Liberty Minecraft was not built by accident. It was constructed from a set of interlocking principles -- morality, logic, evidence, property, freedom, personal responsibility, free markets, capitalism, and justice -- each derived from the one before it. NullCase described the server not as a game with libertarian theming but as a practice environment where people could learn liberty by living it. This article lays out the reasoning as NullCase articulated it, from first principles to a functioning society.

Reasoning from First Principles

NullCase grounded Liberty Minecraft in three foundational commitments that preceded any specific policy or rule:

Morality: preferences are not objective. I can only learn what's good for you from you.

Logic: a logically inconsistent argument is wrong. An incomplete argument cannot be proven.

Evidence: test ideas. Claims about reality which disagree with the evidence are wrong.

These were not slogans. They were operating principles that determined how the server was designed, how disputes were handled, and how NullCase evaluated his own decisions. The commitment to evidence in particular set Liberty Minecraft apart from purely ideological projects -- NullCase ran experiments, tracked outcomes, and published results even when they complicated his own narrative.

The Moral Foundation

From the recognition that preferences are subjective, NullCase derived the one rule: resolve nonviolent disputes nonviolently. If you cannot know what is good for another person without asking them, then imposing your will through violence is never justified when the dispute is peaceful. The full philosophical argument behind the rule is explored in The One Rule.

This moral foundation had a practical consequence that NullCase returned to repeatedly: within Liberty Minecraft, everything a player possessed was earned honestly.

Instead of stealing from people we have negotiation and trade. Everything you have in Liberty Minecraft was earned either by you or by the person who gave it to you voluntarily. Every dollar in our economy was produced honestly.

Property

Property in Liberty Minecraft was defined by computer code, not by social convention or administrative fiat. Players converted diamonds into claim blocks at a fixed rate and used those blocks to claim any unclaimed territory. Once claimed, the property was theirs absolutely:

You are the sole owner of everything you claim. If it is not your claim, it is not yours. You have the exclusive right to decide when and how your property can be used, and by whom. No one can use your property without your first permitting it.

This system is detailed further in Private Property in a Digital World. What mattered for the manifesto was the principle: property rights were absolute, enforced by code, and required no bureaucracy to maintain.

Freedom

Freedom in Liberty Minecraft was defined negatively -- as the absence of restrictions -- rather than positively as entitlements. Players were free to use their property however they wished, travel anywhere accessible to them, and use unclaimed land or privileges extended by other landowners. NullCase was explicit that there were no limitations on these freedoms.

This extended even to ideas NullCase personally opposed. A player who wanted to establish a voluntary communist commune on their own land was welcome to try, provided they did so peacefully:

If a player bought their own land and wanted to make a voluntary communist utopia there, they are free to try that provided they do it peacefully on their land. There's no problem because there's no dispute.

Personal Responsibility

Where conventional servers would protect players from bad outcomes through rules against griefing, scamming, or poor judgment, Liberty Minecraft placed the burden squarely on the individual:

Every player may decide whether to protect their belongings from the elements and from others. Our players are free to take risks and bare the consequences. No rule requires one to provide to another (either time or effort or property).

Trust was earned, not guaranteed. When a property owner granted someone permission to use their land, the trusted party was free to use that permission as they saw fit. Players learned through experience who could be relied upon and who could not. This was by design -- NullCase saw the capacity to evaluate trust as a skill worth developing.

Free Markets

All property could be freely traded with anyone, at any price, without restriction. There were no price controls, no trade regulations, no limitations on what could be bought or sold. Land, goods, labor, management rights, even the soil and minerals beneath a claimed plot -- everything was tradeable.

This was not a simplification born of laziness. NullCase believed that unrestricted voluntary exchange was the only system consistent with the moral foundation he had established. If preferences are subjective and violence against peaceful people is unjustifiable, then the only way to coordinate human action is through voluntary agreement -- which is what a market is.

Capitalism

NullCase considered capitalism an emergent property rather than a designed feature:

We get this one for free! Morality and Free Markets are sufficient for Capitalism to flourish, and it does. When our players get ahead as a consequence of providing goods and services to each other, they gain wealth by making other people better off. Competition reigns, and those who succeed and become wealthy do so only by providing value to others.

This is the key insight of the manifesto: capitalism was not imposed on Liberty Minecraft. It was what happened when people with property rights and freedom interacted peacefully. The server demonstrated this in miniature through its functioning economy, as described in Sound Money and the various Free Market Update posts.

Justice and Accountability

The final principle was perhaps the most unusual. NullCase, as sole owner-operator of the server, subjected himself to market discipline:

You can fire me. Liberty Minecraft is market facing. I am the sole owner-operator of Liberty Minecraft. If I make a bad decision, my incredible supporters will tell me by freely choosing to end their support. I am accountable to you. Whether I succeed or fail depends on your free choices.

This was the ultimate test of his philosophy. If the principles he espoused were sound, then a server built on them would attract and retain players. If they were not, players would leave and the project would die. NullCase accepted this as the proper form of accountability -- not democratic voting, not committees, but the free choices of individuals deciding whether to participate.

Beyond Categories

When asked whether he was an anarcho-capitalist or a libertarian, NullCase refused the label entirely. He saw political categories as vulnerabilities -- levers that opponents could use to attack arguments without engaging them:

Strategically, a category is a lever for your opponents. It's a means to undermine an argument without confronting it. If you have a million people calling themselves Libertarian or AnCap then, other things being equal, it's a million times more valuable to attack the Category instead of their arguments.

His answer was characteristically direct:

I settle peaceful disputes peacefully.

No label. No category. Just a principle, applied consistently, with results anyone could observe by joining the server and seeing for themselves what a community built on that principle looked like in practice.