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, without specifying the context or project or what it’s concerning, and asked me to review it. 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 A New Covenant and Covenant of Unanimous Consent.)

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

***

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.