Ross is Free – We Can Be Too!

Originally published on LewRockwell.com, on January 23, 2025.

The Dread Pirate Roberts is a free man.

Like so many who have called for Ross Ulbricht’s freedom for the past eleven years, I never fully believed I would see this day. And, like many of us, I have heard all kinds of (ignorant) reasons why I should not be supporting him.

“He’s a drug dealer!”

“He ordered a hit on a father of three!”

Neither of these are true. If you want to know what he actually did, and why he was caged for eleven years, here is a place to start.

There is a much bigger issue at stake though, than the particulars of Ross’s case.

Sarah Thompson puts it well:

“Ross Ulbricht embodies the most important issues and ideals of our time. He is just a man, human and fallible, and also an icon: the quiet hero, an innovator so threatening to the established order that they had to bury him. To a small group of people, they made him a martyr instead. And, beyond hope, he is free, having faced the darkness.

“Our choices are Ross or Klaus Schwab. We can’t have both; any drift towards Schwab washes us over the precipice. We still stand on a knife’s edge. But, for this moment, the sun has broken through the murk low on the horizon. Let us not forget our hearts when it sets. The world is still in spin.”

The government did not put Ross Ulbricht in prison because he was a criminal. Ross committed no crime against anyone. But he, and the platform he helped to build, did threaten the government’s monopoly on crime. And that is why they had to lock him up: To send an unmistakably clear message to anyone else who might think about doing anything similar.

When Barack Obama ordered a hit on a US citizen and his sixteen-year-old son, along with other innocent people, nobody threw him in a cage. And I’d be very surprised to find that any of those who were cheering for Ross’s incarceration have likewise called for Obama to be incarcerated for his many crimes.

Too many people are in love with criminals in positions of power. So in love that they can’t even recognize what is going on. So let me explain:

Every time you make an exchange with someone, whether you’re being paid as an employee, hiring someone to work on your house, or picking up cat litter at the grocery store, the government takes a piece of it.

There’s no reason for this, it’s just because they can.

If you think there is a reason, if you think that taxation is justified because “we need it to pay for our military… or public schools… or roads!”, then I’m going to suggest that you haven’t thought this through. Even if you still believe that we need to have someone steal money from people in order to pay for necessary things (and if you do still believe that, I recommend doing a little reading to correct the problem), you cannot reasonably believe that the way in which these things need to be paid for is by taking a percentage cut of every transaction everyone partakes in.

This makes no sense. No legitimate business operates this way. You don’t go out to dinner and pay some fraction of your income for the meal. Nor do we purchase cars this way, nor clothing, nor homes, nor gasoline… nor anything at all. We pay prices for these things, and those prices make some kind of sense given what it costs to make them and how much other people value them.

So… the government takes money from us – as much as it possibly can – and there’s very little we can do about that. We are then asked to believe that the government will spend the money it has taken in ways that are better for us than the ways we would have spent it.

The next step, is that we get things like million-dollar toilet seats; lots of wars in countries we know nothing about and have no problem with; schools that turn out graduates who can barely read but who fervently believe they need the state in order to function in the world; government agencies that forcibly prevent people from helping each other during natural disasters; and entire states burning to the ground.

Oh, and the government also steals wealth from us by inflating the money supply.

Silk Road, and the advent of cryptocurrency, threatened all of that. By providing a platform for people to make anonymous exchanges, it bypassed the routes by which the state is able to take from us.

And while, no, Bitcoin does not itself provide anonymity, the hope (at least early on) was that it would create an alternate currency that could not be inflated by anyone. That hope may yet bear fruit.

That is why Ross was thrown into a cage for eleven years. Not because he hurt anyone, not because he stole from anyone. Not because he committed any kind of genuine crime (the kind that requires a victim) at all. He was thrown into a cage because he helped to create something that posed an existential threat to someone else’s actual criminal activities.

That’s it.

We will always have criminals among us. There will always be a few – hopefully very few – people who don’t mind using violence to get what they want. But our entire society does not need to be based upon this principle.

The system we currently live with is not one that protects us from criminals, but one that provides a safe space for large-scale criminals: Those who steal and kill with impunity – and who criminalize actions for the rest of us that are not in fact crimes.

The question before us is whether we wish to continue to live in a system that is founded on crime. Silk Road, and all of those who used it, answered that question with a resounding “NO.” We can do that too. We can reject the system of state violence. We can seek out ways to live that do not involve the state and that indeed help to subvert it. We can, each of us, look for ways, not to co-opt the institution of the state, nor to get “our people” in there, but to dismantle it entirely, and build in its place a society founded on genuine law and order, rather than rule by a criminal elite.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s bust outta this joint.