The Tragedy of Ross Ulbricht

By Robert Wenzel

And so, Ross Ulbricht, who has admitted to being the creator of the underground market place, Silk Road, has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In his pre-bust writings, Ulbricht admitted to being a libertarian and implied, while using the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, that he launched the Silk Road operation in part as an in-your-face response to government drug laws.

He has now admitted that the effort has been a horrific personal disaster. And yet, I continue to see libertarians cheer on others who have moved in to replace Ulbricht in online illegal drug sales.

I repeat once more, it is extremely dangerous to take on the government directly. Murray Rothbard nailed it when he wrote that drug dealing should be left to drug dealers:

If the black market should develop, then the successful entrepreneurs are not going to be agoric theoreticians...but successful entrepreneurs period. What do they need with Konkin and his group?  I suggest, nothing at all.  There is a hint in the NLM that libertarians would a priori make better entrepreneurs than anyone else because they are more trustworthy and more rational, but this piece of nonsense was exploded by hard experience a long time ago.   Neither do the budding black marketeers need Mr. Konkin and his colleagues to cheer them on and free them of guilt.  Again, experience has shown that they do fine on their own, and that urging them on to black market activities is like exhorting ducks to swim...

As much as I love the market, I refuse to believe that when I engage in a regular market transaction (e.g., buying a sandwich) or a black market activity (e.g., driving at 60 miles per hour) I advance one iota nearer the libertarian revolution.  The black market is not going to be the path to liberty, and libertarian theoreticians and activists have no function in that market...

Historically, classical liberal political parties have accomplished far more for human liberty than any black markets. 

From a libertarian perspective, there is nothing wrong with being a drug dealer, but it is a very high risk occupation that does not  intersect with advancing the cause of liberty.

This is what I have already written on the subject:

Advancing liberty is not about selling hooch or weed, though there is no reason to condemn those who enter into these noble professions. If you want to advance liberty, you do so by writing, speaking and reading about liberty. This requires that very little be done beyond libertarian study and actual libertarian activities, even at the early stages of developing such a career. Roy Childs, a powerful libertarian speaker, who made an impact with short essays and book reviews. was a janitor before he was recognized and found work as libertarian.

As much as I disagree with a lot of Stefan Molyneux's commentary, you have to give the man credit for launching his first podcasts by recording them while he was in his car driving to work at his then day job!

I have often thought that the ideal job for an aspiring young libertarian theoretician or essayist is as a grave yard shift security guard . Get a job at the front desk of a building on the overnight shift, where few are going to bother you--and you can read and read and read. Absorb all you can about libertariansim, and, when you are ready, start writing, creating videos or whatever.

Leave the drug dealing to drug dealers, There's this thing called the division of labor and there is no path where drug dealers and libertarians have to pass, anymore than libertarians have to cross paths with fire eaters and sword swallowers, though I doubt many fire eaters and sword swallowers are paying much in terms of taxes, something that libertarians can appreciate, as much as they can appreciate the efforts of drug dealers, without getting into the business. 

And please don't launch into the absurd belief that the internet and Bitcoin are going to protect you from getting caught selling drugs, that Ulbricht just made mistakes that have now been corrected by a new generation of online black market dealers.

Ulbricht certainly thought he had protected himself. The government has tremendous resources to monitor, and one mistake can doom you. As Teddy, played by Mickey Rourke, in the 1981 film Body Heat put it to Racine, played by William Hurt:


          I got a serious question for you.
          What the fuck are you doing? This
          is not shit for you to be messing
          with. Are you ready to hear
          something? See if this sounds
          familiar. Anytime you try a decent
          crime, there is fifty ways to fuck
          up. If you think of twenty-five of
          them you're a genius. And you're no
          genius...
       
          I hope you know what you're doin'
          you better be pretty damn sure about
          it. If you ain't sure, don't do it.
          Of course, that's my recommendation
          anyway -- don't do it.

If anything, using the internet and Bitcoin are a more dangerous method of selling drugs. If you get caught selling drugs on a street corner, you are busted for that deal. If you sell online using Bitcoin, there is a very real possibility that every transaction you have done can be traced back.

Indeed, on page 1 of the prosecutors 16 page letter to the judge asking for a sentence beyond the minimum 20 years in the Ulbricht case, they wrote:

As the Presentence Report (“PSR”) filed by the Probation Office makes clear, that enterprise resulted in serious real-world consequences, including at least six drug-related deaths.

When have you ever heard of a street dealer being busted and all his deals being traced back to numerous drug-related deaths? It doesn't happen.

Ulbricht's naive false belief in the anonymity of the internet and Bitcoin has cost him his freedom forever. The libertarian fan boy, turned black market operator, now has none.

The freedom to speak freely still exists, for the most part. in the United States. If you want to advance liberty use that freedom. It will keep you out of jail and will be much more effective.

Remember, in the end, Murray Rothbard did a lot more to advance the ideas of liberty than El Chapo.

 Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher at EconomicPolicyJournal.com and at Target Liberty. He is also author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics