Автор: Анкап-тян

How ancap courts work in territories occupied by states

The misconception that the state’s power is insurmountable for non-governmental communities in the sphere of court decision enforcement is extremely deeply rooted, despite regular practical refutations.

Nothing and no one can be strong in everything, and the state has plenty of weak points. On one hand, the state is a fairly centralized organization. On the other, it is a completely decentralized mental parasite. The weakness of centralization lies in the long transit of orders through the chain of hierarchy, multiplied by the distortion of the order at each stage. The weakness of decentralization lies in the possibility of a covert independent attack on any node.

The state is a tool of institutionalized violence. However, it is not the only possible one. Any bounty hunter, blood avenger, or duelist is exactly the same tool of institutionalized violence, just from a different lore. But if humanity has learned anything from postmodernism, it is the construction of lores and switching between them.

Now, imagine a clash of two lores: etatism, with its laws written by bureaucrats, adopted by politicians, and enforced by low-paid employees under the command of bureaucrats venturing into politics — and ancap, with its decentralized pluralistic legal system based on the right to restitution and enforced by any interested parties. In a well-functioning etatist system, the second lore resides somewhere in the back of the mind, where adventure novel characters dwell. But what about an etatist system at the stage of collapse?

Let’s leave the theorizing here and turn to a practical example.

There is the state of the RF, which is at war with the state of Ukraine. War is a deeply anti-legal endeavor. To wage it, the state crudely tramples upon the rights of its own subjects that it established itself. Subjects who, in a normal situation, obey simply out of habit (and this is the most energy-efficient way to command), in conditions where extraordinary demands are placed upon them, obey thanks to stronger incentives, for example, serious reward and/or strong fear. Both money and fear lose their value as an incentive with every dose, so to maintain controllability, the doses must be increased. People to whom such powerful incentives for obedience are applied master the skill of serial murder of people unknown to them.

Let’s consider a couple more factors. First, the accounting of weapons in war conditions inevitably becomes extremely negligent, and they flood the black market. Second, the opponent, a citizen of Ukraine, is culturally close, possesses perfect command of the Russian language, and communicates without problems with any subject of the RF. These factors lead to the fact that various military objects or high-ranking officials are constantly exploding on the territory of the RF. The perpetrator could be a Ukrainian saboteur, an ideological Russian dissident, or a simple Russian mercenary for whom this is a less dangerous and more reliable earning than rotting in a dugout waiting for a drone strike.

And it is against this background that ancap gets a serious chance to establish itself in minds not just as a theory detached from reality, but as a fully working practice.

A native of Chuvashia, Mishshi Oreshnikov, moves to Ukraine and arms himself with a lore according to which Chuvashia never voluntarily joined the RF but is an occupied territory; he states that until the state legal institutions of a future free Chuvashia are formed, the use of norms of customary law is quite appropriate — and simply begins to offer court services. Primarily — over those with whom it is most pointless to litigate in state courts, namely, state officials. Middle-management officials find themselves in the highest risk zone here — those who make some responsible decisions, but of whom there are too many for the state to provide each with even a moderately reliable protection.

In an interview with Sota, Mishshi reveals the mechanisms of the court’s operation and his motivations in more detail, while the host demonstrates certain facets of his understanding of the phenomenon.

What other features of the anarcho-capitalist legal mechanism on state-occupied territory can be noted?

  1. There are several courts; entry into the market is formally open, but the mechanisms for admission into the association are informal. At the same time, the exact number of courts in the system is fundamentally unknown, and some of the publicly designated organizations participating in the movement are placeholders, false targets. The possibility of appealing a decision of one court of the association in another court of the association is declared. In fact, in the case of trials of state officials, this is unlikely to become a necessity.
  2. Fundraising for the execution of court decisions is carried out by non-public organizations via cryptocurrencies. Technically, the lion’s share of the budget could consist of funds from the state of Ukraine, but that is completely irrelevant.
  3. The executors of sentences are non-public organizations that formally have no connection to the courts. Technically, the executors could be professional Ukrainian saboteurs, but that is completely irrelevant.
  4. The initiator of the movement is out of reach of direct threats from the army and police of the RF, since the Ukrainian army stands between him and the RF security forces. Thus, he can be destroyed only accidentally during a raid or as a result of sabotage. It is unknown how many people are capable of picking up the banner in the event of his elimination. Technically, this could be handled by some professional Ukrainian officer, but that is completely irrelevant.
  5. Sentences against state officials and, more importantly, the execution of these sentences are primarily advertising. An official commits a crime as part of their job, and therefore is unlikely to seriously consider the possibility of paying compensation to victims from their own personal funds. Therefore, it is convenient to demonstrate on them what happens to those who refuse to pay compensation. After several such demonstrations, the court can be rolled out into production to resolve conflicts between private individuals. There, it is far more likely that the defendant will appear at the court hearing and provide a full defense, and therefore acquittals, court refusals regarding claims, actual compensation payments, and other riches of law enforcement are probable.
  6. However, even if this specific model of courts does not progress beyond ritualized retribution against members of the “State” organized crime group, it is still a significant step in bringing ancap ideas to life.

