The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.—Michael Sandel [Emphasis added]

Anarchist justice confronts two broad categories of crime: statism and wrongs done by individuals to each other. Each requires a different approach.

The general approach anarchists take toward state violence was captured by the late Samuel E. Konkin III (SEK3), the father of agorism and an old drinking buddy of mine. SEK3 epitomized the attitude of this approach by routinely answering his phone with the salutation, “Smash the State.” And, yet, his lifestyle did not include direct confrontations with authority; confrontation was the attitude, not the actions. His actions offered a blueprint on how to behave toward the state. Whenever possible, SEK3 avoided contact with it and replaced any valid functions that had been usurped by the state—such as banking—with free-market arrangements. The most effective way to smash the state, he understood, was to render it irrelevant and to establish private alternatives. SEK3’s lasting legacy to anarchist theory was an economic system called “agorism.” This peaceful economic revolution is achieved through counter-economics, which SEK3 defined as “the study or practice of all peaceful human action which is forbidden by the State.” Counter-economics is a black market version of Ludwig von Mises’s praxeology—the study of human action; it is the study and practice of human action to avoid the presence of the state. Smash the State in your attitudes by ignoring it in your life. In other words, don’t act to literally smash the state; bypass it instead.

SEK3 would have reveled in the audacity of cryptocurrency, which both avoids and replaces state fiat, because he knew that establishing a better currency is the surest way to disempower fiat. He would have declared crypto to be the “counter-economic currency”—the currency of agorism. But more than this. In a flash, SEK3 would have recognized crypto’s implications for justice, because it avoids and replaces state law. It inserts, instead, the free market and contracts. Of course, he would have called this default position “agorism” as well—a label he tended to attach to many things of which he approved. In my mind, I can see SEK3 take a swig of the awful black beer he frequented, followed by a drag on his constantly present pipe, before announcing that anarchy had arrived.

Anarchists need to “smash the state” in their minds but literally attacking the state should not be a goal anymore than trying to convince the world to become anarchist should be. Those are impossible tasks and beyond anyone’s ability. Practical anarchism means freeing yourself by decentralizing the decisions about your life into your own hands. To the extent you can act as though the state does not exist, it does not. That is justice for the state—to be irrelevant and ignored.

Even without the state, however, private crime will exist as it has throughout history and within all societies. Private crime demands a different response and a different approach to justice.

Michael Sandel wrote of Aristotelianism. The Aristotelian version of social justice maintains that people should receive what they deserve from each other. This is private justice, and it is distinct from divine justice, which people often confuse with each other. Divine justice envisions a diety or some other ultimate power that weighs each person’s worth on a scale and allocates happiness or good fortune on the basis of the reading. “Why me, Oh Lord, why me?” is the cry of someone who believed he has been betrayed by divine justice; the theory underlying this cry is that there is something beyond respect for autonomy that a person is entitled to demand; bad things should not happen to a good person, for example. By contrast, social or private justice applies solely to human interactions; it means a person should receive from other people what he is entitled to expect from them; he should be left in peace or receive exactly what has been agreed upon without demanding anything more.

Another confusion is common. People may or may not be compassionate and pleasant in their dealings. Behavior may or may not be immoral or unfair, uncivil or cruel. But these are not matters of justice. No one has a legal obligation to be kind or civil toward anyone else, and bad manners are not unjust. The word “unjust” or “injustice” is often applied to bad behavior, however, to describe the negative impact on a recipient. It is a misuse of the word because it confuses justice with morality or good manners. Private justice is nothing more or less than a situation in which everyone receives what they deserve from others—that is what they have both agreed upon and have a right to expect.

The concept of justice usually arises when there is a conflict about whether someone has received what he is entitled to expect. The who in this scenario is twofold: whomever is deprived of what is rightfully his—bodily autonomy, property, or a contracted benefit and the person who is responsible. The why is because every person is a self-owner against whom no one can properly aggress. Self-ownership is the jurisdiction that every human being has, simply by being human, over his own body and the wealth he produces with it. It is the how over which anarchists often stumble, and any blueprint must be based on solid theory of who and why.

The libertarian attorney Stephan Kinsella explains why the concept of justice includes external property:

The libertarian view is that human actors are self-owners and these self-owners are capable of appropriating unowned scarce resources by Lockean homesteading − some type of first use or embordering activity. Obviously, an actor must already own his body if he is to be a homesteader; self-ownership is not acquired by homesteading but rather is presupposed in any act or defense of homesteading.

Self-ownership is not only the right to be left in peace but also to have property undisturbed. In turn, this gives power to the concept of consent. Because of autonomy, other people require your consent in order for an interaction to be just rather than coercive. Without autonomy, there would be no basis for anyone to object to being enslaved because there would be no sharp line between a voluntary and a coercive act. Only a man who owns himself can object to being enslaved by another.

Few things are as just as a free market in which two people directly exchange for agreed-upon values and then walk away in different directions, each satisfied. A woman who buys a tomato and goes home with her purchase to make a salad is enjoying justice. The tomato vendor who pockets her money and moves on to the next customer has also experienced justice. It may seem as though they are merely conducting daily life because both statements are true. In normal life, the free market generally provides people with what they deserve—that is, an exchange of value occurs because each person desires what is offered more than they desire to keep what they have. They exchange. As long as their interactions are peaceful and voluntary, then justice has occurred.

In short, self-ownership is free-market justice. The free market is Aristotelianism in practice; people receive what they deserve. The people’s form of justice revolves around property and contract which is consent. In his essay “The Proprietary Theory of Justice in the Libertarian Tradition,” Carl Watner provides a good summary of crypto justice when he writes, “The proprietary theory of justice is concerned with just one thing: the crucial determination of just versus unjust property titles of individuals in their own bodies and in the material objects around them.”