American libertarianism promises that free markets, left alone by the state, produce competition, innovation, and voluntary cooperation. Strip away regulation and let private actors order their own affairs, the theory goes, and coercion withers because no one can force anyone into anything. The professional wrestling territories were about as close to a real-world test of that theory as this country has ever run. The state barely noticed the business existed. A private body, the National Wrestling Alliance, governed it. Deals were struck on handshakes and honor. And what emerged was not competition. It was a cartel enforced by violence, which collapsed into a monopoly, with the workers holding no leverage at any point along the way.
That is the whole argument, and the market only ever needed three moves of doom to reach the finish:
1. private governance became a coercive cartel,
2. the cartel gave way to monopoly rather than competition,
3. and labor was powerless under both.
Same sequence every time, same guy going over. Sorting the history this way, instead of piling up every ugly thing that ever happened in a locker room, is what makes the case hold.
1. Private governance becomes a cartel, and the cartel runs on coercion
The NWA did not referee competition. It suppressed it. Member promoters carved the country into exclusive territories and agreed not to poach each other's talent or run each other's towns. That is not a free market. It is a cartel, the wrestling equivalent of OPEC dividing up oil fields, and cartels have a permanent problem: every member has an incentive to cheat, so something has to punish defectors.
In a system with functioning courts, you enforce agreements with contracts. The territories could not do that, because the whole business ran in a legal grey zone and much of what it was enforcing would never survive daylight. So enforcement went private and extralegal. Promoters who crossed a territorial line or challenged the NWA got blackballed, and the wrestlers who worked for them got blacklisted right alongside, cut off from the only employers in the trade. When ostracism was not enough, there was muscle. Promoters kept enforcers, the "office boys," to hand out beatings and career-ending "accidents" to anyone who tried to jump territories or start a promotion of their own. The 1936 Dick Shikat double-cross, where a wrestler shot on his opponent and took a title for real, ended up in court and briefly exposed how scripted and controlled the whole thing actually was. The system's response to a worker going off-script was not market discipline. It was retaliation.
A libertarian has two ready answers here, and both need to be met head-on. The first: blackballing is just freedom of association, nobody is obligated to book you. Fine, in isolation. But when an entire industry's employers act as one bloc to shut a person out of every job in the trade, "freedom of association" becomes a mechanism of collective coercion no matter how voluntary each individual choice looks. The second answer: the leg-breaking was already illegal, so this is a failure of the state to enforce the law, not a failure of the free market. That objection gives away the game. The territories are what private ordering actually looks like when the state steps back. Remove effective oversight and the vacuum does not stay empty. Private power fills it, and private power writes its rules in whatever currency it has, which in wrestling meant blacklists and broken bones. The libertarian dream is a world governed by private actors instead of the state. Wrestling ran that experiment, and the private governance was more arbitrary and less accountable than any state agency.
2. The cartel collapses into monopoly, not competition
The territorial cartel was unstable, and libertarians are right that it could not last. Where the theory fails is in what came next. A free market is supposed to break a cartel by opening it up to competition. Wrestling's cartel broke open into a monopoly.
Vince McMahon did not win by building a better product and letting fans choose in a fair fight. He won by capturing distribution and raiding rosters that had no legal protection. In 1984, on the day the business still calls Black Saturday, he bought Georgia Championship Wrestling out from under the NWA and seized its national cable slot on WTBS, blindsiding everyone. He gutted Bill Watts's Mid-South by luring away its draws, the Junkyard Dog chief among them, and Watts eventually had to sell. He stripped talent from promotion after promotion, and the promoters he raided had no recourse, because the entire system had been built to operate outside the law they might otherwise have appealed to. Then he used cable television to put his product in every market at once, something no regional promoter could match.
Here the libertarian says: that is competition working, McMahon out-innovated dinosaurs. But look at the actual arc. It runs cartel to monopoly and skips the competitive equilibrium the theory promises entirely. The decisive advantages were not a better wrestling product. They were the capture of a new distribution technology and the ability to poach from rivals who could not sue him because the whole trade was extralegal. The market never produced many buyers competing on merit. It produced one dominant buyer who had absorbed or destroyed the rest. Concentrated private power did not check itself. It compounded.
3. Under both structures, labor holds no leverage
This is the through-line, and it is where the argument pays off. Whether the industry was a cartel or a monopoly, the person with no power was always the worker.
The territory era at least gave wrestlers several employers to play against each other. A man could leave one promotion for another and take his drawing power with him. Consolidation killed that. When McMahon absorbed the competition, he became something close to the single buyer of high-level wrestling labor in the country, and a single buyer sets the terms. The instrument was the independent-contractor classification, and it persists in WWE to this day. Wrestlers work full schedules under non-compete clauses, cover their own travel and medical costs, and are still called contractors rather than employees. That label does specific work: it denies them healthcare despite catastrophic injury rates, it blocks them from unionizing because contractors have no collective-bargaining rights, and it leaves them paid only when booked, so an injury or a fall from favor means no income.
When workers tried to change this, the structure crushed them. In the 1980s Jesse Ventura attempted to organize a wrestlers' union, and by his own account Hulk Hogan reported the effort to McMahon, who shut it down. One worker informing on another to the boss is exactly what you would expect in a labor market with no protections and no solidarity infrastructure, where the rational move for a favored star is to protect his own standing.
The deaths belong here, not in some separate catalog of gore, because they are the cost of a labor system with no safety floor and no worker power to demand one. Eddie Guerrero died at 38 of heart failure after years of the substance abuse the schedule and the injuries fed. Chris Benoit's murder-suicide was later tied to severe CTE from repeated concussions, and only after that did WWE adopt a real concussion protocol, decades late. In an industry with no union, no health coverage, and no independent safety authority, wrestlers were disposable by design. That is not a series of individual tragedies. It is what a monopsony with no regulatory floor does to the bodies it employs.
What the territories actually prove
The honest version of this argument is not that libertarianism logically requires cartels, coercion, and dead wrestlers. It is that when you approximate libertarian conditions in the real world, minimal state, private ordering, voluntary agreements, this is the empirical tendency you get. Private power rushes into the space the state vacates, and it answers to no one. Competition does not discipline it, because the strongest actors have every incentive and every means to suppress competition rather than submit to it. Coercion does not disappear, it privatizes, and private coercion comes with no due process, no appeal, and no vote.
Wrestling calls its maintained fictions kayfabe, the illusion presented as real. The free market in the territories was itself a work. The performance was competition and voluntary exchange. The finish, every time, was concentrated power and a worker with no leverage taking the fall. Without oversight and without the countervailing power of organized labor, the free market is just another rigged match, and everyone in the business knows who is going over before the bell rings.