In several places, I state that for us it is completely irrelevant to what extent we have a confrontation between ancap and the state, and to what extent it is a confrontation between states. Since we are talking about a struggle of ideas regarding the world order, a state imitating ancap mechanisms works for ancap.

Stefan Molynieux, The Practical Anarchy, translation of chapter 21

The newly translated chapter of Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molinieu is dedicated to the problem of collective folly. If a certain community, from the perspective of an outside observer, decides to go crazy and begin adhering to idiotic rules, who will stop it in an anarchic society?

The author’s argumentation proceeds from two directions.

First, he reasonably asks: why have we decided that this problem must be solved in any way at all? As long as a certain whim is voluntary, people tend to leave those who practice it alone.

Second, what if certain moral attitudes prevent people from leaving alone those who practice a certain voluntary whim? Here, the author shows that a proactive legal system, which interferes in the relations of third parties without a request from them, is simply expensive. And if the funding of this legal system is voluntary, a powerful economic incentive arises to evade this funding. At the start, people may strongly dislike drug addicts and, out of old statist habit, ganging up on them. Later, they will pick all the low-hanging fruit, realize that addicts are no longer lying in every alleyway, and are actually hard to find—and searching costs money—and they will calm down. A certain dynamic compromise will emerge: one set of eccentrics does not offend the eyes with their stoned bodies in public spaces, and another set of eccentrics does not offend the ears with scandals on this topic. And so it goes with any moral foundations.

Here, credit must be given to the author: the social theorist has triumphed over the moral philosopher within him—that is what life-giving economics does!

What is the guarantee of freedom of speech under libertarianism?

Fyodor Svetlov

In short: the guarantees of freedom of speech under libertarianism are the same as under liberalism.

Now, in more detail.

Originally, the concept of “freedom of speech” is a liberal doctrine implying that citizens deny the state the right to prosecute its citizens for their utterances. Usually, freedom of speech is promoted in conjunction with freedom of religion, the press, and so on, because citizens, understanding that the state will inevitably find loopholes in a general prohibition, separately specify spheres where the state is not just forbidden, but completely prohibited from prosecuting citizens. What guarantees freedom of speech according to liberal doctrines? Of course, the separation of powers. The executive branch encroaches on freedom of speech, the legislative branch describes exactly what limitations the executive has, and the judicial branch interprets what the legislative branch has dreamt up; as a result, the branches of power trip over each other, and if they suddenly start marching in step, citizens have the right to rebellion, interpreted as the right to reconstitute the government if the previous one, through a long series of abuses, has completely discredited itself as a bearer of liberal values.

Libertarianism implies that the only permissible function of government is the protection of private property rights (since not everyone believes that private property rights can also be effectively protected in a decentralized manner without any government at all).

Can a libertarian government prosecute its citizens for their utterances? Yes, easily. For example, a certain citizen slanders another citizen, and the latter suffers losses because of it. There is a loss—there is a reason to sue. The court may award compensation to the victim of slander at the expense of the slanderer, and this, certainly, can be interpreted as a violation of freedom of speech. Another example is fraud. No slander here; on the contrary, the product is praised so much that it makes your mouth water, but the real qualities of the product fall far short of the description. Could a court consider this statement a violation of private property rights if the transaction took place and is subsequently contested? It could.

Finally, there are countless examples where freedom of speech is not entirely correctly understood by people as the right to make any statements without punishment on any private platform, provided that the platform is fundamentally intended for making statements. Can the owner of the platform ban someone who prevents them from developing their business? Of course, it is their private property. Will a libertarian government support such an encroachment on freedom of speech? It is obliged to support it. But what if the platform belongs to a member of the government? Here we have a clear legal conflict.

What follows from all these arguments? Yes, a libertarian government has fewer powers than a liberal one. But it does have the power to encroach on freedom of speech. Could it begin to abuse these powers? It could. What is left for citizens as a last resort? The same sacred right to rebellion.

Don’t forget to water the garden bed with oil.

