A Comment on a Manifesto of Liberty (Onymarchy); Founders’ Agreement—Key Principles and Foundations; Principles of the Montelibero Agreement; The Voluntaryist Covenant

by Stephan Kinsella on September 7, 2026

Libertarian Nation and Related Projects

Onym, “A Comment on a Manifesto of Liberty,” @onymarchy (Substack) (Sep 07, 2026): “On voice, measure, and what increases when given away.”

Someone sent me some draft “Founders’ Agreement—Key principles and foundations” document (see below), without specifying the context or project or what it’s concerning, and asked me to review it. I believe he is Onym, though I a not sure it’s the same name as the person who emailed me (R.E.). I explained I cannot review it unless I know the context, and mentioned that he might want to take a look at The Universal Principles of Liberty and how it is incorporated in other projects e.g. its incorporation into the draft Liberland Constitution (see Art. I, §1, ¶¶3, 4) and possible incorporation into Nations of Sanity Peace Agreement (KOL496 | Matt Sands and Kinsella on the Universal Principles of Liberty and the Nations of Sanity “Peace Agreement”).

He then sent me the substack article linked above, the text of which I append here as it is short:

A Comment on a Manifesto of Liberty

On voice, measure, and what increases when given away

A handsome document is making the rounds — “Universal Principles of Liberty”: a preamble on dignity, axioms of self-ownership and non-aggression, a decentralized legal order, a list of unjust laws from taxation to copyright, and a closing banner: “we bow to no state… and no power on earth will stop us.” I read it twice: first as an ally, then as a reviewer. A reviewer, before saying anything aloud, picks a verdict for himself alone — sign off, comment, or reject. The three map onto Hirschman with suspicious neatness: sign-off is consent, reject is exit, a comment is voice. What follows is a comment.

The agreements — so that the rest does not read as a dispatch from an enemy camp. The manifesto’s axiomatics are my axiomatics: obligations from consent alone, non-aggression, freedom of association. The rejection of intellectual property — “ideas are not rivalrous” — signed. The rejection of any monopoly on law — signed. The notice that a corporation is not a Person but a derivative of living people — a rare precision. This is the best short codification of libertarian ethics I have seen in years.

Which is exactly why it shows what the whole tradition lacks. Four empty places, in ascending order.

First: there is no voice in it.

There is exit in three forms — voluntary adoption of the Principles, choice of arbiter, choice of protection agency. Competitive jurisdiction: don’t like it — walk to another provider. But nowhere, in no article, is there a mechanism for being heard before the irreversible — a right to demand a conversation with someone who has not yet aggressed but is about to act. Hirschman decomposed order into Exit and Voice half a century ago; the libertarian tradition took the first and systematically fails to notice the second. The irony here is almost familial. The strongest grounding of this manifesto’s axiomatics — Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics — grew out of the discourse ethics of his teacher, Habermas: to deny self-ownership in an argument is performatively contradictory, because the argument already presupposes it. The entire edifice, that is, rests on the fact of conversation — and the edifice itself has no room for conversation in it: the student took from Habermas the performative contradiction and did not take communicative action. An order derived from dialogue is built to run without dialogue. Order made of exit is an order of slamming doors. It works — at a price: whatever cannot be solved by leaving is not solved at all.

Second: there is no measure in it.

Look at the design: property answers “whose,” rectification answers “how much for the harm” — “compensation proportionate to the harm.” And who holds the proportion? The answer is given twice, and both times it is the same: impartial arbitration. Impartiality conceived as a property of a person — the right man will be found, and he will weigh justly. It is a very old hope, and it has a very old alternative. Athens kept metronomoi — officers of measures: chosen by lot, so that neither seller nor buyer could make the measurer his man, and answerable to the polis, not to the parties of a trade. The Athenians did not search for an impartial person — they built a procedure with no slot for partiality: knowledge, choice, and assignment split across different hands, chance finishing the job. Measure as procedure versus measure as persona. The manifesto abolished every monopoly and kept one — the arbiter-figure’s monopoly on the last word.

And deeper: the document’s grammar is homesteading, exchange, rectification. An honest grammar for its task — to demarcate so as not to fight. But it has a blind spot: the position of creation. The entrepreneur — the one who creates value for another, whose income is tied to that other’s verified benefit — has no article of his own in this grammar yet. The Austrians standing behind the manifesto know more about him than anyone; their knowledge stayed in the treatises and did not reach the clauses. The constitution of non-aggression has been written. The constitution of creation is still a vacancy — and, judging by the manifesto’s own footnote about “non-aggressive arrangements” for protecting creativity, the authors left room for it themselves.

Third: there is no “between” in it.

