There is a new commissioned translation on the site, the article “Tulipmania: The classic story of the Dutch financial bubble is largely false“. It is 2018, the Bitcoin bear cycle, and there are once again talks that all this crypto of yours is just a new version of tulipmania; so, the article, without mentioning Bitcoin a single word, instead explains that everything with the tulips was not at all like it is in popular economic anecdotes.
It has been a while since I’ve reviewed what’s happening in Montelibero, but an interesting occasion has arisen: Anton Ekhin, a political scientist, one of the project’s ideologues and author of articles explaining why a free society for Russian emigrants should be built specifically in Montenegro, has released a new article where he now explains why this should be done in Argentina.
In brief.
The pros of Montenegro, as they were seen in 2021: a sparsely populated democratic country without a dominant nation, with access to the sea and prospects of joining the EU.
The cons of Montenegro, as they are seen in 2025: a country that diligently executes any EU directives to tighten the screws regarding Russians, except, so far, requirements to introduce a visa regime. There is also a media and partially police campaign against Montelibero and Anton personally.
The prospects for the Russian libertarian community in Montenegro to facilitate changes toward freedom in this country are not even zero, but negative: the more active the hustle, the harsher the opposition will be under conditions of complete power dominance by the local state. Anton is not particularly interested in agorist ideas on building a counter-economy; it is important to him that all these measures be supported by the official authorities. In hope of this miracle, he first moved from the RF to the DPR, then supported the Montelibero project, and in the last year, finally realized that the miracle is already happening in Argentina, and that the soil there is more fertile for libertarians.
In this regard, Anton intends to cut his losses in Montenegro and focus on creating a libertarian community in Argentina, based on principles tested in Montelibero. The reaction of the Montenegrin part of the community to such ideas was quite unanimous: let him personally go to Argentina and build whatever he wants there, while we have settled in quite well here. This echoes my thesis from last year that the main incentive for a Russian-speaking libertarian to move to Montenegro is that Montelibero already exists here, while such strong libertarian communities have not yet been built elsewhere.
Thus, the main downside of the idea of switching to Argentina is that there aren’t that many Russian libertarians; in Montenegro, they already have a significant network effect from economic and social ties, and switching to a new platform will continue to yield a net negative for quite some time: those remaining in Montenegro will lose out due to the weakening of the local community, and those moving to Argentina will bear the costs of relocation without receiving the benefits of a community, because it hasn’t been created yet.
For those who wish to participate in politics, leaving for Argentina is unambiguously preferable. The reason is banal: it is still realistically possible to obtain citizenship there, along with political rights, in a relatively short period, whereas in Montenegro, Russians have no citizenship and will not have it. Montelibero’s resources tried to put a brave face on a bad situation, claiming that political rights aren’t really needed and that they would influence through locals, but now it seems the illusions have vanished.
However, even those who seriously count on obtaining citizenship in about three years must have something to live on during those three years, and also find a way to stay on their feet after receiving citizenship. Despite a year of libertarian reforms, Argentina is still a regulatory hell, and for immigrants, the situation has rather worsened compared to the pre-Milei times—citizenship and residence permits have become harder to obtain. Besides regulatory difficulties, one must also consider that the cost of living in Argentina has become clearly higher than in Montenegro. The same high import duties known from Montenegro, which Milei is somehow struggling to abolish, are doing their dark work.
Which Russian libertarians should actually go to Argentina?
In other words, there are grounds to flee to Argentina for those who are already very significant actors in the local community in Montenegro, and the departure of each such person from Montenegro would be a great loss for Montelibero. Therefore, the main recommendation for the Montenegrin part of Montelibero is: value our whales, show them signs of respect, and give them no reason to doubt that they are more needed here.
As for the medium-term perspective, the stratification of the Russian emigrant libertarian community into a wealthy legal Argentine and a poor illegal Montenegrin community could eventually produce some useful effect. However, those who could in principle move to Argentina and create a new community there might have a reasonable question: why there specifically? Why not El Salvador, Prospera, or finally New Hampshire? Everywhere has its downsides, and Argentina has them too. So, as was the case with Montenegro in 2021, first a certain small group of people must take a risk and invest in creating a libertarian community in Argentina, and only when some rooting occurs will the presence of their own homegrown “Argentibero” truly become a significant factor for which it would make sense to move there.
