Автор: Битарх

“Citizen-Avenger”: Not a Libertarian, but a State in One Person

After the release of the movie “Citizen Vigilante,” some viewers saw the main character as almost a libertarian avenger: the state is failing, the courts release criminals, and an armed citizen takes the protection of society into his own hands.
 
It sounds impressive. But this character has about as much in common with libertarian philosophy as a sea pirate does with the protection of private property. The external attributes are similar: distrust of the state, weapons, independence, and contempt for bureaucracy. But inside, there is a completely opposite system of values.
 
Libertarianism begins not with a pistol, but with the recognition of every person’s right to life, liberty, and property. From this follows the non-aggression principle: violence cannot be used against someone who has not initiated it themselves. And this is where the image of the “people’s avenger” falls apart. The vigilante kills not only criminals. He executes the relatives of a rapist—people who did not participate in the rape. Yes, they say disgusting things, justify the crime, and blame the victim. Their words are loathsome. But libertarianism does not presume the death penalty for vile views.
 
A person is responsible for their own actions, not for the crimes of a son, brother, father, or neighbor. Collective responsibility is a favorite practice of authoritarianism. Today, a family is shot for the act of a relative; tomorrow, property is seized from the “wrong” class; and the day after tomorrow, people are sent to camps for having an unfortunate last name. The path is well-trodden, and the signs have long been in place.
 
Even more terrifying is the scene with the oncoming car. The hero intentionally drives into the opposite lane, forcing an innocent driver off the road. The car falls into a ditch and explodes. People die simply because the vigilante needed a vivid illustration for another monologue. This is no longer “private justice,” but the murder of innocents for the sake of a political spectacle.
 
At the same time, the film tries to endow the hero with a moral code. On the bus, he pays the fare for teenagers and gives them a lecture: if some do not pay, the costs are shifted to others. Everyone must follow the rules! The thought itself is clear. Only it is preached by a man who entered the country illegally, did not legalize his status, hides the real owners of real estate behind a network of holdings, and raises questions with tax authorities. The result is a surprising moral compass: if you don’t pay for a public transport ticket, you undermine society. If you hide your business, money, and legal status—well, that’s something else, that’s an “extended vacation.”
 
Of course, a libertarian is by no means obligated to consider state law just. Immigration restrictions violate natural human rights, taxes are theft, and financial regulation is a violation of property rights. Breaking any law that punishes “crimes” without a victim does not make a person a villain and is entirely permissible.
 
But then one must be consistent. You cannot declare yourself an opponent of the system when the rules hinder you, and become a stern defender of order when a teenager doesn’t buy a ticket. This is no longer a philosophy of freedom, but the good old “everything for friends, the law for everyone else.”
 
“Citizen Vigilante” could have raised an interesting question: what should society do when the state justice system truly fails to protect victims? Where is the line between self-defense, civil resistance, and vigilantism? But instead of a complex conversation, the film presents the viewer with a man who has appointed himself investigator, judge, and executioner. Moreover, evidence, proportionality of punishment, and the rights of the innocent interest him about as much as a cash receipt interests a bank robber.
 
The film’s protagonist does not protect individual freedom. Instead, he creates his own pocket state: he writes the laws himself, determines the guilty himself, passes sentences himself, and exempts himself from the rules. This is not libertarianism, but the dictatorship of one man—just without a coat of arms, a parliament, and boring meetings.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Why the collapse of Pindostan is the best news for freedom, and why it is time for us to stop praying to Washington

It is often possible to see how some “libertarians” (in quotes) continue to look across the ocean with breathless admiration. They pray to the US Constitution, quote the Founding Fathers, and seriously believe that America is the bastion of a “free republic.” Except they are stuck in the 18th century. That republic has long been gone, and what we see today is “Pindostan.” This is not a federation of equal states, but a real, classical, bloated, and last surviving empire of our days. And do you know what happens to empires? They collapse, and that is great! So let’s break down exactly what is what.

What is an empire in the classical sense? It is when one center, greedy for taxes, forcibly holds under its power absolutely different peoples and territories that are culturally alien to one another. Now look at the map. How can Alabama and New York seriously be called a “single country”? Wyoming and California? These are different universes. In one state, people want to go to church on Sundays, own an AR-15 to protect their families, pay minimum taxes, and have bureaucrats simply leave them alone. In another, they demand total control over the economy, a ban on plastic straws, insane taxes, and regulation of how you breathe.