The tomatoes, grandson, might wither, but the machine gun won’t rust

A question from Georgy Nemov regarding non-accession to contract jurisdictions

Let’s simulate a situation:

Territorial and extraterritorial contractual jurisdictions are formed, as well as a decentralized cross-arbitration mechanism linking them. Natural law continues to be supported only by religious or ethical organizations, in whose understanding the guarantor of rights is God/karma. Thus, these organizations remain the only ones who guarantee the life and freedom of a person in territories with a population that has not entered into contract law. These people may be marginal, fragmented, poor, or simply very far from the ideas of ancap. And these people flock under the protection of such religious organizations.

1. Do you think such a situation is possible?
2. If so, is this process natural, and is it a legal objectification of the human being?
3. If this happened, how should our union of contractual jurisdictions proceed? Should it be perceived as a threat, and how should it be fought? Or, conversely, supported?

Ancap-chan’s Answer

1. In fact, this describes a fairly ordinary case of tribalism. While some people, in the event of legal conflicts, rely on those organizations that are obliged to provide assistance by contract, others simply rely on the help of coreligionists/like-minded people. There is nothing surprising about this; there are currently many extremely decentralized communities of interest in the world, from hitchhikers and fencers to libertarians and Krishnaites. They already generally provide primary legal assistance to their members, especially locals to newcomers. I don’t see why these mechanisms should suddenly look different in our model world with greater decentralization of law.

2. I realize that you and I interpret the model situation somewhat differently. You likely view “jurisdictions” as organizations to which a person is legally attached, and those who are not attached are as if outside the law. I view jurisdictions more as “areas of norm imposition,” into which a person may fall both according to contracts and outside of them. And since in the model situation states, as organizations of general jurisdiction on their territory, exit the stage, a huge number of situations arise in which the jurisdiction is unknown in advance. If I’m having sex in a car parked opposite a church, whose jurisdiction is it? The parking owner’s? The church’s? The wife of the person I’m having sex with? It all depends on the context. If the car is parked incorrectly, the parking owner deals with us. If the parking owner is a church, its employee may suggest we have sex elsewhere and not distract the parishioners from pious thoughts. If my partner’s wife has an agreement with him that such things are not accepted between them, then demanding information from me about how aware I was of his availability is entirely within her jurisdiction. But some universal jurisdiction, which cares about everything and can dictate its norms in any sphere—that is already the dark etatist past; in our model situation, these dinosaurs died out long ago and ignominiously.

3. Let’s consider the situation where, say, in some locality, some people call their insurance company during a conflict, while others write in a thematic chat “alarm, ours are being beaten!”, and people from the surroundings start gathering, ready to defend the interests of a member of their community. Should such a thing be perceived as a threat? That depends on what interests the community defends in the conflict. If it is determined to protect its own at any cost in any conflict, then it is a clear threat, and a conditional insurance company must be ready for war with this gang in such cases. But if it is determined to extinguish the conflict, then there are no problems; this is one of the most important functions of communities. A person feels comfortable in them, but in order to belong to them, they accept that other members of the community care about their behavior. In this situation, from the insurance company’s point of view, the community acts as an “insurance cooperative” and can be viewed as an equal counterparty.

Stefan Molynieux, The Practical Anarchy, translation of chapter 20

The translation of the new chapter of Practical Anarchy is ready. This chapter, with the long title Stateless Dictatorship: How a Free Society Prevents the Re-creation of the State, seemed a bit weak to me. It provides counterarguments to the well-known claim that in the course of free market competition, one protection agency will inevitably begin to dominate over others and form a new state—only this time without any checks and balances like the separation of powers, but simply as a business enterprise for robbing the natives, similar to one East India Company or another.

The weakness of Molynieu’s argumentation is that he exaggerates the inevitability of using centralized services—in an anarchic world, no less—and the possibility of horizontal coordination between multiple agencies in the pursuit of a single goal. Imagine threatening people in a world of bitcoin, drones, and 3D printing with such laughable measures as bank freezes, control over the distribution of weapons, and similar totalitarianism. It is clear that all these technologies, at the time the book was written, were either nonexistent or in their infancy, but if your forecasts collapse with just one decade of technical progress, how much are those forecasts worth? As for his hypothesis about the flawless coordination of independent economic entities around a strategic goal despite the prospect of immediate market gain (someone banned in one place will be willing to overpay in another)—that is the well-known problem of cartel agreements. They are unstable.

Molynieu should have focused on explaining specifically the decentralized mechanisms for countering attempts to re-create systems of organized robbery. In my book, they are mentioned quite briefly, because the book is not exactly about that. In general, it can be put this way: if anarchy is imposed from above, and a sign saying “Ust-Perduy District Court” is simply painted over with “Ust-Perduy PRA,” then nothing much may change under the sign compared to the dark times of etatism. However, if ancap evolved from below and the state truly withered away from obsolescence, then the very human qualities that killed the state will not allow a new one to grow. Ancap is not just a society without a state. It is a society with immunity to the state.

