Автор: Анкап-тян

In addition to the previous post

The post turned out poorly. As a mitigating circumstance, I can only cite a lingering respiratory infection, because of which everything is running, and it is somewhat distracting.

It was a mistake to mention some debates and takes from those debates, because readers naturally tried to understand how they related to the content of the post—and the connection there is quite weak. The thing is, I am not very interested in the topic of survival under a state; otherwise, the topics of my posts would mainly concern tactics for standing in line for various state social perks, roughly speaking, for the slop. The post concerned specifically the ethical aspects of concluding contracts under ancap, and the fact that positive law in conditions of decentralization works very limitedly, and therefore not every document that says “Contract” and is signed by the parties actually possesses the properties one would expect from a contract. That is, it is not a fact that the mutual promises described in it will actually be fulfilled by the parties, were planned to be fulfilled by the parties, or can be forcibly realized in reality by the efforts of one of the parties.

Is it ethical to sign a contract that you do not want to fulfill? Yes, if the alternative involves significant costs. Is it ethical not to fulfill a signed contract afterwards? Yes, or to fulfill it partially. Is it ethical not to make it clear in advance that you do not like the contract? Yes, if this type of feedback is punishable. Is it ethical to abuse deceits of this sort? Of course not; on the contrary, it is ethical to strive to avoid situations where such deception is required.

By the way, the presented ethical approach simultaneously completely closes the meme topic of contractual slavery under ancap.

Contracts

I had a debate yesterday. My opponent was pushing popular takes about how the state is no different from those contract jurisdictions of yours, and that obtaining a passport is like signing a contract. Where is the text of the contract? Right here, the body of laws. Much arguing followed, during which I formulated for myself why contracts are needed and how to view them.

A contract is merely a mutual promise. Promises are made, revised, disavowed, and broken; their violation may have certain consequences. The vast majority of contracts are not smart contracts. They cannot execute themselves; they must be executed by people. My interlocutor asks: if you ancaps reserve the right to break any contract in advance, and even explicitly state that you reserve the right to try to avoid harmful consequences of its breach—then why are contracts needed at all? How does a world with contracts differ from the state of nature, where nobody owes anyone anything?

Contracts are needed to make the world simpler, more predictable, and more understandable, providing the ability to make longer-term plans by relying on other people. But if a contract does not execute itself, then simply relying by default on the fact that it will be executed by other people is fraught with erroneous planning. And here there are two paths, both valid and not contradictory. One can invest in contract enforcement mechanisms. Or one can try to enter into contracts that the counterparty will want to fulfill.

For example, the traffic rule “in this area, it is customary to keep to the right side of the road” is a good rule. It is far better than its absence because it increases the predictability of traffic. It is cheap to follow, because what difference does it make which side you drive on; you can drive on the right. And it is expensive to ignore. There is no need to specifically enforce this rule; it is enough that everyone knows about it, and if they happen not to know, they quickly find out by observing the flow of traffic. And since those who love to stretch the truth tend to call the relationship between a citizen and the state a contract—implicitly concluded on the principle of a public offer—then this traffic rule is a good example of a healthy person’s social contract.

Now let’s imagine a situation. A person enters a certain territory. At the checkpoint, they are offered twelve volumes of rules of conduct on this territory—and a place to sign this contract, which will give them the right of entry. Since the person will not read these volumes, the procedure for them boils down to the following: you ask for a signature to let me in. Here is the signature, let me in. The contract on my part is fulfilled. And any further appeal to the contents of the sixth volume of the tomes gathering dust at the checkpoint will be perceived by them as lawlessness, and pointing out that you signed the contract will be perceived as mockery. Such contracts do not make the world simpler or more predictable. They are needed by self-proclaimed enforcers to have a reason to nitpick a violation, while the party who signed them for the right of entry will constantly violate them without any ulterior motive; therefore, one cannot rely on the existence of such-and-such a contract and people’s adherence to it in their planning. This means that under ancap, the natural emergence of a practice to accompany stay on a territory by imposing a voluminous code of rules is unlikely to take hold. More precisely, the maximum volume of rules acting on a territory will be proportional to the exclusivity of access to it and the ease of enforcement. An expensive, elite, closed club can afford complex norms of behavior. A public park cannot.

Of course, there are contracts where complexity is due to the complexity of the subject of the deal. For example, the merger of large joint-stock companies. But there, the contract is prepared by professionals from both sides, not provided by one party in a ready-made form without the right to make edits. So the complexity will be voluntary. And it is precisely this that will ensure the desire to fulfill everything exactly as written.