But as soon as the subject of a possible breakup of the USA into separate independent states (or at least a confederation) comes up, conservatives and mainstream libertarians begin to panic: “This will be the end of the world! Madness! The collapse of civilization!”. But let’s take a breath and open a history textbook. Do you know who screamed like that a hundred years ago? Supporters of the “One and Indivisible” Russian Empire. When the Russian Empire began to crack at the seams in 1917, it seemed as if the heavens were falling to earth. But let’s ask the Poles and Finns how they like this “terrible collapse”? For them, it was the best thing that ever happened to them.

Poland and Finland jumped away from the imperial corpse in time. They stopped feeding bureaucrats in a foreign capital, stopped sending their guys to die for someone else’s imperial ambitions, and built their own countries. No one in Helsinki today is crying: “Oh, what a pity that we no longer send taxes to Petersburg!”. The collapse of an empire is not the end of the world. It is spring, decentralization, and secession in its purest form—the sacred right to self-determination that Rothbard wrote about.

Why is the collapse of Pindostan beneficial to libertarians worldwide? First, it is the death of the global policeman. For the last 80 years, Washington has exported not freedom, but bombs, sanctions, and inflation. The breakup of the USA into 5-10 independent jurisdictions means that none of them will any longer have a budget for 800 military bases around the world. There will be fewer wars, less intervention, and less blood.

Second, it is the collapse of dollar hegemony. The Fed (Federal Reserve System) is the main sponsor of global etatism. They are the ones who allow budgets to bloat and print candy wrappers, for which the entire world pays through a hidden inflation tax. The collapse of the empire will bring down the fiat system and open the way for hard money—gold and crypto.

Additionally, this will create a market of jurisdictions. Imagine that in place of one monster, half a hundred states of various sizes will appear. A brutal competition for minds, capital, and labor will begin. California wants a 90% tax? Please! Only all businesses will move to an independent free Texas or Nevada within an hour. This will be the greatest experiment in jurisdictional competition in history.

It is time to get rid of the cargo cult! The fact that the Founding Fathers wrote a cool piece of paper 250 years ago does not make modern Washington a holy place. Today it is the same kind of imperial center as Rome was before its fall, London at the beginning of the 20th century, or Petersburg in 1917. There is no need to fear the balkanization of America. This should be welcomed! Division is the path to freedom. After all, the smaller the state, the closer the power is to the land and to the specific person, and the fewer opportunities it has to build a digital GULAG.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Hardening of character or a lifelong trauma?

There is a traditional opinion: a boy needs to “harden” his character to grow into a full-fledged man and be ready for life. Following this position, or simply using it as a justification for violence, some abusive fathers deliberately harm their sons. Victims encounter this form of violence at a very early age, which makes it important to examine.

At the core of such an approach is the belief that a boy must grow up to be tough, insensitive, aggressive, and dominant, and that any manifestations of vulnerability, emotionality, and softness allegedly make him weak and unable to survive in society. However, a recent article published on the Psychology Today website correctly notes how such “upbringing” actually only causes serious damage to the child’s mental and emotional development.

The methods used for such “hardening” include physical “punishments,” psychological pressure, humiliation, and intimidation. A child may be forced to participate in aggressive or painful activities, or encouraged to fight or engage in excessively harsh sports such as boxing, martial arts, and even American football. Simultaneously, he is required to suppress his emotions—especially fear, sadness, and affection. The boy is taught not to cry, not to complain, and not to show weakness, forming an internal belief that sensitivity is something shameful. These practices may be accompanied by direct instructions on what a “real man” should be.

It is important to understand: such actions cannot be justified by “good intentions,” partly because in practice they are often used by the abuser purely for personal interests, as a method of control and dominance over family members. A son may be used as a tool—for example, to strengthen the father’s power, exert pressure on the mother, or pass on the same beliefs and behavioral models to the next generation, making violence an inherent trait of the family. Abusive fathers also tend to destroy the bond between the son and mother, which is crucial for psychological development and a sense of security.

