington’s Initiative 645, which would repeal the state’s tax on household income over $1 million and bar state and local income taxes, and a North Carolina amendment lowering the state’s income-tax rate cap from 7 percent to 3.5 percent.

Misrecognition Cuts Both Ways

Parvini’s charge that libertarianism “fundamentally misrecognises the problem” rests on the claim that politics precedes economics and that elite organization is decisive. Both points have force. Markets do not operate in a vacuum; property rights require some framework of enforcement, and organized interests shape that framework. But the conclusion that free-market analysis is therefore useless does not follow. The same elite-theory tools show why concentrated interests capture regulatory processes and why dispersed interests (ordinary producers and consumers) lose. A free-market diagnosis identifies the mechanism—state-granted privilege and barriers to entry—and points to the practical remedy of reducing those privileges. That is recognition, not misrecognition.

The story Parvini has dismissed as a myth (that wealth in Britain or America was built on free markets) is more mixed than either pure free-market triumphalism or pure empire critique allows. Coercive elements existed. So did periods of relatively open trade, secure property for producers, and competitive entry that raised living standards for ordinary people. The relevant question is comparative: societies that moved toward broader property rights and freer exchange for non-elites saw sustained gains; those that relied on political allocation and monopoly privileges did not. Elite theory explains why the gains were incomplete and contested. It does not erase the pattern.

Organic Demand and Strategic Response

A real free-market economy—minarchist or close to it—looks less like an elite-approved script and more like an organic preference that keeps reappearing despite containment. It appears in small-business owners who face licensing barriers, in workers who lose purchasing power to inflation and taxes, in communities that want housing and services without waiting for political permission, and in the persistent polling support for keeping more of one’s earnings. These are not abstract ideology; they are practical responses to the costs of the current system.

Because the preference is real and the institutional resistance is also real, the effective response is not to treat free-market arguments as inherently compromised. It is to use both economic action and selective political pressure. Purchases, investment, and donations directed at organizations that litigate against regulatory barriers or expand property rights for ordinary people function as continuous votes that bypass package-deal elections. At the same time, candidates and offices can be evaluated by whether they actually reduce specific privileges and penalties rather than by partisan branding. The Strategic Liberty Coalition’s approach—weighing the significance of a restriction, the peacefulness of the activity, an office’s capacity to change it, and a candidate’s viability—treats free-market gains as high-value targets precisely because they are not the path of least resistance for the existing elite.

Containment is a real technique. Managed cultural opposition is common. A consistent defense of property rights, open entry, and voluntary exchange is not managed opposition; it is one of the clearer threats to the arrangements that currently sustain concentrated power. Recognizing that does not require denying elite theory. It requires applying it to the actual distribution of institutional rewards and punishments.

Sources

Neema Parvini (Academic Agent)

Economic freedom

Public opinion and current events

Written from a perspective focused on liberty and justice.