One hundred and one ways I tried to break Free Market Ecology. Find the hundred and second.
Every framework is a set of promises about cases it hasn’t seen yet. The honest way to test one is not to defend it — it’s to hunt for the scenario where its rules run out, or where settling it honestly quietly requires the very thing the framework was built to abolish.
So that’s what I did. Working with an adversarial AI (the story of how), I spent a year trying to break Free Market Ecology on purpose: a hundred and one corner cases, across land and inheritance and cross-border trade and the mechanics of the ledger, each one pushed until the framework either produced an answer from its own logic or admitted it didn’t have one. About half resolved cleanly. The rest are still open.
This page is the standing version of that hunt, opened to everyone. Find case one hundred and two — a concrete scenario Free Market Ecology can’t settle honestly — and it goes into the ledger under your name.
What counts as a corner case
A corner case is a specific scenario, not a general objection. “I don’t believe markets should price nature” is a disagreement, and a welcome one, but it isn’t a corner case. “A tourist who holds no rights eats a fish dinner inside the jurisdiction — who surrenders the unit?” is a corner case, because it has a definite answer and the framework has to produce it.
The test that decides whether a case breaks the framework is one question, asked the same way every time: who pays whom, in what unit? A case is a genuine break if settling it honestly forces one of these:
- money standing in for a surrendered physical right (cost paid in cash instead of in kind);
- a cap that has to expand to accommodate demand;
- a central planner deciding what a market should have cleared;
- a fund, a committee, or a pool that materializes from nowhere to make the books balance.
If you can force any of those, you’ve found a real one.
Two things that feel like corner cases but aren’t. Political questions — how high to set the cap, who may immigrate, whether to bail out a failing firm — are not breaks; Free Market Ecology is accounting, not a constitution, and it prices those choices without making them (the full line between the two). And cases already in the ledger — so before you write, skim the hundred and one below.
Three of the hundred and one
The tourist’s dinner. A visitor from the ordinary money world pays cash for a fish dinner at the village store. The meal carries real ecological cost — the catch, the land — and that cost has to be settled the instant the meal is eaten, which happens inside the jurisdiction. But the tourist holds no rights and never will. Who surrenders the unit? The answer: tourism turns out to be an export that never leaves the reef. At the counter, the tourist’s dollars buy the community’s own rights from residents who didn’t spend theirs, and the store surrenders those to cover the meal’s actual metered draw — the same currency swap a card terminal does when it settles a foreign charge. No tourist tax; no store eating the cost. The quiet consequence is the interesting part: the tourist’s money flows to the most frugal residents, the ones whose unspent share fed him. Tourism structurally pays the abstainers.
The fire that overruled me. A fire-adapted forest needs periodic burning to stay healthy. So is suppressing the fire — preventing the burn the ecosystem depends on — itself an ecological harm that ought to be metered as damage against whoever prevented it? The AI argued yes, and built a clean, internally consistent case for it. It was overruled. Follow that logic through and you have handed every activist a weapon: let a fire run onto someone’s land, then bill them for suppressing “nature’s regime.” Rewilding is a legitimate goal, but it belongs in the open, argued with the people who set the caps — not smuggled in as an accounting rule that turns a landowner’s own property into a standing liability. Suppression is metered damage only on land explicitly set aside for conservation. (This is the case bias number four in the methodology essay is about — and one of the clearest examples of the AI reaching for a rule the framework didn’t want.)
Birth the share, then leave. A community chooses to give every newborn a fresh share of the commons. A family has four children — minting four new shares, each one diluting everyone else’s — then emigrates, keeping the shares and continuing to collect the rights they mint from wherever the family now lives, selling that monthly flow abroad at leisure. They thinned their neighbors’ shares permanently and now draw the proceeds from another country. Surely the framework has to forbid this? The answer: no — and trying to is the error. Every step was a choice made in daylight: the community chose to mint a share per birth; the share itself is inalienable and can never be sold, but it is heritable property and it keeps minting rights for whoever holds it; emigration confiscates nothing, and a citizen keeps collecting wherever they move, the way a retiree draws a pension overseas. A jurisdiction that doesn’t want to subsidize emigrant fertility writes an exit tax or a vesting rule into its politics. The framework forbids none of it and mandates none of it; it prices whatever the community chose and shows, on the public ledger, exactly who voted to carry the dilution.
The full ledger — the hundred and one
Titles only. About half are resolved against the framework’s own rules; the rest are open. You’re welcome to attack either — a resolution you find unconvincing is as useful as a case we never catalogued.
