OK, I’ll admit it from the start. I enjoyed reading S. Andrew Swann’s Profiteer. A lot. It is well written, has plenty of good characters and action. Swann’s fascination with weaponry and eccentric alien gentleman-adventurers reminds me of L. Neil Smith. But is it libertarian? A tricky question.

Some elements of the novel are obviously libertarian. The hero is a gun manufacturing entrepreneur in conflict with an ugly statist system. Most of the action takes place on a planet with no government, and the good guys want to stay ungoverned.

But the anarchist planet Bakunin is not a very nice place. There is no real respect for individual freedom and property rights. Most of the bad things statists think would happen in an anarchy do happen on Bakunin. And yet—this free society seems to work, in a sense.

Swann’s vision of Bakunin could perhaps be seen as an illustration of the thesis that anarchy usually works even if a lot of people behave like criminals most of the time. Maybe this is what Max Stirner’s nihilistic Union of Egoists would look like?

Is it a realistic vision? Well, who knows until we’ve tried? Personally, I think George H. Smith’s theory that justice entrepreneurship in the free market will result in an acceptance of free market libertarian rights seems pretty plausible (this theory is firmly grounded in sound economic and social theory). But even if things didn’t work out that way, trade and social life would probably emerge in another, albeit much less than perfect form.

Crime is part of everyday life on Bakunin, ranging from ordinary street gangs to religious nuts who kill sinners on prime time television as part of an extortion racket. But there is also considerable commercial activity and there are financial institutions, contracts and protection agencies. Gold is universally accepted as money, and “tax” is an indecent word. The statists are definitely the bad guys in Swann’s universe, killing people by the millions while the bakuninites settle for minor blood feuds.

You have to keep in mind, of course, that Profiteer is the first book of a trilogy, under the general heading, Hostile Takeover. What about the sequels? Where is Swann’s heading? The second book in the trilogy, Partisan, is out—and there is nothing in this novel that spoils the fun from a libertarian point of view. And whatever may happen in the final book, Profiteer is still a good read.

If anything, Profiteer could be read as a critique of certain rather naive communist visions of anarchy. Life on the free-market planet Bakunin would definitely not meet with the approval of its namesake. Indeed, Swann ’s frequent use of communistic quotations at the beginning of each chapter seems most of all like good satire. In Profiteer the market process survives anything—chaos, war, and other massive statist intervention.