I am settling my pre-New Year’s debt and posting the translation of another chapter of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State. It is absolutely monstrous in size, but at the same time, in my opinion, quite interesting. There are plenty of fresh thoughts scattered throughout this chapter, but the key point is that leftists and rightists are not some kind of static groups, but simply the tactics of a particular community in relation to power. There is a left-wing tactic — to overthrow the existing power. And there is a right-wing one — to preserve the existing power. And the practitioners of these tactics constantly replace one another: former leftists, upon coming to power, become rightists.

The author logically does not count libertarians as either left or right, but in his opinion, they have their own cycle: from a startup to a bureaucratized corporation, and then to the departure of the most free-thinking employees to found a new startup. He provides no recipes for counter-cyclical policy in this chapter; we shall see what happens next.