Its ontology is two-sorted: Persons and Resources. Everything that exists is either someone’s or a non-resource. “All rights are property rights” — the proprietary frame declared total. Ideas fall out of it by remainder: non-rivalrous, not-scarce — a definition by negation, a hole in the taxonomy. But a gift is neither a resource nor a person. Recognition is neither a resource nor a person. The very norms of dispute the manifesto proposes to live by — whose are they? They cannot be appropriated and cannot be instituted by a single will; they live between those who argue. This region has old names — Buber called it the Between — and one astonishing property that distinguishes it from any resource: what circulates in it increases when given away. Knowledge, once given, does not diminish in the giver. The Aramaic root rawḥā means at once “open space” and “relief”; its Hebrew sibling revaḥ means “profit.” The languages knew what the Persons-and-Resources taxonomy cannot see: there is wealth built as a place, not as a thing. The manifesto honestly declares ideas free — and finds them no home.

Fourth, and most ironic: the apex came back through the front door.

A document written against every imposed instance opens with the words “supreme meta-normative baseline.” Supreme. The Principles “flow from reason” — that is, from above and from nowhere. Secondary codes are allowed, but “the Principles prevail” — primacy, hierarchy, the familiar pyramid with a text where the crown used to be. And the section on interpretation instructs arbiters to consult “respected scholarly commentaries — especially from libertarian thinkers”: a canonized library as a source of law. The state has been expelled; the archē remained, in a new costume. The closing banner — “no power on earth will stop us” — settles the genre: this is the pathos of one apex declaring war on another. The test for anti-hierarchy is simple: does the text end with a measure — or with a banner.

What instead? I will not pretend to carry a corrected manifesto for the whole world in my pocket — my scale is smaller and therefore more honest: a three-founder agreement in which these four holes are closed one by one. Voice as a protocol: the right to demand a conversation before the irreversible, with guaranteed delivery. Measure as a procedure: one divides, the second picks, the third says to whom without looking; the lot does not appoint the measure — it keeps the measure from belonging to anyone. The “between” as a regime of knowledge: authorship of ideas is not recorded, knowledge sits on no balance sheet, what is protected is not value but the season of disclosure. And no supreme text: the agreement runs on the continuing consent of three specific people and refers to nothing above itself — including, with all sympathy, the Universal Principles.

The manifesto teaches how not to fight. Necessary, and not sufficient: between “not fighting” and “living together” lies the question it does not contain — by what measure. The Athenians answered with the lot; Watt in 1776 — with a contract paid out of the customer’s verified savings; Buber — with the Between. The tradition that wrote this manifesto will get to the same question eventually, if only because the first dispute between two of its adopters over “proportionate compensation” will raise it point-blank.ddd

Meanwhile — a test for any code of principles, yours to keep: look for three things in it. A right to be heard before the irreversible. A procedure of measure that does not reduce to a good person. And a home for that which increases when given away. If even one is missing, you are looking at a constitution of truce, not of order.

And, to pass my own test: this text is neither a sign-off nor a reject — it is a comment, which is to say, voice addressed to the manifesto’s authors. Habermas distinguished communicative action from strategic action by its aim — not to win but to reach understanding; I have tried to write in the first mode: signed what I could sign, named the empty places, and left a door in each. Objections will be received as the conversation continuing — for how else should a document about freedom live. My verdict stays a comment; the review is open.

My initial comment was something like this:

Interesting. But this is very compressed and an odd way of writing.

It references some Hirschman as some kind of jargon without explanation. It is too breezy and hard to follow. It treats the Universal Principles of Liberty as some kind of draft contract requiring “sign-off” or consent. But the principles laid out in the doc are not an agreement and not a contract meant to be signed in the first place.

He says: “This is the best short codification of libertarian ethics I have seen in years.” I’ll take the compliment but it is worded as if there are others attempted every so often. But I am not really aware of others. Where are they? (The only other one I can think of is L. Neil Smith’s proposed “Covenant of Unanimous Consent”: see Smith, A New Covenant; Covenant of Unanimous Consent (LPedia); Smith, Majoritarianism versus Unanimous Consent (Pizzacracy as Hyperdemocracy) (1997).)

In talk about creation and ideas, the comments seem to be vaguely Randian and in search of some kind of property right in ideas, which is deeply confused.

***

On “Onymarchy”

Incidentally, I asked Grok to try to figure out the etymology of “onymarchy.” See below.

