The Ownership Society (Patreon)

This is also unfinished, but I really wanna finish it. In Justice, Gender and the Family, Susan Okin argued that as constructed, the ideals of libertarianism suggest, not that all humans are free, but that all humans are the property of their mothers, and that the fact that libertarianism hasn't noticed this is because in our society the cost of child-rearing is considered invisible, but if you had a true libertarian society, it would either die out, enslave women, or make all people the property of their mothers. The concept really resonated with me as a critique of libertarianism... I always knew there was something poorly thought out about libertarian ideals, and this brought it home to me in a dramatic way.

The title of the chapter she discusses this in is called "Libertarianism: Matriarchy, Slavery and Dystopia." Suffice it to say, Okin is not a fan, and her argument is an argument against libertarianism. I decided to take it from the other direction. What if a society was fully libertarian, with no laws except those that enforce contracts and the ownership of private property? If they go in the direction that Okin suggested was the only way a stable libertarian society could exist without declaring women non-persons, what would that look like?

The portion I've completed is just the setup. The actual plot of the story is going to be that a man is going to hire Ad Jenna Janes, the main character of the story, to get legal revenge on the mother of his children for murdering them. (No, not aborting them. Murdering them, for revenge on him, when they were like 3 and 5 or something. This is legal in their society.) The Ownership Society is definitely intended to be a dystopia, but I'm trying to make it a well-thought-out dystopia where there are actually benefits that explain why people live in it, not "and the central government forces our children into gladiatorial combat because it can and it's evil!"