At the request of @mysery_tg, I have produced a translation of one of the chapters of “Evenings on the Rue Saint-Lazare” by Gustave de Molinari (1849). In the mid-19th century, the author conceived and popularized the idea that we now know as ancap; in the text presented here, he lays out the arguments for this system of social organization in a theoretical dialogue with a conservative and a socialist.
The translation was made from David Hart’s English translation of 2009. I did not cross-reference it with the French original, but I hope that the “telephone game” factor is negligible.
I have finally managed to finish listening to the previously announced long and tedious debates between Maxim Frantishkov and Alexey Kamendant regarding the problems of the validity of libertarian theory.
This was preceded by a conversation between Bogdan Litvin and the aforementioned Maxim Frantishkov, where the latter described the gaps he sees in libertarian theory.
Maxim’s main take from this first conversation was that self-ownership is not such a necessary concept, the direct application of which runs into numerous borderline cases and conflicts, such as the legal analysis of parent-child relationships—and if we agree to the possibility of parents infringing upon children’s self-ownership-based rights with impunity in the name of their own good, then this literally justifies paternalism in any sphere, and statism as its ultimate manifestation, in one single step. In my book, similar problems are briefly analyzed; however, in Maxim Frantishkov (at least in the two conversations provided), we have not so much a theorist as an erudite who has studied the theoretical works of Mises-Rothbard-Hoppe in detail and is convinced that libertarian theoretical thought stopped with the latter, and now all libertarians are merely obsessing over this trio without moving their research further.
Next, Maxim shows that there is no right other than the right of the strong, and libertarian considerations about ethics and law are simply the ideology of the weak. The strong take what they want, and the weak are indignant, asking by what right, yet they endure and do not revolt. In conclusion, he suggests that libertarians acknowledge this conclusion as a fact and act based on these considerations. It must be said that this correlates in some ways with my definition of rights as claims that have been accepted; however, in my view, libertarian ideology will not be sufficiently viable if it only organically fits the worldview of people in a weak position, for as soon as a person becomes strong enough, they will begin to discard all libertarianism with contempt. Our task of ideological expansion consists precisely in demonstrating that libertarian approaches are also capable of improving life for the strong.
As for the debates with Kamendant, I strongly disliked the format; the moderator could have at least somehow reined Maxim in when he went off-topic, exceeding any reasonable time limits. On the other hand, Maxim stated at the very beginning that libertarians always enter debates only to lose, and then immediately demonstrated that for dominance in debates, the pressure applied is more important than the quality of argumentation. This is the nature of the genre, he claimed, so study no-holds-barred fighting; maybe you’ll win someone.
Nevertheless, a couple of takes appealed to me. One from Kamendant, when he said that as the legal system becomes universalized and separate local legal systems merge, local peculiarities disappear from them, and the foundation that remains is natural law. And libertarian ideology can rely perfectly on this very natural law.
The second take was from Maxim, stating that the ethical system of libertarianism has no need to justify itself through another ethical system, such as utilitarianism; the system should be closed within its own values. In principle, Rothbard wrote something similar when, analyzing Mises’ position, he noted that for a libertarian, freedom would be preferable even if it were somehow incredibly possible to construct a working version of communism that would multiply people’s material well-being more effectively than a free market. So, while a libertarian can be glad that the laws of economics are on their side, their ethical position should not rely on this circumstance but be rooted in more fundamental things.
So, in the end, listening to these conversations at 1.5x speed was not a complete waste of time, but in the future, I will prefer someone not so talkative.
M1inki
It has long been no secret to my readers that the copyright law appears to me as an entity that is hopelessly obsolete and extremely expensive in terms of enforcement, and therefore will immediately wither away as soon as the state ceases to carry out this very enforcement. However, with the appearance of large language models, all grounds have emerged to believe that copyright will wither away even and significantly sooner than the state.