The consequences of such actions for the child’s emotional development are very profound. The constant suppression of feelings leads to the child stopping the recognition of his own emotions and the emotions of other people. His capacity for empathy decreases, and difficulties with self-regulation and the expression of experiences arise. In the future, this may manifest as emotional detachment, an inability to build close relationships, and outbursts of uncontrollable aggression.

Ultimately, the boy may begin to identify with the aggressor and adopt his model of behavior. He is deprived of the ability to build healthy relationships, becomes cruel himself, and passes this cruelty on to future generations, forming a closed cycle of violence and traumatic experience. Alternatively, he may suppress himself, leading to anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Often, both outcomes blend to some extent. This only decreases, rather than increases, the child’s social adaptability.

Beyond psychological harm, such treatment can lead to physical consequences—injuries, chronic stress, and related health problems. And even if the child is not a direct victim of physical violence, the mere observation of aggression in the family already has a destructive effect on his psyche and health.

Therefore, only one conclusion can be drawn: “hardening” through violence has nothing to do with care or upbringing. It is a form of abuse of power by a domestic tyrant, which destroys the child’s personality and even exacerbates the problem of violence at the societal level. Such practices are simply incompatible with a free, non-violent society, and they must be completely replaced by models of upbringing based on respect, empathy, and the development of emotional resilience not through the suppression of feelings.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

How bats solved the free-rider problem without taxes and prisons

Every time you start a conversation with someone about a voluntary society, you inevitably encounter the trump card of any statist: “But what about the free-rider problem? If people aren’t forced to pay under threat of a club or prison, everyone will just enjoy the benefits, and no one will chip in! Everyone will want to be a free-loader, and society will collapse!” It sounds logical. Yet, an interesting thing happens: in nature, the free-ride problem was solved millions of years ago, and completely voluntarily, without a single tax inspector or ministry of coercion.
 
Let’s look at an unexpected example—vampire bats. Life for these creatures is certainly not a walk in the park. They feed exclusively on blood, and night hunting for large animals is a highly unpredictable business. About a third of the colony returns home empty-handed every night. This is where the harsh mathematics of survival comes into play: if a bat does not eat for three consecutive nights, it dies of hunger. Individually, this species would simply have been wiped off the face of the earth. This means they needed an insurance system. And they created one.
 
When a lucky, well-fed bat returns to the cave, it regurgitates part of the obtained blood to feed a hungry neighbor. From the outside, this might look like a socialist’s dream—from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. But there is no need to rush to rejoice for the leftists, because we are talking not about a common pot, but about a system of decentralized mutual aid built on reputation.
 
And here we return to the argument of the fans of the “strong hand.” What stops some cunning bat from simply sitting in the cave, squeaking pitifully, collecting tribute from neighbors, but never sharing its own prey? How will that end for it?
 
Bats are far from stupid. They have a disproportionately large neocortex, an excellent memory, and they recognize each other without fail by voice. They practice strictly targeted cooperation. Bats do not dump resources into an abstract fund; they invest in specific social ties. They remember who shared with them and who withheld their prey.
 
If a bat only takes but does not give, its social rating drops to zero. Neighbors simply stop feeling sympathy toward it. The next night when it is unsuccessful and begs for food, its yesterday’s “friends” will simply turn their backs to the wall. Through its dishonest behavior, this bat will kick the bucket without any coercion, bat courts, or prisons!
 
Now for the most interesting part. How does this mechanism work at the level of neurobiology? Evolutionary selection was not tasked with inventing this form of cooperation from scratch. There was already a powerful, perfectly tuned chemical circuit—maternal bonding (the mother’s attachment to the child), which forces an adult individual to spend colossal resources on a helpless offspring and derive pleasure from it. Selection simply took and extended this mechanism to non-related individuals.
 
When a bat shares blood with a neighbor or grooms its fur, its brain is flooded with the same cocktail of oxytocin and dopamine as a mother’s during contact with a child. Oxytocin forms deep attachment and trust, and dopamine reinforces this feeling with powerful pleasure from the very fact of mutual aid.
 
This is why bats, like you and me, help each other not out of cold calculation, but on emotions, which also serve as a biological detector of cheating. If a partner plays a one-way game, oxytocin simply stops being produced in your brain in their presence. The attachment breaks, and you no longer want to help them.
 
