Автор: Анкап-тян

What’s up with the khokhols?

On September 19, Ukrainian politician Gennady Balashov, leader of the 5.10 party, officially announced that he intends to run for president of Ukraine. In the five days since then, he has managed to collect about 200 thousand hryvnias, which is 10% of the electoral deposit required to run for president. An inspiring start.

The program of the 5.10 party implies a drastic reduction in taxes, deregulation, the reduction of the state by entire ministries, and so on—practically a full minarchist set. So, during the campaign, libertarianism will finally be discussed loudly in Russian on television, and this will allow us to test the waters to see how such ideas resonate with the broad layers of the population who are not used to gathering information from the internet.

Politics in modern Ukraine is competitive enough, so a refusal at the registration stage is unlikely—provided there is enough money. As for Russians, for now, instead of a libertarian presidential candidate, they will have to settle for Navalny. Not the worst choice, but Balashov is much closer to us.

https://youtu.be/bVjX0nOglYs
Wanna bet he’ll get more than Gary Johnson?

Hello, what do you think about the second part of the TrashSmash video about how civilians should not be given weapons, and that arguments for the legalization of weapons are pointless?

anonymous question

In the second part of his hoplophobic video, TrashSmash actually managed to say one smart phrase, I quote:

The only remaining convincing argument for easing access to weapons is personal freedom.

43:09-43:15

For a libertarian, this argument indeed outweighs any others. The right to own property, the right to use it for self-defense, sports, hunting, collecting, and other peaceful activities—these are above any statistical data and other appeals to public benefit.

Therefore, instead of digging into the depths of fragmented data collected through dubious methodologies for manipulative purposes at the expense of taxes, and using it to argue with another apologist for the disarmament of citizens, simply seduce them.

Just don’t take them hunting with drunken old-timers; it’s better to take them to a shooting range, let them listen to the safety briefing, fire a few dozen rounds, and hear “Thank you for safe shooting, come again” at the end. And once their fears subside, you can congratulate yourself: there is one less hoplophobe in the world.

It brings people so close!

And what do you think?

Как правильнее либертарианцам вести оружейную политику в современной России?
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It’s good when friends are nearby!

Famous vlogger TrashSmash released a long and pompous video about how bad state militarism is, and how we should all disarm before it in the name of peace, ridding ourselves of civilian weapons and testosterone.

The weapons faction of the LPR responded to this with a double-barreled blast: Alexei Ovsienko with a text on Facebook, and Vladimir Popov with a video breakdown of the clip. As for me, I’ll just post a thematic picture from the channel of one cool Chelyabinsk girl.

Added some interactivity

I want to get some idea about you, so I decided to add a surveys section to the site. I will store all the surveys that ever appear on the site there, while new ones will always be published as separate posts.

To start with, here are a couple for you.

The first survey places you on the political compass as seen by libertarians

Ваша идеологическая ориентация
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The second survey concerns the methods of building ancap, briefly discussed in the post about ancap and minarchism.

Какой метод построения анкапа видится вам более перспективным?
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What’s the deal with Esperanto? Is it worth learning?

Ildar

Language is one of the most vivid examples of spontaneous order arising in society. People have a desire to understand one another, and they use various available means for this purpose; in most cases, this turns out to be the voice, although gestures and facial expressions also retain an important role. The convenience of transmitting information by voice is quite great, and this successful practice becomes embedded in culture, turning into a full-fledged language and gradually being refined: vocabulary tends toward complexity, and syntax toward simplification.

In every sufficiently isolated population of people, its own language develops. You can see this in miniature even in your own family, where there are likely many idioms for internal use that are not used in the outside world. At the same time, as globalization progresses, a reverse trend emerges—toward the unification of language, for now there is a need to understand not only the nearest neighbors but also those with whom contacts occur quite episodically, and there has been no long period of adjustment to develop a communication protocol.