There are various arguments in defense of copyright. There is the utilitarian one: if everyone takes someone else’s content for free, the incentive to compose this content will vanish, and that is the end of progress. There is the objectivist one: a person has a right to the product of their mind, and damn it, because that’s what Ayn Rand said. There is the ethical one: labor must be paid for.
And then it turns out that to train another, more advanced version of a large language model, it needs to be fed the entire corpus of texts ever created by humanity, and it will devour them and ask for seconds. If this is not done, then a promising direction of information technology development will hit a dead end. Those training the model are not concerned with the artistic merits of the text. For them, whether it is the Bible or a Harry Potter fanfic—it is simply text possessing a key quality: written by a human. Knowledge of the Bible is more important for a language model, but only for the reason that, firstly, it is more voluminous, and secondly, references to it are far more frequent in other texts and in user queries.
And that’s it, we have immediately lost the utilitarian argument, because it is precisely for the sake of progress that texts need to be fed to the neural network. In exchange, we have acquired very wealthy lobbyists for the abolition of copyright, since companies developing large language models can quite well compete in terms of capital size with digital publishing houses. Moreover, even if for particularly widely circulated texts the rightsholders manage to defend the right not to acquaint LLMs with them, who wins from the fact that in response to “summarize such-and-such story by Stephen King” the chatbot will answer “I don’t know a single work by this author, let me instead summarize such-and-such story by David Friedman”? Surely it won’t be Stephen King’s publishers nor Stephen King himself who will benefit from such a thing.
How will content for training neural networks be obtained? Very simple. Content is usually already physically present on the web in free access; it just has a “pirated” label, and therefore law-abiding companies have to pretend it doesn’t exist. However, this is too flimsy a little fence, and it won’t stop those who consider themselves entitled to step over it. The only person a neural network won’t get is some Rodion Belkovich, because he in principle does not post his books on the web, even for money))) This is a huge loss for the future interlocutors of intellectual chatbots, but what can be done, humanity has lost many valuable texts throughout its history, shit happens.
Question from Dmitry
I am currently translating an interesting article that traces the anarchist roots of ancap (funny, but many consider ancaps to be fake anarchists) from Proudhon, who, in fact, was the first to declare himself an anarchist. But there are still a few days until the work is finished, so for now, I’ll reflect on how fundamental it is for an anarcho-capitalist society to have specifically libertarian principles at its foundation—self-ownership and all that other NAP stuff.
Let’s replace self-ownership with “we are all instruments of the Lord” or “we are but a third theme in the music of Ainur.” This is simply a shift in the locus of control. Well, okay, now it’s external. Will this shift hinder the construction of ancap? Not particularly. The Lord, in His mercy, gave people commandments. The elves left humans their powerful epic, filled with moral messages. Take it, use it. In songs, you read about loyalty to oaths, or a commandment requires you not to bear false witness—one way or another, you learn the idea of a contract and the obligations under it, which means we have the basis for capitalism.
Can we do without the non-aggression principle? That no one has the right to initiate violence with impunity? No, someone does. Will this hinder the construction of ancap? Well, it depends on exactly who turned out to be the lucky exception to this principle. For example, if we declare that holy fools, small children, and women with PMS can initiate violence with impunity, this will not hinder us in building an anarcho-capitalist society. But if we declare that a certain special knightly order, sworn to maintain peace and tranquility in the Galaxy, possesses the right to initiate violence with impunity—it will be harder, although even then the situation is not hopeless, but we will be critically dependent on the procedures regulating entry into and expulsion from this order.
To what extent can ancap be built on the principles of classical liberalism? Gustave de Molinari described this very clearly. He didn’t know any of the clattering libertarian technical terms like NAP and self-ownership; he simply described how a competitive market for security services would yield better results than a monopolistic one.
What about objectivism? Egoism is a virtue. Reason is a virtue. Demanding that people sacrifice themselves for you is yuck. How is this not a basis for ancap? The principles sound as unfamiliar as appealing to the Silmarillion instead of the Bible as a source of morality, but essentially, by implementing the principles of objectivism, we get the same ancap, only with intellectual property. And yes, the state will not exist, regardless of what Ayn Rand wrote on the subject, because collecting taxes by force is to demand sacrifice from taxpayers, and forcing government officials to work for free is to demand sacrifice from them. But, of course, if voluntary self-governance coordinated by volunteers at their own expense or via donations is “the state,” then okay, let it be the state, but for us libertarians, this is simply ancap.