Of course, you might say now: “But we aren’t bats; we have millions of people in our society!” And you would be absolutely right, because our brain has a biological limit on the number of social ties it can maintain. However, today we have the tools (institutions and technologies) to scale this natural mechanism to all of humanity. Though, that is a completely different story, which we can discuss in future publications.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

The Art of Leaving People Alone: How Libertarianism Was Invented in Ancient China

What if the concept of the free market, spontaneous order, and the minimal state wasn’t devised by Mises, Hayek, or Rothbard, but by guys in robes sipping tea in the mountains of China 2,500 years ago? Does such a claim surprise you? Then today we will talk about Wu Wei—the ancient philosophy of “non-action,” which, of course, does not mean lying on the couch with a beer, but refers to how the Universe (and the economy) works.

What is Wu Wei and what does it have to do with the free market? “Wu Wei” literally translates as “non-action,” but this is a terrible translation that makes Daoists look like slackers. It would be much more accurate to translate it as “action without violence” or “non-interference.” Imagine a surfer. He doesn’t try to beat the ocean with his fists to force the wave to go where he wants (which is how any government behaves). The surfer catches the wave and uses its natural power. He acts, but does not contradict the nature of things. In libertarianism, we call this “spontaneous order.” People, interacting voluntarily, create highly complex systems themselves: languages, money, markets. And a bureaucrat’s attempt to step in with his wrench and standards only breaks the mechanism. The Daoists understood this even before paper was invented.

Let’s transport ourselves to Ancient China (the Warring States period). Complete chaos, kings slaughtering each other over territories. Against this backdrop, the Confucians appear—ancient etatists of a sort. They walk around with tablets saying: “We need more laws! More officials! More subordination and taxes!”. And then Lao Tzu comes along and drops the “base,” which exactly mirrors modern libertarians: “The more prohibitions and restrictions there are in the world, the poorer the people become. The more laws and decrees are issued, the more thieves and robbers appear.”

Lao Tzu argued that the best ruler is one who rules so unobtrusively that the people forget he even exists. The ideal policy according to Wu Wei is to lower taxes, remove prohibitions, and leave people alone. Let them plant rice, trade, and make agreements on their own.

Some might say: “Sounds great in theory, but did it work in practice?” It worked, and brilliantly! Let’s recall recent history: Mao Zedong, wanting to take everything under his control, ordered the destruction of sparrows. A typical example of anti-Wu Wei (“I am smarter than a complex system”). The result: locusts devoured the harvest, and tens of millions of people died of hunger.

Now let’s rewind 2,000 years. The Han Empire (2nd century BC). After the brutal tyranny of the previous Qin dynasty (which tried to control every sneeze and predictably collapsed), Emperors Wen and Jing came to power. They were convinced fans of Daoism. And what did they do?

– Reduced agricultural taxes first to 3%, and then abolished them entirely for 12 years!
– Deregulated the economy, allowing peasants to freely mint coins, extract salt, and smelt iron.
– Abolished repressions for criticizing the authorities and abolished corporal punishment.
– Stopped waging senseless wars and reached agreements with neighbors.
 
The state simply stepped aside. What did this lead to? The economy exploded with growth. The standard of living soared, granaries were overflowing with grain, and the population grew rapidly wealthy. This period is still considered the Golden Age of China. No state plans—just give people freedom, and they will build everything themselves.

By relying on Wu Wei, we can learn two things:

1) Macro-level: Do not believe in saviors. Any political program that promises to “make everything good for everyone” through new prohibitions and regulations is doomed to fail. The system is too complex. The market will always find a way, just as water finds a crack in the asphalt.

2) Micro-level: Agorism and the black market. Do not waste energy on head-on collisions with the leviathan. Water does not fight the stone; it flows around it. Use crypto. Build parallel institutions. Find loopholes. Mind your own business without attracting the attention of the “sovereign’s eye.” Be like water.

The state is heavy, rigid, and fragile. While freedom is fluid, flexible, and unstoppable. And in the long run, water always wears away the stone!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

“Don’t like it—get out!”, “Say thank you that they let you in at all!”, “Be more modest as a guest, otherwise it’s suitcase, station, [country of origin]!”