And finally, there are contracts where the subject of the deal is complex, but the text is standard. For example, a bank loan agreement. But for the bank’s client, this text essentially boils down to a short explication: you give me this much now, I give you this much monthly for this many years. As for what exactly should be done if something goes wrong—here, the presumption of the bank’s good faith applies. The client believes that the bank provides fair procedures for such scenarios and is not against following them specifically, because he did not think them through himself. But when it comes down to it, his opinion may change sharply. This is where the bank discovers that all these procedures, from the client’s point of view, are not sacred tablets. It is not a contract at all. These are the bank’s wish-lists. And the client has their own. And the more the bank insists on the observance of its wish-lists, the more dissatisfied the client will be, and the more costs he will try to create for the bank. Therefore, the more highly competitive the loan market will be under conditions of decentralized law, the more customer-oriented the contracts there will be.

The same applies to our ordinary life—most of the rules that others insist on observing are not contracts, but wish-lists. Some we respect, some we don’t, we resolve our conflicts ourselves—and it’s fine, we live. Quite peacefully and happily.

A wise guy who knows which wish-lists are worth voicing and which are not

It is often possible to hear from various leftists that the AES does not rely on empiricism, and accordingly, it is generally unclear how praxeology, for example, will work. Could you clarify these points?

Lazzy

Praxeology is indeed simply a set of deductive inferences from the axiom of action: “humans set goals and choose means to achieve them.” To the extent that real people satisfy this axiom, praxeology works for them. Similarly, for example, Euclidean geometry is a set of deductive inferences from five axioms, and to the extent that real physical space and the objects within it correspond to these ideal geometric shapes, this geometry will work for them. Replace the axioms—and you get, for example, Riemannian geometry, which will differ from Euclidean geometry and be better suited for describing real objects in a space with different properties.

Similarly, if we replace the axiom of action, for example, with “man is an instrument for the realization of divine will,” then we would have to derive a different praxeology for it, and to the extent that real people satisfy this new axiom, the praxeology we derived will work for them. Although, of course, given such starting data, a researcher would find it far more interesting to study theology rather than praxeology.

We can conventionally say that the leftists (more precisely, proponents of social engineering) build their praxeology on something like “human action is a phenomenon of the influence of the forces of the material world upon them, obeying the objective laws of physics and biology.” Deductive inferences from this axiom form the set of approaches that the left apply to people. And this also works in some way.

Thus, praxeology indeed does not rely on empiricism. It is verified by empiricism. I hope this clarified things.

Leftist praxeology

Libertarian Theory of War, starting to write a book

I think it’s enough throwing unstructured notes at you; it’s time to get started on the book itself.

The current version of the book will be available on my website at a fixed location at https://ancapchan.info/war/. Currently, there is a rough table of contents available there, which gives an idea of how I envision the structure of the future text. And to get things started, I am immediately posting a short preface.

The scale of the task scares me a little. Moreover, I don’t want to drag out the writing process for over a year, as happened with the basic book on ancap, but rather manage it a bit faster. Wish me luck, cheer me up with donations, criticize the text as it appears — let’s together expand the horizon of human conceptions of the world a little (well, okay, in our case, not so much about the world as about war).

Network State, Chapter 2.7. Fragmentation. Frontier. The Fourth Turn. The future is our past.

The translation of another chapter of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State is ready. While the previous chapter seemed overly long to me, oversaturated with facts and undersaturated with ideas, here the balance has more or less leveled out.

The author points out that since the world will soon stop revolving around the USA, it makes sense to prepare for this in advance, starting with the dissemination of new narratives and concepts that explain the state of affairs. After which he rolls out as many as four—here they are, from left to right, in the header.

Some of them, such as the frontier thesis, were more or less familiar to me; some considerations turned out to be quite new despite their simplicity—for example, the thesis that the future, in terms of the general level of centralization, will mirror the past in the coming years.

I simply cannot find the time to translate another chapter of Eric Mack’s book, and I really should, because a small donation came in for its translation. But The Network State is an urgent order, and I’m already struggling to maintain the agreed pace. So I feel slight pangs of guilt, but I’ll have to endure them for a while longer.

Libertarian Band, a video about FSP

The Libertarian Band team, with whom I collaborated a long time ago on creating videos with an introduction to libertarianism (this experience later proved useful to me when writing the book), has after a long break produced an excellent video about the Free State Project.

This is their second video dedicated to libertarian communities (the first, released at the end of 2021, was about Monte libero.

The screenwriter who replaced me works in a completely different style: where I preferred my own, as original as possible, reflections, his focus is on much richer factual detail. In my opinion, it turned out quite entertaining; it’s great that the guys are still active and continue to deliver the basics.

Now, of course, a video about Liberland is overdue; I hope it won’t be more than a year before they enrich their playlist with a corresponding episode.