Related neologisms:

On Conflictability and Conflictable Resources; Voluntaryism and Voluntarism (proposing the term “consensualist” and consensualism)
The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; or: I prefer Hazlitt’s “Cooperatism”
Should Libertarians Oppose “Capitalism”?
“What Libertarianism Is,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society, n43
How To Think About Property (2019)
The Origin of “Libertarianism,” Mises Blog (Sept. 10, 2011)
Rothbard on Leonard Read and the Origins of “Libertarianism” (Nov. 17, 2014)

See, from Grok:

The Substack does not define the word in a glossary. The publication tagline is the closest statement of intent:

By day I ship code; here I trace the genealogy of one question — from ἀρχή to ἀγάπη — and test the answers on live contracts.

That is the author’s own frame: start from archē (beginning / first principle / rule) and move toward agapē (love as gift that increases when given). The comment on the Universal Principles is written inside that same frame: it praises the manifesto’s axioms, then objects that an archē (“supreme meta-normative baseline”) has re-entered after the state was expelled.

Etymology (the parts the name is built from)

Onym comes from Greek ónoma / ónyma (ὄνομα / ὄνυμα), “name.” It is the same root as anonymous (without a name), synonym, eponym, homonym. Onymous means “having a name; not anonymous.” The handle “Onym” is therefore “the named one.”
-archy is Greek archē (ἀρχή) via Latin -archia: beginning, origin, first place, and hence rule or government. Same suffix as monarchy, anarchy, oligarchy, hierarchy.

Put together, Onymarchy is a coined “rule of the named” or “named archē”: order that is attributable, spoken for, and signed, rather than anonymous power or a nameless apex. That reading fits both the handle and the article’s closing move: the piece is offered as voice (a signed comment), not as another unsigned banner.

It is not a dictionary word. Nomarchy (province of a nomarch) is a different formation, from nomos + -archy, and is unrelated.

***

In further email exchange, he wrote:

Guilty as charged: the essay is written at one-tenth of the length it needs. Let me decompress, starting with your direct questions.

The trade: I am a software developer. On GitHub, when a colleague proposes a change, a reviewer must pick one of three actions before the change is merged: Approve, Comment, or Request changes. I read your Principles the way I read a pull request.

Sign off on what: on adoption. Your own text says any person “may adopt the Principles by any clear act of consent.” Adoption is the signature; a builder reviews before adopting. My review returned “Comment” meaning: I want to adopt, and four things stop me from clicking “Sign off” yet.

Hirschman, in one paragraph: Albert Hirschman (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, 1970) observed that a member of any organization in decline has two responses: leave (Exit) or speak up and try to change it from inside (Voice). My point was that the Principles institutionalize Exit thoroughly — choose your arbiter, your protection agency, your code — and contain no mechanism of Voice: no right to demand a hearing before something irreversible happens.

On “others that have been tried” — my comparison set is small but lived-in: these are documents I have signed or lived under, not a scholar’s bibliography. The Montelibero Agreement holds together some two hundred people online, with a real settlement on the ground in Montenegro. I participate remotely. The Principles of the Montelibero Association were born painfully; I took part in drafting them and signed. Separately, the Voluntaryist Covenant – unaffiliated with Montelibero – which I have also signed. Christian and Objectivist codifications have passed within sight, but only in passing, so I will not cite them from memory. That set is what I mean by “best I have seen in years”: small, but made of texts people actually sign and live under. And thank you for L. Neil Smith’s Covenant of Unanimous Consent, which I did not know and which goes into the genre survey I now owe the series.

I will unpack the four comments one at a time, at a readable length, on the same Substack. I would be glad to see you in the comments there: an intellectual attack from you is the best QA my principles can get. Thank you for subscribing; the review continues in the open.

***

He gave me permission to post the Founder’s Agreement. It is below. As far as I can gather from his email to me, it has to do with The Montelibero Agreement and the Principles of the Montelibero Association. As he wrote to me, “As a libertarian, I’m participating in the Montelibero Free Society Project Europe and built a founders agreement, agnostic to “governmental” law.”

Here is some of our further exchange:

Kinsella:

Principles of the Montelibero Association https://docs.mtla.me/Principles/Principles.en.html — has nothing about property rights.”

Onym:

> May I post it online?

Yes, gladly: post it, circulate it, quote it. I attach the full mechanics (Founders’ Agreement, rev. 6.15 EN: a translation of the Russian original). If you post anything, please keep the revision number visible; it is a living document with a change-log. I have already solicited intellectual attacks on it from Russian-speaking anarcho-capitalists and-yes-anarcho-communists; a review from your positions would be invaluable. There is nothing sweeter for an open-source builder than code that is not merely read but attacked.

> It has nothing about property rights.