Have you heard this before? If you have ever moved to another country and had the misfortune of criticizing the local taxes, bureaucracy, or healthcare out loud, you have likely faced a similar storm of indignation in response. Moreover, this is said by local “patriots” and even other immigrants, who apparently suffer from a severe form of Stockholm syndrome.
 
For some reason, in the minds of authoritarian etatists, the state is a kind of sacred deity. A strict but fair father who, out of great mercy, “took in” the poor orphan immigrant. Consequently, the orphan must fall prostrate, kiss the ground, and keep quiet. Only we understand that this is all nonsense that does not fit into common sense.
 
Imagine that you checked into an expensive hotel. You paid for the room a month in advance and left a deposit. You enter, and the faucet is leaking, the Wi-Fi only works on the balcony, and cockroaches are running down the hallway. You go down to the reception to express your dissatisfaction. And suddenly some guy in the lobby screams at you: “How dare you complain?! If you don’t like the hotel, go sleep on a heating pipe! Be grateful that you were even given keys!” Sounds like the rambling of a madman? But it is exactly the same as the phrase “if you don’t like it, leave.”
 
It is also necessary to understand that immigration is by no means “charity.” Modern legal immigration is a harsh, pragmatic, and very expensive procedure. The state is effectively selling you access to “its” infrastructure. And it certainly does not lose a single cent in the process.
 
You pay for this access long before your foot touches the new land. You pay visa fees, document translations, agent services, language tests, and medical examinations. You go through a rigorous administrative filter that checks your health, education, lack of criminal records, and ability to bring in money. The state power of the country lets you in not because it is kind. It is simply because you are a ready-made, trained taxpayer at someone else’s expense with minimal risks for the system.
 
Does this end upon arrival? Not at all. At that moment, an invisible counter starts. Your life in the new country has a specific price—the cost of one hour of life. Calculate your rent, utilities, insurance, groceries, gasoline, taxes, and divide by 30 days, then by 24 hours. You will get the amount you owe this system simply for the right to breathe its air. Even when you sleep or are sick, your counter ticks. You continuously pour money into the local economy as a customer of banks, supermarkets, insurance companies, and landlords, who, by the way, pay exorbitant taxes. Even if you personally do not work “on the books,” these taxes are already included in the price of goods and services.
 
So why on earth should a client, who regularly pays the “subscription fee” (in the form of huge taxes and the cost of living), not have the right to say that the service is, to put it mildly, mediocre? State lovers adore the proverb “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Only the horse was never a gift; it was bought at a double rate. And we have every right to be outraged if the horse is defective.
 
Citizenship, by the way, also changes nothing fundamentally. A passport is not the end of the game or an indulgence from levies, but simply “premium access” within the framework of the same contract. Once the counter is started, no one will ever turn it off.
 
Therefore, to the words of a defender of the stationary bandit saying “pack your bags,” you can boldly ask—are you saying this to the investors who invested their capital, their brains, and their time in this country? People have every right to demand quality service, be outraged by high taxes, and criticize unfair laws. In any language and in any part of the globe, regardless of their origin and the color of their passport!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

“How to survive in this almost forced technological progress and live in well-being?”

Questions like these are increasingly coming from our subscribers. It sounds as if terminators are already marching outside the window, and Skynet is about to cut off our hot water for non-payment. Many seriously fear that neural networks and robots will leave us without work and means of subsistence, and if the market is allowed to remain free, then evil corporations will throw us out into the cold. But there is no need to worry so much—this threat is greatly exaggerated. And the fear of “technological unemployment” is perhaps the most persistent myth in human history.
 
Do you know that mean joke? “We thought that in the future, robots would carry heavy loads and mop floors, and people would paint pictures and compose music. In the end, AI draws and writes poetry, and we continue to mop floors.” This is the essence of the so-called Moravec’s paradox. What seems complex to us (higher mathematics, playing chess, writing code) is a piece of cake for a computer. But what is elementary for us (walking through a room cluttered with junk without tripping) is an impossible task for AI.
 