Question from Zigoter
Having started writing a book on the libertarian theory of war, I realized with some bewilderment that, despite all my methodological individualism, I cannot construct correct descriptions without operating with fictitious entities such as collective subjects. These speculative subjects were named by me as spirits.
The Jewish people are very ancient and managed to survive over millennia because they possessed and diligently preserved a very strong spirit of the people’s divine election. Nothing could shake the Jews’ loyalty to their spirit, but the 19th century brought them a strong temptation: the spirits of nationalism were born—a phenomenon known as the Spring of Nations. From the connection between the spirit of divine election and the spirit of nationalism, the spirit of Zionism was born. Those possessed by this spirit made efforts to create a national Jewish state that could become a home for any representative of the divinely elected Jewish people.
In the early period of its existence, the State of Israel represented a very peculiar combination on the spiritual plane: the old Jewish spirit of divine election, the new Jewish spirit of Zionism, the new global spirit of socialism, the mature European spirit of individual freedom, and additionally, the spirit of a victim-people born during the Holocaust. These spirits supported each other in some ways, but in many ways they were at odds. The result was a dynamic, expansive state that not only habitually survived in a hostile environment, as the Jewish people had survived in a hostile environment for many centuries, but also actively expanded its borders, creating a zone of quite decent security within the assimilated space.
Currently in Israel, the spirit of the victim-people has completely exhausted its potential, and the positions of the spirit of socialism have weakened somewhat; otherwise, the picture remains the same. As long as Israel’s environment remains hostile, abandoning expansion is fraught with destruction for it: passive defense in conditions of technological progress does not allow for the effective containment of enemies.
And why, exactly, is Israel’s environment so hostile to it? Initially, Israel faced the spirits of nationalism, and these are quite weak in the Arab world. Therefore, it was sufficient for Israel to achieve a decisive military victory over one coalition of states or another for the situation to calm down noticeably. It was only the spirit of Islam, which gained significant strength at the end of the 20th century, that made the situation truly complex, because this spirit has strong grassroots support, which is precisely what makes it a real spirit and not a propaganda facade, like Orthodoxy in the RF.
Having finished with history, let us move to libertarian recipes. First of all, the rhetoric of “we are launching preemptive strikes because otherwise we will be destroyed” is already being received with difficulty by consumers of propaganda, even if it is true. On the other hand, it is precisely now that the rhetoric of “freedom is coming” is on the rise; it would be a sin not to take advantage of it. Externally, Israel needs to appeal not to the spirit of its divine election—it will only work on the Jewish diaspora, and even then poorly. Nor to the Holocaust, which as a news hook no longer sells (now October 7th must be used instead). And certainly not to socialism; it is sinful to be proud of one’s internal illnesses. However, the slogan “We are expanding the space of freedom” is not only dignified but also effective. “We are not destroying terrorist regimes in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran because they are against Israel, but because they are terrorist regimes. They are directed against all free people, whether inside the countries they control or outside. Islam is not a religion of slavery. It is quite compatible with the ideas of free trade. And those political regimes that are ready for trade rather than war, and in which their own citizens enjoy freedom, are welcomed by Israel.”
Of course, one should not confuse freedom with democracy; this mistake cost the USA dearly, there is no need to repeat it. What matters is not how a political leader took office, or if there even is one, but how free people are within that political regime, period. But, of course, such rhetoric imposes restrictions on Israel’s internal policy as well, which, however, is only for the better.
In the comments of my previous post, I was asked to tell more about the speech given by the esteemed Atomic Cherry during a Sunday conversation with Kirill Grebnev at the Educational Resort.