Sketches on Libertarian War Theory. Part 2, on why the NAP is a poor criterion.

When I was writing the book on ancap, you could observe the results of the creative search process in real-time. After publication, the material was restructured; as a result of discussions in the comments, personal communication, and simply rereading the text, serious revisions to the wording were introduced, and a couple of chapters were discarded entirely, after which the second part of the book started over in a different vein. And this was while I was navigating relatively familiar territory: libertarian doctrine has long been and repeatedly laid out, and all that was required of me was its reimagining and a brief retelling.

As for the libertarian theory of war, this is uncharted territory, so I am not attempting to write a book right away, but am simply recording separate considerations for now. The only support I currently have are the questions laid out in the first part of the sketches that a libertarian theory of war should answer. These are the points I will go through.

How to determine when it is worth starting a war?

As a reminder, I define war as a class of conflicts in which, for at least one side, the survival of the opponent is not a deterrent factor. That is, to be strictly precise, the party to a conflict that is prepared to kill is waging war, while the party to a conflict that is not prepared to kill is not waging war, even if they are currently being attempted to be killed. Thus, even if someone is attacked with the intent to kill, they do not automatically find themselves in a state of war, but are free to choose for themselves whether to wage war or to evade it in some way.

Evasion can be direct: using passive defense, fleeing, hiding—something along those lines. Or it can be indirect: resorting to someone else’s protection. This immediately raises the problem of fuzzy boundaries. On one hand, even if a subject feeds and equips their protector, as well as pays them a salary and promises to recognize their ownership of captured trophies, they themselves are still not directly fighting. On the other hand, take a drone operator: they might be sitting a thousand kilometers from the target, sipping coffee and having nothing against the target of liquidation in general: should this operator be considered the one waging war—or their client, who feels enough antipathy toward the target of liquidation to shell out for the hire of an operator? How, fundamentally, does a drone operator differ from the drone itself? By the fact that they make the decision to kill? And what if the drone is controlled by AI and makes that decision itself?

In short, in conditions where there is a deep division of labor everywhere, finding someone who wages war completely independently is as easy as finding someone who lives entirely on subsistence farming.

By the way, this circumstance also complicates the precise determination of who started the war and, consequently, who the aggressor—that is, the initiator of violence—is. Parties can spend a long time inventively doing nasty things to each other, primarily through other people’s hands, and then some particular nasty act, for some reason, begins to be interpreted by observers as the start of a war and a legitimate reason to respond to aggression with all their military power.

What is my point in all this? That in the libertarian theory of war, it is not enough to simply say “NAP.” This is an abstract principle that can be applied to any interpersonal interaction to decide: in this specific elementary action, Vasya is the aggressor and Petya is the victim of aggression. And before that was an action in which Petya was the aggressor and Vasya the victim. And even earlier… and so on, until one grows tired. The aggressive IDF bombs Hamas. Well, yes, it bombs. If we take October 8, 2023, as the starting point, then the IDF is the aggressor. If October 7, 2023, then Hamas is the aggressor. Let’s wind further back into the past—and we slide into questions about land property rights, the content of sacred texts, and so on. In other words, the NAP as a criterion for when to start a war is inapplicable, at least in its pure form. At least when it comes to collective conflicts, rather than elementary situations like “you are just walking, someone lunges at you with a knife, and how to determine at what moment to shoot the attacker.”

With that, I conclude the second part of the notes; I didn’t even manage to fully analyze the first question, but it is better for me to post small notes more often, as the overall speed of work will be higher. In addition to sequential numbering and links to previous pieces of text, I will also use the tag LTV (libertarian theory of war) for these notes.

Milei

My Monday began with the news of Javier Milei’s victory in the presidential elections in Argentina. There happened to be a little prosecco left in the bottle on the table, enough for a symbolic toast to commemorate a bright future. And that is why I want to say a few words about the future.

Some look at Milei with hope: they say that Argentina is about to dismantle a significant part of the state, Argentines will start living like human beings, and then, perhaps, others will want the same, and maybe we will get something too.

Others look at him with suspicion: they say that a populist has finally grabbed power; Zelensky also called himself a libertarian, and now he is preparing to become a military dictator, so this one won’t do anything meaningful in the economy, will only ban abortions, and will discredit our beloved libertarianism before the broad masses of the people.

Both points of view focus excessively on Argentina itself. Meanwhile, for most of us, Argentina is a distant fairytale land in another hemisphere, and the libertarians there will either succeed or screw up on their own, without our participation. We, at least those who intend to maintain their own agency, must not only follow the news from across the ocean as if it were a sports match, but also analyze it, draw lessons for ourselves, and popularize the experience being developed by the Argentines—in short, we need to take full advantage of such a gift of fate as the appearance of libertarianism, in its most radical anarcho-capitalist form, on the big political stage.