Any physical work requiring fine motor skills and the ability to act in the chaos of a non-standard environment will be automated last. Electricians, plumbers, auto mechanics, builders, painters, roofers, welders—they can all sleep perfectly soundly! No robot, not even the most advanced one from Boston Dynamics, will be able to climb under the hood of your old car, feel for the right bolt, and understand why it’s “making a strange knocking sound on turns” in the coming decades. Replacing a plumber in a Khrushchev-era apartment with its unique, historically formed pipe geometry is a task for super-civilizations, not for ChatGPT.
 
“But surely someone will be replaced!” you might say. Of course. But let’s look at a history textbook. In the 19th century, English weavers (Luddites) smashed steam looms in a panic. They were convinced that machines would deprive them of their bread. What actually happened? Fabric became many times cheaper. People were able to buy an entire wardrobe instead of one shirt every five years. Demand skyrocketed, and the industry required far more laborers: tailors, logistics specialists, salespeople, and mechanics to maintain those very looms appeared.
 
Or remember the beginning of the 20th century. About 80-90% of the population toiled in the fields. Then came the tractor. It seemed like a catastrophe! Millions of peasants would be left without work! But no, they went to build factories, produce cars, and open restaurants and barbershops.
 
And remember the panic of the 1970s when the first ATMs appeared? Bank tellers thought it was their funeral. But ATMs made opening new branches so much cheaper that banks began to grow like mushrooms after rain. In the end, the demand for bank employees only grew—from simple “bill dispensers,” they turned into consultants and managers.
 
We often fear what we cannot imagine. Try explaining to an 18th-century peasant who a “targetologist,” “SMM manager,” “cyber-athlete,” or “prompt engineer” is. He would simply tap his temple with his finger. In the same way, we currently cannot even imagine the professions that will appear in 10-15 years.
 
People think: “If the state doesn’t protect my rights and regulate AI, I’m doomed.” In reality, it’s exactly the opposite. When technology closes a door in one place, enterprising people immediately cut ten new windows. If officials start introducing quotas, bans on the use of AI, or robot taxes, they will simply freeze the economy. Enterprises will become uncompetitive, goods will become expensive, and you and I will become poor.
 
A deregulated market allows capital and resources to flow instantly into new, as yet undiscovered niches. Will AI take over the routine? Great! This means that the production of goods and services will become incredibly cheap and your real income will grow. We will work fewer hours but live in greater abundance, spending time on creativity, service, interpersonal communication, and those very new professions that will be born out of entrepreneurial freedom.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Asymmetry of Anonymity: Why the Ghost Always Beats Goliath

Let’s be honest: we all love movies where a lone hero goes up against an entire army of bad guys with a single pistol and wins thanks to incredible marksmanship and plot armor. It looks cool over popcorn. But in real life, especially in political struggle, it doesn’t work that way. In reality, the winner isn’t the one with the bigger gun. The winner is the one playing hide-and-seek, knowing in advance where the opponent is hiding. In the digital age, our primary weapon against a stationary thug is the asymmetry of anonymity.
 
Imagine a situation. You know absolutely everything about your opponent. You know their real name, where they live, and what time they pick up their kids from school. You know the make and plate number of their car; you’ve seen their drunken photos from a corporate party ten years ago; you know where they work, who they’ve crossed, and what scares them to the point of chills down their spine. And what do they know about you? Only your Telegram nickname. Some hypothetical LibertyNinja99 with a capybara avatar, and that’s it. One of the subscribers recently voiced a damn bold but absolutely brilliant thought:
 
“If I have full personal data, addresses, life history, and an understanding of my enemy’s weaknesses, while the enemy has even a nuclear bomb but doesn’t even know my name—I have a much better chance of destroying them than they do of destroying me.”
 
And you know what? That is the pure, crystal truth. Power, even the size of a nuclear bomb or the entire repressive apparatus of the state, is simply raw energy. And any energy must have a vector, a point of application. What use is a nuclear button or an OMON division if you don’t know where to strike? In such a situation, the authoritarian machine turns into a blinded Cyclops, frantically swinging a huge club, smashing its own caves while the cunning Odysseus stands quietly to the side. You, on the other hand, hold a scalpel. You don’t need an atomic bomb to destroy the life or career of a corrupt official or a brutal security officer. One flash drive is enough. One letter to his wife. One leaked document about offshore accounts. One report to the security service of his own boss. You strike precisely, at the most vulnerable spots, because you see everything, and he sees nothing.
 
