The best job I ever had was for an agorist.  At the time, I was 18 and looking for a summer job.  For the last several years of my life, there was a ice cream store at the end of my street.  It had gone through 3 owners in my life, finally settling to one man, whose name I’ll change for anonymity.  We’ll call him Bill.

Honestly, I disliked Bill when I met him.  He changed the name of the place from the traditional name to something I considered stupid.  He changed the whole menu, raised prices on everything, and he was kind of crude.

That first day I complained about the prices, he told me, “That’s because of the ingredients, I use a milk mix so good, even lactose intolerant drinkers can tolerate it.”

I literally called bullshit on him.  He insisted and said he was severely lactose intolerant and that he had tried literally dozens of mixes looking for one that wouldn’t make him sick.  That blend, wherever he got it, was the only one he found.  He challenged me to eat the ice cream without a lactose pill and I thought he was nuts but I tried it.

And he was right.  The ice cream was incredible and I didn’t even get heart burn from it.  I instantly changed my tune and started spending basically all my extra money there until I was 18 and needed a short term job.  I’d drag friends, dates, and family there; anyone who would go with me.

He agreed to hire me to the shop and teach me the ropes.  He also wanted me to paint things for him to display, like a gigantic wooden ice cream cone he found in the back from years past.  And working for him was amazing. I had a few really nice bosses after that, don’t get me wrong, but he offered so much value to me at that time in my life.

He never said the words libertarian, capitalist, voluntaryist, or agorist.  But, man, did he talk the talk.  He complained about taxation and how much of his income he had to give up.  He held the business in an international corporation in China that he owned, believe it or not.

And that corporation he inherited from someone he worked for.  When he first went there, he found a shop owner who he loved that spoke English.  They became friends and he started to work there basically for purpose, learning about business and totally falling in love with Chinese culture.  The man died and left him the business/corporation.

At some point, he started to get home sick and looked for a lifestyle where he could have both.

Where I grew up,  he had about maybe 4 months a year to get business in the summer, the rest it wasn’t worth staying open.

He also grew up in the same area and wanted to dip his toes into business again, but in his home town.  The ice cream shop was perfect, especially because he loved ice cream.  Last order of the night was always a custom milk shake he’d take home with him.  He spent the rest of his time in China, literally trying to find a wife.

He was an excellent businessman. He knew to hire young, beautiful women from the local high school.  The girls speculated that he was a creep based mostly on his appearance and the fact that he was weird.  I never got those vibes from him myself and at that age I was already used to advances from older men.  I asked him about their allegations mostly to see what he had to say about it.

That was when he told me the reason he spent so much time in China was for a wife.  He is literally only interested in Chinese women, and all of the girls working there other than myself were blond hair, blue eyes. Their purpose was to impress the firemen and keep them coming back, literally.  He explained this all to me with a laugh.  It was funny because those girls would SWOON over the fireman that came to the establishment just for them.  Who was really creepy there?

He was very particular about how he did business. He made all his own sauces from scratch and if the strawberries weren’t cut in the right shape, it wasn’t right, he’d have you redo this.  That was always easy for me to understand, but the girls who didn’t understand quality hated it.  Why did things have to be so specific? To me it always made sense, so I did the extra work to do it right.

The thing was, if you did the thing exactly how he said, he was very generous.  He regularly gave me bonuses for the fact that I tried to be a good employee for him. Even when I quit for college, he gave me a bonus as I left to say thanks and help me with the transition.

Those girls were too young to understand what it was that made his ice cream so addictive.  Whatever problems they had with him stopped at the ice cream.  We all had the privilege to take home 16 oz of whatever we wanted every night we worked.  And we all did, the only thing that was off limits was the more expensive Hershey’s brand hard serve.

In truth, the girls  didn’t get him because of the little rants he’d go on.  For example, they’d get excited about making USD, and he’d tell them the dollar is due to collapse and that they better not bet on it for their future.  He straight up told vapid blond girls to buy gold every time they worked. He was virtually the first person I ever heard talking about “taxation is theft” in an intelligent manner.

He’d talk to me a lot about my future, ask me questions.  When I told him college, he asked why. I didn’t have an answer.  He’d remind me the dollar would collapse and society as we knew it would change. He was encouraging me to do basically anything other than college.  Really, he wanted me to stay and work on the business with him.  Realistically, I should have, but I was brainwashed. One of my biggest regrets is leaving that job.

One night we were working alone on what was a rainy night so we had like no customers.  And he started talking about my future again.  I saw Bill as a mentor by this point and I was his favorite employee because I’d actually talk to him about the things he cared about.  I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I was listening.  I definitely respected him after witnessing how he ran his business.

That night he told me this: “I’m going to give you the best advice I could ever give.  Leave the US, to literally anywhere.  Get out of this country, off the USD, and avoid the scam of college.  Buy gold with what you make here but whatever you do, just get out before things get really bad.”

But brainwashed I went to college, and when I read about agorism, all I could think about was Bill and how he was fucking RIGHT.

Eventually I went back for just one more visit to see my family and to tell him, “You are right,” because he needed to hear it.  I went home, got some ice cream, and saw his nerdy smiling face.

Right there at the ordering booth, I spit it all out, “Bill, you were right. The dollar’s a mess, the FED is awful. The drug war is a scam, this country is fucked.  I’ve been buying silver (because I was, this was right before I found bitcoin) because I can’t afford gold, but I just had to come back and tell you, you are right.  Thank you.”

He stood there, red faced, and smiling, then basically proceeded to beg me to move back to work for him again.  I really should have taken him up on it.  Perhaps now I’d be in China half the year, having all sorts of adventures and not be on the run.  Staying would have meant he taught me everything about the business.

Bill is easily the most agorist person I knew in my life and I never once heard him even use the term.  He actually never applied any label to himself other than “businessman” which was accurate.  Every so often I think about Bill and the effect he had on my life with pride.

If only he could see, I definitely got the fuck out of the US.