Of course, it is clear that libertarian reforms are only taken up as a banner by the majority when the state has managed to fail completely, and the utter hopelessness of further attempts to rigidly steer society is resolutely visible to everyone. Therefore, even in the most favorable scenario, Argentines will in the near future only be crawling out of the poverty and chaos into which the previous regime drove them. When society becomes more prosperous, ideas of active redistribution of wealth as a vital state function will emerge from the shadows again. Therefore, it is very important that many other peoples manage to catch the Argentine spirit and embrace the ideas of reducing the state. And for this, we will have to work quite hard.

Network State, chapter 2.6: If even the news is fake, then what can be said about history?

The translation of another chapter of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State is ready. The translation process was very, very tedious. After all, this tradition of meticulously chewing over the material is somewhat foreign to me. There is too much factual detail and too few thoughts in the text; I would have packed such things into appendices, as that is where factual detail belongs.

One might assume the problem is that the facts here are American, and much of what is mentioned is not particularly close to us. But no, if he were to chew over Chinese or Russian material, it’s unlikely I would find it any more interesting.

In general, the summary of this chapter is fully exhausted by its title, but your tastes may differ from mine. After all, from time to time, I am also asked to tell specific historical anecdotes to support my thoughts, so I fully admit that many people need exactly such anecdotes to be convinced. There are some here.

Sketches on Libertarian Theory of War. Part 1, Statement of the Problem.

Not long ago, I was listening to one of Vladimir Zolotorev’s Saturday sermons on the Libertarian.site channel (I’m too lazy to search for the specific sermon—the channel’s navigation is very mediocre), and he noted that the theory of war is poorly developed within libertarianism. This observation seemed fair to me, which means it is worth thinking in this direction.

War is a type of conflict in which the necessity of the opponent’s survival is not a deterrent factor for at least one party. If one of the parties to the conflict is destroyed, it means that the conflict, for all intents and purposes, has been resolved. Granted, this may give rise to new conflicts—with those who consider such a manner of resolving conflicts by the winner as a reason to assert claims against them.

To minimize such claims, humanity has developed certain customs of war. For instance, if a reliable casus belli is presented before entering a war, and collateral damage is minimized during the war by attempting to destroy only legitimate military targets, then according to these customs, such a manner of conducting war should not entail any sanctions, and may even help in acquiring allies.

However, this is all empiricism operating with collective subjects such as states, armies, peoples, and so on. Libertarianism, on the other hand, is about methodological subjectivism and individual responsibility. The fact that some collective imaginary entities are in a state of war does not create any moral obligations for a specific person to enter the war on either side. At the same time, libertarian morality suggests entering conflicts on the just side, which means that libertarians may not be foreign to wars, even those where they are not the party subjected to a direct attack.

Vladimir Zolotorev proposes using the standard legal approach of peacetime to describe war within libertarianism: a lawsuit is filed against the party that caused the damage; in the case of collective actions, the lawsuit extends to the entire collective proportionally to their contribution; courts make decisions, the assets of the party that caused the damage are seized and sold on the market, and the proceeds are transferred to the plaintiff—and so on. Unfortunately, this model, which would have worked perfectly for a tribal society from the Icelandic sagas or, adjusted for capitalist realities, in some conditional Wild West, begins to stall heavily in a society where the system of kinship ties and personal obligations has been replaced by a system of formal hierarchy and various group identities, such as religion or nation.

Obviously, in this situation, an obvious solution suggests itself to a libertarian—to simplify the task. In other words, let’s abolish states and all other imaginary collective entities, and then the analysis of conflicts will elegantly be reduced to a simple and clear basis of property disputes. Abolishing these mental parasites in reality is, undoubtedly, a boon for all humanity; however, if we close our eyes to their existence right now and analyze reality as if these entities did not exist, they will not instantly disappear because of it.

This was simply a pointer to some difficulties in considering such a phenomenon as war; naturally, it is far from exhaustive.

A viable theory of war in libertarianism must answer several diverse questions:

  1. How to determine when it is worth starting a war?
  2. How to determine the just side in a war?
  3. How to determine the appropriate degree of one’s own participation in a war?
  4. How to determine that a war is being waged against you?
  5. How to determine who is waging war against you?
  6. How to determine what collateral damage is permissible?
  7. How to determine appropriate compensation for direct and collateral damage?
  8. How to determine when it is time to end the war?
  9. How to determine on what terms the war should be ended?

I do not yet have the sought-after theory; I want to think about the necessary formulations in my spare time. Your comments may prove to be very useful. I hope to be able to share the results of these reflections soon.