This asymmetry is critically important everywhere:
 
In political struggle: etatists, conservatives, and bureaucrats love the spotlight when they are at the podium, but they are terrified of the light of a flashlight pointed at their dark dealings. When a nomenklatura official realizes that ghosts they can neither imprison nor buy are watching them, paranoia sets in. And paranoia causes mistakes.
 
At protests and during revolutions: remember why the punishers so desperately hide their faces under balaclavas and rip off their badges? Because they understand that as soon as they are deanonymized, they cease to be an “immune cog in the system.” They become Vasya from the third entrance, whose tires might be slashed tomorrow or who might be refused bread at the local store. Deanon turns a faceless machine of terror into a bunch of frightened people fearing retribution.
 
Authoritarian regimes are built on the illusion of omnipotence and total control. They want you in their databases, they want your biometrics, they want your passport linked to social networks. They want to see right through you. Because as soon as you become anonymous, their monopoly on violence collapses. The state can imprison a person of flesh and blood, but it cannot handcuff a cryptographic key or VPN traffic.
 
What conclusion can be drawn? Maintaining this very asymmetry is not just geek paranoia, but basic hygiene and a vital method of struggle for any libertarian and free-thinking person. Hide yourself. Use pseudonyms, encryption, crypto, proxies. Do not feed the Leviathan with your personal data. Be an impenetrable black square to them. And at the same time—tear the masks off them. Study OSINT tools. Dig through registries, find their villas, mistresses, secret accounts, and corrupt connections. Make their lives absolutely transparent.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Debunking the myth: the “black market” is not a Hollywood action movie, but simply a free market underground

It is amazing how laypeople sometimes imagine the “black market” or the darknet. Thanks to Netflix, crime reports, and government scare stories, most people picture something out of “Mad Max.” Constant chaos: brutal cartels, automatic weapon shootouts over distribution points, gloomy sociopathic hackers trading uranium and contract killings, and absolute brutality.

But let’s come down to earth and see how it looks in reality. Imagine a typical transaction on the “terrible and horrible” black market:
– Psst, man, did you bring the goods?
– Yes, here. Here is some farm cheese made from unpasteurized milk, freelance design without paying an exorbitant tax, crypto bought without KYC humiliations, and medication from abroad that our Ministry of Health decided to ban for some reason.

Sounds less bloodthirsty already, right? Because 99% of the so-called “black” market is an absolutely peaceful, voluntary exchange between people who simply want to live their lives. It is the reaction of a healthy organism to the suffocating grip of a stationary bandit. Therefore, it is worth understanding where the shadow economy comes from in the first place and why it has nothing to do with violence:

First, it is protection against financial striptease (AML/KYC). Today, to transfer your own honestly earned money, you have to turn yourself inside out. “Anti-money laundering” procedures have turned banks into branches of intelligence services. “Where did these 500 dollars come from? Prove it! Bring a certificate! We will freeze your account pending investigation!”. People move to crypto and the darknet not because they are laundering millions of dollars from cartels. They do it because they want to reclaim the basic right to financial privacy.

Second, it is an escape from the over-regulation of every single breath. The state loves to create monopolies and feed bureaucrats. Want to start a business? Get 150 permits, pass the fire inspection (which requires a bribe), buy a license. For many small entrepreneurs, this is simply unaffordable. The shadow sector consists of garage masters, tutors, home bakers, and IT freelancers who simply say: “Leave us alone, we want to work, not feed an army of inspectors.”

Third, these are goods banned by the whim of the Leviathan. The state constantly decides what we can read, watch, eat, and how we should treat ourselves. Banned the import of decent antidepressants? They will appear on the gray market. Blocked convenient subscription services? People will appear to help bypass this. Banned vapes or certain types of plants? Welcome to the darknet. Demand does not disappear just because a man in a suit banged a wooden gavel on a table.

But what about violence? What about the mafia? Now, this is the most interesting part. Violence on the black market is a direct consequence of state intervention, not a property of the free market. Remember Prohibition in the USA. Before the alcohol ban, brewers fought in courts or competed on price. As soon as alcohol was banned, Al Capone, shootouts, and Tommy guns appeared. Why? Because legal dispute resolution mechanisms vanished, and risks skyrocketed. The state itself creates crime by pushing entire industries outside the legal framework.

