анонимный вопрос
Friedman devoted two chapters of The Machinery of Freedom to the problem of territorial defense against an aggressor of the “nation-state” type, with an interval of forty years between them. In the first part, he estimated the chances of an anarcho-USA fending off nuclear aggression from the Soviet Union and concluded that for the sake of defense against such a serious aggressor, he was willing to accept the existence of a state. In the second part, once the USSR was reliably dead, he breathed a sigh of relief and began to fantasize about how territorial defense is ensured without a state.
In my view, Friedman pays excessively much attention to the territorial aspect of the problem. For example, when he dismisses the model of financing defense through insurance, he puts the cart before the horse and assumes that clients will be tried to be sold “national defense” specifically (and that they will hope to save money, counting on their neighbor buying it). But the client does not need national defense. They need assurance that if an insured event occurs personally to them, they will receive the money. Whether they are on territory near where they bought the policy or on the other side of the planet is unimportant to them. And exactly what means the company uses to reduce its own risks of having to pay out insurance does not concern them either, as long as the company does not commit fraud.
Thus, if the organization of territorial defense truly reduces the chances of an attack by an external “state”-type aggressor, insurance companies are capable of calculating how much to invest in it to keep it profitable, and how to interact with other insurance companies to share the costs, for example, proportionally to the client base.
Friedman also presents an interesting thesis that the absence of a single jurisdiction over a certain territory is not in itself a guarantee against an aggressor’s claims. And when a conditional USSR arrives in a region where ancap reigns, it is sufficient for them to smash one city with a nuclear bomb and declare something like: look, see, Alderaan was here, it is no more. If the residents of Yavin do not wish the same fate, they owe five hundred million credits by the day after tomorrow, and we don’t care that they have neither a single administration nor taxation; if they want to live, they’ll figure it out somehow.
Effectively, he suggests that when it is too costly for a stationary bandit to expand its territory, it retains the option to act toward that territory as a nomadic bandit. Further, as you understand, everything depends on how coordinated the response will be. If a community is capable of reaching a level of coordination sufficient to pay a large tribute, it is reasonable to assume that further resistance will be coordinated at a level at least no less. This means that the second Death Star will indeed be destroyed without firing a single shot, unlike the first, which managed three.
At the same time, let us note that it is the free market that contributes to the fastest scientific and technical progress. And if, at the initial stage of ancap, states will still be able to oppose network market structures due to the difference in scale, then by the end of the transition period, the technological backwardness of states will become too obvious, and they will have to focus rather on holding onto the remnants of power over their own subjects.
Perhaps by ancap’s foreign policy you did not mean defense. But since for ancap the state is nothing more than a bandit, relations with a bandit amount to nothing more than deterring it from banditry directed at oneself, and other diplomacy is reduced precisely to this aspect. Visa regimes? That is about ensuring the bandit does not attack travelers. Customs regimes? That is about ensuring the bandit does not rob caravans. Regulatory regimes? That is about ensuring the bandit does not interfere with contracts. All these negotiations will come down to the interested party spending money on a payoff. As long as this money is less than the money required to eliminate the bandit, the latter will have a chance to survive.