Regarding Montelibero’s Principles: you caught something real, and the honest explanation is almost embarrassing: property rights are so naturalized in the libertarian community that the drafters, myself included, simply forgot to write them down. The founders’ agreement corrects that reflex in the opposite direction: property participation is fully explicit, while knowledge is deliberately kept off the balance sheet. The knowledge side connects to your Free Cities talk [KOL497 | Debate: “Should Free Cities Protect Intellectual Property?” Free Cities Foundation Annual Conference — Próspera, Honduras 2026]: §15 of the attached document attempts to build what your position implies: protection of the disclosure period by contract, with no property in ideas at all.

***

I note that this also does not define property rights as I did in The Universal Principles of Liberty and in in Plank 2.1 of the Libertarian Party Platform (Aggression and Property Rights Plank in the Libertarian Party Platform). By talking of “consent,” self-ownership (body-ownership) is implied, but not acquired property rights in external, previously unowned resources. This should be specified clearly, distinguished from body-ownership, and should include original appropriation, contractual transfer, and transfers of owned resources for rectification once there has been trespass/aggression. ¹ It also suggests restitution is appropriate instead of punishment. ²

In addition, there seems to be an Objectivist tinge to all this, implying some form of intellectual property may be legitimate, as with this line: “Unstamped material is free by default…” in ¶6:

6. Knowledge is separated from money. Money measures what diminishes; knowledge is what increases when given away: knowledge has a season and a path, but no price. Authorship of ideas is neither recorded nor reconstructed; knowledge sits on no balance sheet. The stamp protects neither value nor authorship but the season of disclosure — an agreed moment, not an asset. Unstamped material is free by default; registrations against third parties (patents, trademarks) are a separate, optional constitutional decision.

This document is too riddled with metaphors and flowery language; is vague, not consistent, and does not define terms. It seems to vaguely recognize the difference between ideas/knowledge and scarce resources/means ³ but also seems to hint at some type of “stamped” contract, which I have elsewhere criticized. ⁴

In any case, here’s the text of the Founder’s Agreement draft he sent me:

Founders’ Agreement · rev. 6.14

Key principles and foundations — one page

Consent is the only source of obligation. Nothing binds one who has not consented; neither majority, nor “the interests of the enterprise,” nor anyone’s reasonableness creates Consent comes in two kinds: continuing consent to participate (withdrawable freely and instantly) and constitutive consent to the procedures of parting — the latter survives withdrawal, so that no one can revoke the Other’s exit.
Status without a quantitative measure. Equality of co-founders is equality of constitutional standing: Voice, Exit, protection, information, Courier, participation in procedures. Status says who takes part; how much anyone receives is determined by procedures — never by status, merit, or the “value” of a person.
Measure is a procedure, not a person. There is no final measurer — inside the association or outside it. Functions are disjoined: forming the options, checking them, and assigning by lot are never held by one hand; two are not the measure of the third. Whoever defines the measure of a division does not control its application to the Other.
Four protocols: Voice, Exit, Loyalty, Courier. Voice — the duty to hear before the irreversible. Exit — free, immediate, with settlement. Loyalty — disagreement goes into Voice, not into sabotage. Courier — a guaranteed delivery channel, down to a memo transaction on a public ledger: “I didn’t know” is impossible by construction.
Fork instead of ostracism. The Agreement knows no expulsion by majority and relies on no external enforcement. The answer to evasion is not punishment but fork: the others may found a new association. Property does not move; knowledge moves. Order is protected by design — keys, accesses, terms — not by force.
Knowledge is separated from money. Money measures what diminishes; knowledge is what increases when given away: knowledge has a season and a path, but no price. Authorship of ideas is neither recorded nor reconstructed; knowledge sits on no balance sheet. The stamp protects neither value nor authorship but the season of disclosure — an agreed moment, not an asset. Unstamped material is free by default; registrations against third parties (patents, trademarks) are a separate, optional constitutional decision.
Work without employment. The association creates no employment relations. Labor is engaged by contracts with persons who keep their own title to their means and results — with priority for forms in which the counterparty’s reward is tied to their own measured delta.
Settlement instead of punishment. Status ends only on grounds accepted in advance and explicitly by its bearer, and none of them leaves a position without settlement. Consequences of breach are restitution, restoration of access, compensation, and procedures — not loss of status.
Disagreement goes only to one chosen by all. The Agreement refers to no external order. A dispute the parties cannot resolve themselves is submitted only to someone chosen by all parties to the disagreement.

Foundations. Self-ownership, non-aggression, and freedom of association as axioms; the “between” as unownable — the norms of a common undertaking belong to no one and cannot be instituted by a single will; a measure answerable to those affected rather than to the strongest (the Athenian metronomoi: disjoined functions and lot instead of an appointed measurer); and protection of the Other by architecture rather than motivation — constitutive consent guards his exit against my future change of heart.

In one line: a constitution for order without an apex — held together not by coercion but by design (keys, roles, terms, and lot) and by the consent the participants keep giving one another.