It’s been a while since I worked on the translation of Molynieux’s “Practical Anarchy,” but from time to time, even those texts that don’t receive donations need to be posted, otherwise the public forgets they exist.
In chapter 17, The Stateless Society: An Exploration of Alternatives, the author examines several groups of typical arguments put forward by supporters of the state in defense of the state’s right to exist, and for each group provides a brief justification of their invalidity. As usual, he maintains a brisk polemical style, but, of course, the orientation of the arguments toward a Western reader is evident.
As a reminder, I am continuing the projects to translate several books into Russian:
Libertarianism by Eric Mack – 20 out of 23 chapters translated
Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molynieux – 18 out of 29 chapters translated
Minarchism is an extremely unstable state, where the cancerous tumor called the state has just been pushed into maximum remission by stripping it of as many functions and resources for their execution as possible, leaving only what simply cannot be taken away—either because officials resisted strongly, the people cannot understand how to manage without it, or something else.
Therefore, I understand the question roughly as follows: under which form of government will a minarchist state expand its powers most slowly? My answer: shareholder democracy. Historically, trading republics, such as Venice, were quite close to this method of management.
The point of this form of government is that the right to vote in the administration of the republic belongs to those who contribute to its functioning, and exactly to the extent to which they contribute. Modern technologies fully allow for quite complex voting with share packages, including options for delegating votes and revoking that delegation.
When people allocate their own money, they tend to maximize savings and are least inclined to give anyone the right to forcibly seize citizens’ money. This is precisely what makes them vigilantly monitor any potential abuses by authorized officials, which works more reliably than a simply formally drawn scheme of checks and balances.
One might wonder, how is this worse than a scheme with a benevolent dictator who unilaterally pays for all state functions out of their own pocket, providing state services to others? The problem is that everyone else must be guided by his sole conception of the common good, which can change unpredictably and rapidly. Simply compare the pace and amplitude of changes in the structures of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
At Montelibero, we are implementing exactly this form of government: both in the eponymous fund and in the land cooperative building the village. (These are two different entities with slightly different vote-counting mechanisms: in the village, we simply vote by square meters, and in the fund, a logarithmic formula for calculating vote weight currently applies so that no one can obtain a controlling interest.) So, I am not only reasoning theoretically about the best form of government, but I am also participating in the field testing of the one I consider to be the best.
Enrico Dandolo, Chairman of the Board of the Most Serene Republic of Venice
The matter is gradually nearing completion. The book is almost ready in rough draft; later, I will polish it, adapting the text so that even a non-professional narrator can read it aloud without getting tripped up by tongue-twisting phrasing (I want to make an audiobook). For now, I present to you a freshly written chapter on the instrumental approach to building ancap. There are no historical studies on cypherpunks and such—just a very brief overview of why all this is needed, how it works, and why it doesn’t work very well.
Can parents commit an act of aggression against their children, or do they have full ownership rights over their child?
Is it an act of aggression against one’s child to stop feeding them, condemning them to death by starvation? Probably not, but if so, from what age to what age?
If parents have full ownership rights over a child, does this ever end, and if so, at what age does a person gain the ability to become a full member of society and sign the NAP?
Is it possible to intentionally kill one’s own child without violating the NAP?
Is selling one’s own child into sexual slavery aggression?
From what age are children allowed to work and consume alcohol/substances?
Andrey Fridges
The author of the question prefaced it with a quote from Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty about how a free market for children should be developed in a free society (I omitted this fragment), and it seems appropriate to me to supplement this deontologist with the utilitarian Friedman, who in his The Machinery of Freedomdedicated one entire chapter to the rights of children.
Now, I will express my own opinion on the specific questions asked. To start, of course, I suggest re-reading the chapter of my ancap manual that I have to refer to most often—the one on conflicts, morality, and law.
A child, being a human, possesses self-ownership from a libertarian point of view, and therefore the NAP is fully applicable to them—no one has the right to initiate violence with impunity. If a parent acts against the interests of their child, there is clearly a conflict between them. Libertarian morality dictates intervention in a conflict on the side of justice. Therefore, any third-party libertarian, driven by their own morality, will attempt to delve into the observed conflict between parent and child to determine which position is more just.
Justice, I remind you, is the feeling of proportionality between the damage caused and the value of the subject of the conflict. Therefore, a third-party adult, putting themselves in the place of the damage being caused to the child and comparing it with how valuable they perceive the subject of the conflict between the child and parent to be, may quite possibly conclude that the child should be protected.
Not feeding a child is not violence. But violence is preventing them from obtaining food, or preventing others from feeding the child.
Selling the rights to preferential guardianship over a child (that is, parental rights themselves) is not violence. If the buyer turns the child into a sexual slave, that would be violence.
Allowing a child to be hired for work or consume harmful substances is not violence. But violence is forcing them to work under a stick or imposing harmful substances upon them.
In all these cases, the guardian finds themselves in a situation where they can cause indirect harm to the child without direct violence. To what extent compensation for indirect harm can be recovered is impossible to predict under ancap conditions (decentralization of law plus the market); a unique solution may be found for every conflict, or a standard one may be consistently adopted if it generally satisfies everyone.
In short: here are the principles, and from there, decide for yourselves; books of ready-made recipes have some value, but they should not be perceived as dogma.
Subscribe to the main channel of the Montelibero project and wait there for a post announcing the next MTL-breakfast. They always take place on Wednesdays, but in different establishments, which is why you need to keep an eye on the announcements. MTL-breakfasts are designed specifically so that anyone from the outside can come, see the project participants in person, get acquainted, chat, and perhaps even join in. We already have vegans; maybe radical feminists will fit in too.