Land, boundaries, and the meter. De minimis draws: where does metering start? · Temporary occupation: the one-day market stall · Trees, roots, and canopy crossing a boundary · Shared walls and party structures · Wild animals damaging crops · A parcel improved by the neighbor’s runoff · Subdivision and merger mid-lease · Boundary disputes between leaseholds · The landlocked parcel and rights-of-way · Vertical rights: minerals below, storeys above · Fire or pest spreading between leaseholds · Survey error discovered later · Land physically created or destroyed: the delta and the drowning shore.
Persons and households. Death of a leaseholder with improvements · Birth: when the mint starts, and whether babies dilute everyone · The heritable share vs. the existence-mint · Minors and guardianship of the flow · Death mid-contract, seller side · Marriage and household formation · Divorce and household split mid-lease · New member admission mid-year · Long absence and travel · Incapacity: the member who cannot manage their affairs · Membership exit with contracts outstanding · Death with standing damage on the account · Imprisonment and exile.
Contracts, finance, and timing. The month-end bell: trades straddling the tick · Partial settlement and fractional rights · Quality disputes after rights are surrendered · A forward seller who cannot deliver · Buyer default on a forward mid-term · Assignment and resale of forwards: a secondary market in near-money? · Netting between parties with offsetting positions · Co-signed and syndicated ecological loans · A lender’s investors withdrawing mid-season · Retroactive meter corrections · The deemed-content dispute · Leap years and unequal months at expiry.
Trade, visitors, and jurisdiction. The tourist’s dinner · The cross-border commuter · Goods in transit when the month expires · Immigration mid-year and the first mint · Smuggling · Emigration with open positions · The expat retiree on the home commons’ income · The road’s exchange fails mid-trade · Dual membership in two jurisdictions · The hostile neighbor: non-FME vs. dishonest-FME · Refugees en masse · A jurisdiction splits or merges.
Firms, production, and employment. Wages, and the labor-unit that must never exist · Incorporation: what a firm may hold · Staffing agencies, contractors, and gig work · All-in pricing: bundling vs. absorbing the liability · The unincorporated partnership and its dissolution · The cooperative: firm treasury vs. collective pocket · Firm insolvency: two waterfalls that never touch · Mergers mid-lease and mid-loan · Vertical integration and settlement points · The multi-jurisdiction firm · Franchises and licensed production · Foreign equity in a local producer · The autonomous operator: who signs when the operator is software.
The ledger, identity, and security. Key loss · Privacy · Offline settlement · The oracle problem: who attests physical facts to the ledger · The registry operator · Key theft · Death without keys or known heirs · Sybil attack on the mint · The ledger mints wrong · Fraud discovered a decade later · The ledger forks: two histories, both claiming to be the jurisdiction · The cryptography breaks: quantum or otherwise.
Markets in the shares themselves. Multi-heir division: fractional shares and the dust problem · Marriage property regimes splitting a share · The share as collateral for fiat debt · The living member who sells the corpus · Minors inheriting share stacks · The stack: one person, four shares, and the end of per-capita equality · Fractionalization and securitization · The foreign share portfolio · Escheat · The undying holder: churches, trusts, and endowed corporations · Natalist mint arbitrage: birth the share and leave · Concentration and governance · The foreign sovereign at scale.
Ecology, science, and deep time. Interacting dimensions · Science revises a damage coefficient · Multi-year cycles vs. monthly minting: the seven-year aquifer · Restoration verification: who certifies the only mint · Dimension discovery · Invasive species and ecological regime change · Fire and flood as natural function · Stock exhaustion: the field runs dry · Rewilding and voluntary cap-tightening · Carbon and climate as the limit case · Dimension retirement · Orphaned damage · Genetic and biological resources.
How to enter
Email your scenario to justin@freemarketecology.com. Keep it concrete: the situation, and the specific point where you think the books can’t balance honestly.
Every serious submission gets a real reply — I adjudicate it against the framework the same way I adjudicated the hundred and one. If it’s genuinely new, it enters the ledger as case one hundred and two (and onward) under your name or handle, with its ruling. The best case anyone sends becomes a small monument with their name on it, which is the only bounty I’ve found that people actually work for.
This framework is still being attacked, in the open, by anyone who wants to try. You don’t need economics training to help — several of the hundred and one came from taking one ordinary situation and following the money until the books wouldn’t balance. If you find the case that breaks it, send it to me.