Nomads project

The Nomads project channel was created a month after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the RF to provide digital nomads with up-to-date information on where to flee. Initially, it mainly focused on Armenia and Georgia, but the authors’ horizons gradually expanded, and later they moved from simple informing to more proactive actions.

On March 26, a post was published in the channel stating that the project intends to open a visa center in Albania. The idea is to lobby the Albanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a program to receive digital nomads on conditions that are as humane as possible. Then it gets a bit funny: for this purpose, they plan to hold a conference in Tirana with the participation of Albanian bureaucrats and those who hope to use their bureaucratic services. What’s funny is that the conference is being held on Albanian territory, to enter which a visa is precisely what is needed. It’s as if people are willing to make a one-time effort to enter the country in the hope of convincing the hosts to let expensive guests in under more lenient conditions in the future. The idea is noble; perhaps something will come of it.

And today the project put out a post about the issuance of NMPR tokens as part of the Montelibero tokenomics. The tokens were created back in mid-March, and half a month before the start of official sales, Montelibero insiders managed to buy up about a thousand. Well, now they are trying to promote them to the wider market. I hope the target audience of the project, namely digital nomads, will be digitally savvy enough to get some of these tokens and thereby get entangled in the Montelibero tokenomics, which is exactly what we need.

I want to wish these enthusiasts, unknown to me, luck and patience. I don’t know how to say polako in Albanian, but they will definitely need to learn this word. And if they truly manage to make Albania easier for Russian expats to live in, then they will have my heartfelt faleminderit.

Stephan Molynieux, translation of “Practical Anarchy”, chapter 19

As previously indicated, my last remaining long-term translation project can no longer escape, and presented for your attention is the translation of Chapter 19 from Stephan Molneux’s book Practical Anarchy. The chapter is titled These Cages Are Only for Beasts. Previously, while describing his proposed system in which dispute resolution organizations (DROs) operate instead of modern law enforcement systems, Molneux emphasized how powerful an effect a coordinated active boycott can have on an individual. In this chapter, realizing that he went too far and created so much dread that totalitarian anarchy might seem to many a less preferable solution than existing state models, Molneux, conversely, explains that multiple checks and balances are also provided against DROs, and therefore they will not be able to act lawlessly and become a new edition of the state.

Discussion on whether to pay for security

A subscriber sent me the text of their article with a suggestion to refine and publish it. This seemed like a bad idea to me, as I find AI-generated creations uncomfortable to read, and editing them is not enjoyable at all. So I simply posted the article on Teletype so that those interested could read it, and I will reflect on the topic addressed in it.

Briefly, the article explains why someone in need of security should not buy this security, but should ensure it for themselves. As justifications, fairly standard protectionist arguments are provided, stating that the division of labor is not always a benefit because the provider of necessary services will inevitably want to dominate the market, which in the case of security services will inevitably place the consumer of these services under the complete control of the provider.

Firstly, it seems to me not entirely correct to suggest that the reader act on the assumption as if there are currently no enforcers claiming a monopoly, but rather a free market, and one only needs to try not to spoil the current blissful ancap. In fact, we already have a situation of forced collection of arbitrary sums from everyone the state can reach under fraudulent pretexts, including the argument that the state supposedly provides protection. In other words, the article essentially suggests to people who have already fallen into the crocodile’s teeth to be more careful and not walk around Africa.

Secondly, the same arguments used against the division of labor in the sphere of security can be transferred unchanged to other spheres. Wouldn’t a food supplier want to be a monopoly supplier, with complete power over your death by starvation? Let’s engage in subsistence farming to avoid this terrible danger.

In fact, in the case of state security, we have not an excessive, but an insufficient division of labor. The state tends to involve itself in any aspect of security that occurs to a bureaucrat drafting new regulations. Meanwhile, it is precisely the practice of turning to various narrow specialists for every specific issue that counteracts the potential forced merger of these specialists into a single center for providing everything. As soon as the state gets a market competitor in any sphere, the state’s position in it becomes more shaky. Of course, many initially prefer the option already paid for by taxes and therefore requiring no additional expense, rather than paying a private provider for a higher-quality solution. However, private solutions still gradually carve out their way, first in the premium segment, and then in the mass market.

Therefore, I will instead formulate the opposite call: pay for security. Buy all goods and services that are sold to you cheaper and/or of higher quality than if you were to tinker with it yourself. And only if the market choice does not satisfy you, does it make sense to combine efforts with partners and produce the missing product yourself.