Esperanto is an artificially created language intended precisely to fulfill this task: to facilitate mutual understanding in a global world with minimal common costs for language learning. The fate of Esperanto unfolded roughly as the fate of Bitcoin might have if it had appeared in a world with a gold standard. Yes, Bitcoin is more convenient for transfers than gold, but where is its gold backing? Why are another set of decentralized funds, independent of a trusted intermediary, needed if gold already exists and is actively used? The same goes for Esperanto: yes, one can learn it and become one of hundreds of thousands of speakers, but English is just as widespread worldwide, and it has billions of speakers, for hundreds of millions of whom it is their native language.

So the idea is certainly clever and deserves great respect, but by natural order, people did not follow this idea. However, there is certainly a point in learning Esperanto—some people, for instance, learn Sindarin, and there are surely more speakers of that artificial language in the world than of, say, Vepsian. This means someone needs it.

Of course, forcing humanity to communicate in Esperanto is a solvable task. After all, there are precedents in the world where the Irish artificially recreated their Gaelic and the Jews recreated Hebrew. But the costs for those who would be forced to do so would be very high, and I would prefer that society avoid such a violation of spontaneous orders—there is no need for it, as the natural convergence of languages and the development of machine translation will handle the task much more simply.

1908-kl-t-zamenhof.jpg
L. L. Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto

Hey, Ancap-chan. Can you explain step-by-step and in detail how the judicial system will work in the wonderful Ancapistan? And how will private prisons make a profit?

anonymous question

In addition to this post, I also recommend reading all posts tagged “court,” at least this one and this one.

To start, let me roll out a bunch of definitions related to your question. Often, providing clear definitions is enough, and the answer to the question becomes completely obvious.

  • Property  – the relationship of an object to a subject, within which the subject disposes of the object at their discretion, and other subjects refrain from similar actions without the owner’s sanction.
  • Ancap – a system of relations between people based on the principle of self-ownership, that is, ownership of oneself. In common parlance, we will also call an “ancap” a person who is ready to adhere to this system of relations.
  • Law – a complex of practices for resolving conflicts between people.
  • Court – a legal institution within which a conflict between parties is resolved by a third party. Under ancap, a court can resolve conflicts only within the scope of the authority delegated to it by the parties to the conflict.
  • Prison – a legal institution within which the party that caused damage is isolated from the party that suffered damage. Under ancap, isolation can occur only with the sanction of the isolated party and only on terms agreed upon with them.

Now let’s provide a few examples of how law works in Ancapistan.

  1. Two ancaps disagree with each other regarding which of them owns a certain object. They have stated their claims to each other, and after discussion, they agreed on who gets the disputed object, and who, for example, in exchange for waiving their claims, receives an agreed-upon compensation. The conflict is resolved.
  2. Two ancaps disagree with each other regarding which of them owns a certain object. They have stated their claims to each other but have not reached an agreement. Then they agree with a third party in one way or another and delegate to them the authority to resolve the conflict. The court examines the situation, issues a decision, and the parties to the conflict execute the decision. The conflict is resolved.
  3. Two ancaps disagree with each other regarding which of them owns a certain object. In an attempt to exercise their property rights over the disputed object, the parties begin to cause each other some damage. Not wanting the conflict to escalate, one of the parties finds a shelter where they are out of reach of the second party, and after this, the parties begin to negotiate about a court. The court examines the situation, issues a decision, and the parties to the conflict execute the decision. The conflict is resolved.

The shelter appearing in the third example is, in essence, a prison. For the service of providing security during the period of imprisonment, the prison owner may charge a fee from the client, that is, from the person who wishes to obtain shelter.

I do not think that under ancap, the service of imprisonment will be in such high demand that it would be profitable to build special, well-protected structures to provide it. Most likely, the service of providing shelter will be provided decentrally and will be more declarative in nature.

A guy is running down the street, all disheveled and bruised, and another guy is behind him, very agitated and wanting to bruise the first one even more. The first guy rushes to me and asks for help. I shield him from the second one and suggest that he move toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict. I have isolated one participant of the conflict from the other, and, in essence, this is no different from putting him in a pretrial detention center. The only thing that prevents the strong side in this conflict from continuing the crackdown on the weak side is the unwillingness to enter into a conflict with me as well. In the vast majority of situations, this is quite enough.

Will I take money for the service provided? I don’t know, it depends on the circumstances, depending on how much it distracts me from my own affairs.

