Six months ago, Mikhail spoke in Latin America and said that the state has no incentives to “leave you alone and let you live as you wish,” but it does have economic and power-based incentives not to do so.

And at the end of the lecture, he stated directly that libertarianism is a revolutionary ideology. And if you are not an extremist-revolutionary at heart, then you are not a true libertarian.

How do you feel about this statement and the lecture as a whole?

Anonymous question

With a feeling of slight nostalgia, I reread my post about the conversation between Svetov and Shulman. I noted that neither Svetov’s premonition of a civil war nor Shulman’s premonition that the government would continue to lose ground during elections came true. Instead, we have a hecatomb that Putin is orchestrating for his own voters by the hands of the AFU, which, of course, almost no one predicted back in 2018. I suppose this means that these voters are not actually that necessary to him.

In the Latin American lecture you mentioned, Svetov launched an interesting take: that we do not resist the state not because it has the biggest club, but because deep down we actually believe in its legitimacy, even if we position ourselves as ancaps. This corresponds with Belkovich’s well-known take that we already live under ancap; it’s just that all the territories have been divided among bandits, and people mostly endure their subordinate status without complaint, although, in general, they are not obliged to.

As justification for his thesis, Svetov brings onto the stage a poor Afghan with a Kalashnikov, who first drove out the Soviet and then the American “civilizers” because his belief that he alone knew how to live correctly was far stronger.

Since Svetov spent the entire first part of his lecture savoring how he was beaten and humiliated by representatives and henchmen of the state while he was organizing the coolest events in Eastern Europe, it can be concluded that he, too, believes in the legitimacy of the state deep down. After all, a proper, sincere ancap with a bunch of bitcoins would surely have found a way to personally avenge those miserable lackeys who dared to violate the NAP against him, and thus set a good example of how to deal with violators of the non-aggression principle.

As you may have noticed, my tone was always quite extremist even in Russia, and once I left the RF, it became completely unrestrained. In practice, however, my activism very rarely goes beyond tax evasion. Perhaps I am simply waiting for a talented libertarian revolutionary who will raise the people to the barricades for freedom and the market—so that I may stand under his banner. But for now, while the fiery libertarians limit themselves to looking reprovingly at the Latin American audience in search of radicals, I must also limit myself to purely peaceful activities in building my own village ancap.