Kirill brought up the question of the meaning of life. For me, the concept of meaning is by definition retrospective: the past is always what is given meaning, through reflection on what was planned, what was achieved, by what means, and, accordingly, whether there was meaning and what it was. Therefore, talking about meaning in the future can only be done hypothetically. For instance, practice shows that doing certain things is meaningful, therefore in the current situation it makes sense to apply a certain tactic. Whether there will actually be meaning in its application will be known in fact. The same applies to the meaning of life. Only the already lived segment of it is given meaning. Boring, instrumental, nothing to argue about.
As for Cherry, he didn’t interfere in the conversation for a long time; then, after a powerful puff of his pipe, he broke into a half-hour lecture, delivered at a very brisk pace so as not to be interrupted. I reproduce this to the extent that I managed to grasp.
Many animals are capable of advanced group interaction. Monkeys possess a highly developed intelligence that allows them to use tools, diversionary maneuvers, attack from ambushes, and enter into alliances. The genus Homo is capable of the same. However, all these wonders of social behavior hit the limit of Dunbar’s number. For larger collectives, the brain’s neural network resources are no longer sufficient, and emotional attachment weakens.
Cro-Magnon solved this problem through emotional attachment to fetishes and the construction of conceptual subjects, including collective ones (see my piece on spirits in the Libertarian Theory of War). Now, for him, “his own” are not only those with whom he has spent his whole life hanging out and hitting strangers over the head, but also anyone who is a descendant of the same totem animal, who believes in the same gods, and cracks an egg from the same end. It was precisely this ability to abstract attachments that allowed humans to assemble alliances of tribes, thanks to which they wiped out the Neanderthals completely. And after that came states, world religions, conspiracy theories, and other neural trash.
The thing is, a human cannot arbitrarily switch off this ability to abstract. He looks for patterns and finds them, always. Every neural network hallucinates. We see this most clearly in the example of large language models, but we ourselves are no better. Our consciousness, with all its searches for a higher meaning, is exactly those neural network hallucinations. If you want abstract thinking, accept the abstract glitches.
Abstract thinking has a practical value — it serves the biological need of humans to assert themselves by dominating large collectives. If we remove the ability to abstract, we simply return humans to the level of interaction of primitive tribes. And if we remove the drive to assert oneself over others, we get a pure hallucinating neural network, devoid of practical application, and therefore bogged down in fruitless spiritual quests.
Yes, the need to assert oneself over other people can be sublimated through creativity, asserting oneself over the forces of nature, and similar challenges. But without respect and recognition from other people, these activities lose their meaning for the human.
A link to a lecture on the anarchist theory of pedagogy appeared in the Ogurism channel, which I found very interesting. It tells the story of the teachings of a very wise Croat who served as a Catholic priest and, as befits a normal Catholic saint, regularly shamed the devil, played by various education officials.
Beyond the banal criticism of the dominant education system, which almost everyone has slammed for the insane ritualization of the process and the disregard for the opinions of those who should formally be the customers of education, our Catholic paid considerable attention to constructive solutions, and the lecturer recounted some of this construct, supplementing it with their own thoughts. In many ways, this construct echoes Friedman’s reasonings on how to prepare children (throw books at them and see which ones stick), although it devotes slightly more attention to the actual teaching technology.
Meanwhile, this weekend we took a private kindergarten, which I help out with small things from time to time, to an educational resort. The owner of the site specializes in inventing puzzles and, for fun, created an inspiring environment around himself. In addition to monetary donations, he took payment from me and my companions in the form of conversations about the meaning of life, libertarianism, Freud and Frankl, neural networks, and evolutionary biology; he was satisfied. The children, in the breaks between the pool and watching peacocks, steadily poked at the puzzles and various cool crafts piled everywhere, thus inevitably exercising their brains.
Let’s consider this somewhat disjointed story to be a toast, and drink to the hope that theory does not diverge from practice!
Today’s chapter of Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molinari is, unlike the previous one, long and thorough. Not surprisingly, as it is dedicated to a topic that has inspired many memes — roads under ancap.
First, the author explains that the best way to understand why on earth someone would suddenly want to pay money to build and maintain a road in a free market is to imagine yourself as a developer approaching investors. Then, he analyzes various typical scare tactics. And in conclusion, he delivers a finishing blow from a related field, which also pertains to public goods.