By the way, the darknet itself is a brilliant example of how the free market solves the problem of trust without any state. There is no police there and you cannot sue. But there is a system of reputation, reviews, and escrow accounts (where money is frozen by a guarantor until the goods are received). Sellers on darknet marketplaces tremble for their rating more than a legal restaurant does for Michelin stars. If a shop cheats a customer or sells low-quality goods, it will simply be destroyed by reviews and lose its business. Pure reputation economics and agorism in action.

So next time someone tells you horror stories about “illegal” markets, remember: the largest and most dangerous gang, which regularly employs violence and takes money from people, is not in the darknet, but collects taxes.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

“Sign here and forget that we are assholes”: how NDAs kill the truth about employers

You have probably heard the following more than once: “The market will settle everything.” If an employer is a tyrant, pays peanuts, and forces you to work weekends for a “thank you,” then the invisible hand of the market should simply slap them. People will leave, new ones won’t come, and the company will either fix itself or go bankrupt.

It sounds beautiful. However, for the market to work, it needs information. If you are buying a car, you want to know if it has been in an accident. If you are selling your labor, you want to know if the buyer is a cold-hearted psychopath who will cheat you out of your bonus. And this is where the stationary bandit (the state) steps in with its club, helping corporations break the feedback mechanism.

Very often, employees are forced to sign NDAs. Non-disparagement clauses are particularly noteworthy. This is legal newspeak that translates as: “We will pay you below market rate, scream profanities at meetings, and force you to overwork, but if you write about it on social media or leave a review on Glassdoor/Habr Career, we will sue you into poverty, and our puppet state court will help us do it.”

Why does this break the market? In economics, there is a term “the market for lemons” from economist George Akerlof. If a buyer cannot distinguish a good car from junk, sellers of junk drive out honest sellers. The same happens with jobs. A bad company pays lawyers to draft draconian contracts. The employee is told: “Sign this stating you have no claims and agree not to speak ill of us, otherwise you won’t get a severance package or a recommendation.”

A person cornered by a mortgage and children signs and stays silent. Meanwhile, a new applicant doesn’t know that the company is a living hell. The market signal is distorted. A toxic business continues to exist because the stationary bandit provides it with the muscle to enforce an unconscionable contract. Instead of an honest reputation, which should be the primary currency in a libertarian society, we get a sterile space where all companies are “white and fluffy” until you get inside.

The funniest part is that sometimes state courts still cannot withstand this absurdity. Yes, the state is a machine of violence, but even this machine’s fuses sometimes blow from the sheer audacity of corporations. Here are a few examples where the right to tell the truth defeated a corporation’s right to silence:

1) The McLaren Macomb and NLRB case (USA, 2023). The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the States ruled that the very offer to an employee to sign a non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement upon termination is illegal. The logic is simple: it violates employees’ rights to organize and discuss working conditions. Moreover, people cannot be forced to choose between a severance package and freedom of speech.

2) The Glassdoor case. Courts have repeatedly sided with review platforms when companies demanded the IP addresses of authors of negative reviews. They recognized that an employee’s opinion about a “toxic atmosphere” is simply an evaluative judgment protected by the First Amendment (in the USA), not defamation.

3) Russian practice (yes, it happens even here). Even in our latitudes, courts recognize clauses in employment contracts that prohibit employees from working for competitors or disclosing their salary as void. The right to free expression and the dissemination of information still works in some areas, no matter how much an HR director might wish otherwise.

What should a normal person do? Read what you sign (you can use AI models to look for “hidden pitfalls”). If you see a Non-disparagement clause without clear time limits and definitions, it’s a red flag. Remember the “Streisand Effect.” If a company sues a former employee over a review stating that it’s a bad place to work, that is the best advertisement that it is indeed a bad place to work. Furthermore, don’t forget that we live in the era of crypto-anarchism and Tor. Nothing currently prevents you from fulfilling your moral duty and telling everyone about a toxic employer anonymously, without consequences for yourself.

Voluntarist, Bitarch