Retreatists propose to eliminate statism by withdrawing all sanction from the existing system, on the theory that it will collapse from its own weakness. In today's America, this approach would require, in effect, that one resign completely from mainstream society. This approach holds some attraction because it seeks to take advantage of the natural weaknesses of statism. As was argued in Section 3, evils such as statism are fundamentally impotent, obtaining apparent power only by sowing mental confusion so that well-intentioned people are persuaded to offer them support (pp. 3.9:1-3). The kernel of value in the retreatist view is that it emphasizes the necessity not to compromise with evil or to grant it the support of the good.

On the other hand, the retreatist strategy is highly impractical in today's society, which has become so saturated with statism that human beings must associate with the state in certain ways in order to attain an acceptable standard of living. Pure retreatism would require, for instance, that people resort to barter, since cash transactions are more easily taxed and thus offer material support to the leviathan state. As we saw in our praxeological analysis, however, barter economies are necessarily more primitive and inefficient, since many advantageous trades require a general medium of exchange (pp. 4.6:30-1). To follow retreatism consistently would therefore require forsaking many such benefits, a kind of self-sacrifice conflicting with the basic moral principles developed in this course. In other words, retreatists do not really preserve their moral integrity, because their approach tries to apply a single political principle while ignoring its larger ethical perspective.     

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