Even Amid the Flames of War, the Market Process Endures

 

Even Amid the Flames of War, the Market Process Endures

An LPWI Press Blog Exclusive

By Lucas Peters, LPWI Contributor

April 29, 2026

In the midst of the 2026 Iran war with its blockades, naval standoffs, and artificial energy chokepoints imposed by warring states the United Arab Emirates has done what sovereign actors rarely do: it has chosen the market over the cartel. By announcing its withdrawal from OPEC and OPEC+, the UAE is set to ramp up production unconstrained by quotas. From the lens of Austrian economics and libertarianism, this is no anomaly. It is the market process asserting itself against the very states that profit from destruction.

Markets are not fragile constructs easily shattered by political violence. They are living processes driven by entrepreneurial discovery, subjective value, and the ceaseless coordination of millions of individual plans. Cartels like OPEC are not “free market” institutions; they are state-enforced price-fixing schemes. They rely on coercion (quotas, threats, political favoritism) to suppress supply and inflate prices, just as any government price control does. When war compounds this through blockades of the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions, and naval enforcement the state’s hand grows heavier. Yet the market does not simply submit.

The UAE’s move is entrepreneurial calculation. Abu Dhabi has recognized that its own long-term interest lies in unleashing production capacity already built (and expandable) via pipelines like Habshan-Fujairah that bypass Hormuz chokepoints. This is not altruism or geopolitics disguised as economics. It is self-interest rightly understood: profit-seeking actors responding to price signals and consumer demand. Even under the most severe interventions war, inflation, regulation the market process redirects resources toward their highest-valued uses as perceived by individuals. Higher prices from disrupted supply (the war’s “historic energy shock”) scream for more oil. The UAE hears the signal and acts; global consumers and businesses now breathe easier.

Libertarianism adds moral and historical clarity. Wars are not “market failures”; they are the state’s signature failure. They are the ultimate rent-seeking enterprise: governments conscript resources, inflate currencies to fund destruction, and impose embargoes that crush civilian prosperity while enriching connected insiders. Libertarians have long warned against the American empire’s entanglements and the bipartisan addiction to foreign adventurism. The Iran conflict blockades, dual chokepoints, and the predictable blowback exemplifies the pattern Rothbard decried in For a New Liberty: the state creates problems (energy scarcity, volatility) then poses as the solution through more controls. Yet even here, the free market mitigates the damage the state inflicts.

This is the beauty of the “invisible hand” in wartime: it does not require central planning, patriotic appeals, or international summits. It requires only the freedom to act. Entrepreneurs and producers, guided by profit and loss, discover ways around the wreckage. No cartel bureaucrat possesses the dispersed knowledge of local geology, pipeline capacity, investment timelines, or shifting demand. Only on-the-ground actors do. By defecting, the UAE accelerates the cartel’s unraveling, a classic example of how voluntary association and exit (the ultimate market discipline) undermine coercive monopoly.

Libertarians understand the true instability is the state system itself: cartels propped by force, wars launched under false pretenses of security, and consumers left footing the bill through higher pump prices and distorted supply chains. The market’s response here is proof that peace and prosperity are not opposites of self-interest; they are its natural outgrowth when individuals are left free. Lower oil prices mean lower costs for food, transport, manufacturing, easing the very burdens states impose through their wars.

The state cannot abolish economic law; it can only distort it, at enormous human cost. The UAE’s bold step reminds us that even in 2026’s Middle Eastern conflict, the market process endures. It alleviates the suffering. And proves the libertarian truth: the freer the people, the less the state can make us pay for its follies.

A Sweet Swearing Into Office Tuesday

 

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin member Brian Defferding (pictured) will get sworn onto the Neenah City Council, Tuesday, April 21st.

April 17, 2026

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin

www.lpwi.org  

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A Sweet Swearing Into Office Tuesday

Neenah, WI—OnTuesday, April 21^st, the City of Neenah, Wisconsin, will swear in their newest city council member, Mr. Brian Defferding, age 49, a member of the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin.

Running for a non-partisan office, Defferding based his campaign on door knocking, listening to people, and sharing their concerns. “When you talk to people, meet them where they are at [in viewpoint]. And then, tailor your response in a Libertarian way,” he said. Enough voters saw the reasonableness of his message. He beat his single opponent by 24 votes.

His opponent, a long-term city council incumbent, told Defferding several years ago that if he did not like the rules of the city, he should “move out to the country.” Instead of heeding her ridicule, Defferding got elected in 2018 as a county board supervisor, where he served a few terms and became a watch-dog against unreasonable government regulations, and an advocate to protect taxpayer money from frivolous spending.

His motivation to run this spring for city council had to do with Neenah’s 6% property tax increase, and its increase of fees by 10-15%. His opponent had always consistently voted for the numerous spending increases, and new borrowing, and tax and fees increases

Defferding also sharply criticized the city government for massive use of taxpayer money to prepare Arrowhead Park for private development.

A notoriously polluted area in the city, the park had suffered decades of chemical runoff from area paper mills. According to Defferding, Neenah’s government has spent $3.5 MILLION in various tests, legal costs etc. etc. since 2010 to try and get the area certified by the Wisconsin DNR as a safe zone for sales and developments to proceed.

Defferding’s opponent, who told him to move out of the city over its refusal to allow him to build a privacy fence several years ago, consistently voted for that spending. Calling Defferding simply an “extremist Libertarian” on her social media, the people replied to her. Defferding says that “Residents want the city to stop spending money” so unreasonably. As a Libertarian, and a new city council member, he can do a lot to protect taxpayer money.

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin 

 

For Immediate Release

April 15th, 2026

www.lpwi.org  

The Case for Privacy and "Forget Your Customer"

There's a plague sweeping across state legislatures. In the name of protecting children, they are adding requirements to add age attestations and even full identity verification, similar to banks, to use computers and/or install software with severe penalties to individual developers, including hobbyists writing free and open source software. This is a patchwork of different bills with different severity. Some just require people to state their age and some require photos and uploading of Real IDs. There’s talk of doing this at all layers: hardware, operating system, application distribution/installation, and websites.

They are building a world of computing of "own nothing and be happy" where the government has full surveillance and control over all hardware and software. There are quickly eliminating all technical workarounds. In addition to being an Orwellian nightmare of tyranny, it will legally require data to be collected and stored in enormous honeypots that will be breached and sold on the dark web. Data can't and won't ever be protected.

To paraphrase a famous cybersecurity quote, there are two types of databases, those that have been breached and those of which you don't know have been breached. Even more ominously, even the most light touch of age attestation will require all computers to inform all predators and pedophiles who query the computer who the children are. Put differently, it'll make it clear who all of the children are and paint giant bullseyes on them for predators to target.

In his recent veto of age verification of social media web sites, Governor Tony Evers called upon legislators to instead require age verification at the operating system and hardware level. The only way to protect people, including children, is for firms to Forget Your Customer. In the Information Age, privacy is security. Age verification is a veil of security when in reality, it singles out the most vulnerable.