In describing this example, I proceeded from the implicit assumption that ancap developed in a peaceful society through the gradual withering away of the state, which is why the described conflict, within which the need for shelter arose, looks quite “vegetarian.” Of course, if some Venezuela arrives at ancap through the complete and rapid bankruptcy of the state, then conflicts between people in the first stage will be significantly more numerous, and there may indeed arise a sufficiently stable, solvent demand for solid fortified shelters where the client would be provided with armed security services. But the probability of such a scenario seems very small to me.

Explain the difference between common law and civil law jurisdictions?

anonymous question

This is roughly like asking what the difference is between equality and a jury trial. The first is a principle. The second is an institution. Between them is a cause-and-effect relationship.

NAP is the non-aggression principle, stating that no one has the right to use aggressive violence with impunity. Contractual jurisdictions are an institution for conflict resolution based on adherence to the NAP.

The point of contractual jurisdictions is that one subject enters into an agreement with another subject stating that they are subject to their jurisdiction. The agreement also specifies what limitations this jurisdiction has.
The existence of a contract between the court and the subject is a mandatory condition that ensures compliance with the NAP, since under the contract, the subject agrees to execute the court’s decision or agrees that they will be forced to execute it. Without such prior consent, an attempt to force a convicted person to execute a court decision becomes a violation of the non-aggression principle.

The most elementary example of a contractual jurisdiction is an arbitration court. Two parties to a conflict enter into a contract with a court to resolve one specific conflict, pledging to execute the court’s decision regardless of what it may be. An arbitration court provides the highest possible degree of fairness in conflict resolution, but is poorly suited for cases of extreme bitterness between parties, as well as situations where the parties are barely acquainted and simply cannot find a single person whom both parties trust.

In cases where a pure arbitration court is difficult, intermediaries begin to step in. I entrust the settlement of my conflict to someone I have chosen as my representative, and after some effort, they provide me with a result: here the opponent is ready to make such-and-such a concession, here it makes sense for me to make a concession, I can also count on such-and-such compensation, but I must pay such-and-such for the mediation. I agree to this, and a settlement occurs. Or I disagree and negotiations continue.

The more stable a society is, the more likely it is that such mediation contracts will become more long-term and the results of their activity more predictable. People generally love to generalize and average things out to save effort and not worry about minor details.
Thus arises what is usually meant by the words “contractual jurisdictions,” although this is only a specific case of them: a system in which practically everyone is bound by a permanent contract with one jurisdiction or another, and it is that jurisdiction that handles all their conflicts, whether they bring claims against others or others bring claims against them. A contractual jurisdiction can be freely changed, but this will likely happen no more often than people change mobile operators today.

To a certain approximation, such a judicial system existed in Iceland during the Age of Sagas, that is, in the period of the absence of a state, when jurisdiction, along with priestly functions, was carried out by the so-called godi, and a landowner could enter one godord or another or move to a different one.

For the geeks, I can even provide a link with a description of this legal system.

Modern Icelandic godi are more like role-playing games, but imitation institutions sometimes wake up

How will treatment protocols be developed under ancap? Today, the WHO does this, and then the state implements these recommendations. But without a state?

Semyon Podporin

Even today, there is a more or less market-based competition between various treatment methodologies in the world. There is the WHO, with its ICD and list of essential medicines. There are numerous schools of traditional medicine that find their followers, often even on an international level. There is homeopathy and all sorts of other extrasensory practices. There are fasting and prayers. There are several families of therapeutic gymnastics.

Thus, even when competing with international bureaucracy, the medical market is quite flexible and provides services for every taste and budget. There are no grounds for it to be any different under ancap. Yes, it will be easier to introduce various “placebo-drugs” to the market. On the other hand, there will be no imposition of such drugs at the state level, as was the case with something like Arbidol.

Yes, humanity will not have a single list of diseases and drugs, but developing new medications will definitely become easier. Yes, there will be more various placebos on the market, but funding for the Cochrane Collaboration will likely grow, as will its authority.
Many also fear the curtailment of research into new drugs due to the demise of patent law, but that is a completely different question, which, moreover, I have already partially answered.

fully decentralized self-governing self-funding association – the market solves the problem of placebo-drugs