Such regular meetings are not yet held in other cities, so it’s a good thing that you are in Bar.
However, Montelibero is not the only Russian-speaking community in Montenegro, nor even the only one in Bar. There is, for example, a quite independent beer club, there is a club for board game lovers, and there are certainly many other centers of activity that I have no clue about. In any case, one would have to be an exceptionally unsociable person to experience loneliness in this country. At least, to experience it for long.
If this occurs under one state system or another, the answer is simple: responsibility lies with whoever is legally required to bear it. Usually, this turns out to be the judge and the taxpayers, or only the taxpayers. Additionally, false witnesses and other individuals involved in fabricating the sentence may also be caught in the gears.
But the question, I presume, concerns ancap, that is, a social order in which law enforcement is decentralized, and developed commodity-money relations are in effect.
Are courts possible under ancap? Yes, because conflicts are possible, and the service of resolving them through a verdict by a third party not involved in the conflict may be in demand on the free market. Are courts that issue death sentences possible under ancap? As a procedure implying the voluntary participation of each party—it is quite doubtful, since the party who may be threatened with the death penalty by a court verdict has a strong incentive to simply refuse to participate in the court.
Are courts that issue verdicts in conditions where one of the parties does not recognize the jurisdiction of that court over them possible under ancap? They are. When I speak of possibility, I mean potential market demand under ancap conditions.
Such a court can function in two ways.
First, it can examine evidence of a crime in a situation where the criminal is in hiding, and give the go-ahead for their pursuit and retribution by any means convenient to the plaintiff. Why does the plaintiff need this? So that other people can familiarize themselves with the verdict and not obstruct this pursuit.
Second, the plaintiff can independently detain the defendant and forcibly bring them before the court. Why? So that the execution they intend to carry out is favorably accepted by those around them and not viewed as some kind of lawlessness.
Can a verdict of guilt be appealed? Yes, of course. The pursued party can present evidence of their innocence to another court, or even to the same one, and after reviewing it, the court may issue a verdict of innocence in light of newly discovered circumstances. If the plaintiff is not satisfied with this new verdict, they will have to act further without the support that the court decision provided, which could be critical for the ability to carry out the execution.
And what if the plaintiff has already executed the defendant using a court verdict, and then evidence of their innocence surfaces? That is, for example, some third party obtains the evidence and deems it important to make it public, after which one or several courts review it and issue an acquittal. By the way, will they do this if they aren’t paid? Actually, they have a market motive: if they can show that the court which issued the verdict of guilt was biased and conducted the procedure incorrectly, they will bury their competitor.
Thus, under ancap, the judge, the plaintiff, and those who execute the court’s decision (if the plaintiff does not carry out the death sentence personally) act at their own peril and risk, and bear responsibility to the extent that other interested parties are willing to spend effort to hold them accountable. Vague? There’s nothing to be done; decentralized systems rely on market incentives, not direct mandates. Just look at Bitcoin—that’s all it relies on, and, you must agree, it’s working out quite well.
How much are you willing to pay for the enforcement of a verdict under ancap?
My book about ancap has been supplemented with a new chapter on secessionism. This is the term I’ve conventionally used for a family of approaches to building Ancapistan—a territorial libertarian community populated almost entirely by libertarians from the start, in contrast to the minarchist approach discussed earlier, where the state as a whole, with all its hereditary ailments, idiotic practices, and dominant statist majority, undergoes libertarian transformation.
The external background today is not very conducive to writing monumental works, so new chapters of the book on ancap are coming out infrequently. Nevertheless, last night another one was born: about minarchism. For those who have forgotten the context, let me clarify that I do not view minarchism as a branch of libertarianism asserting that the state must be preserved while being limited by certain boundaries. No, for me, minarchism is simply a method of implementing libertarian principles into society: through political reforms from above. This is the method, with its obvious advantages and inherent limitations, that I discuss in this new short chapter.
The Libertarian Band studio released a fairly dense ten-minute video explaining the specifics of mobilization in the RF for those who still believe that it is actually possible to do something according to the law in the RF. By the way, this is actually possible, because “according to the law” in the RF is one of several competing systems of concepts, and where there is competition, there is an opportunity to win that competition. The thing is, the main tool to ensure that things are handled “according to the law” with you is a loud and dirty public scandal or a credible threat of one. The video also speaks quite clearly about this.
At the end of the video, it was also mentioned that a great way to avoid mobilization would be physical relocation to Montenegro and joining the Montelibero project.
Mikhail Svetov held a rather thin six-hour stream with the powerful title “Run,” where at the end he also mentioned that he strongly recommends fleeing, including to Montenegro, where one can join the Montelibero project if desired—despite Mikhail’s own skepticism regarding the project’s goals, as it’s not the time for luxuries.
I regret to state that the suggestions from both respected channels were slightly belated, and now the priority is to flee not specifically to Montenegro, but anywhere abroad at all, as long as you aren’t turned back at the border—then you can figure out how to survive in the new conditions, and perhaps you’ll manage to make it to Montenegro after all, who knows. For example, one of the project participants lived with us for a month in August; he liked it, then he returned to the RF to pack the rest of his things and move for good—and now he’s stuck in Kazakhstan, where he managed to get with considerable difficulty after the mobilization decree. “Packed his things,” my foot…
Nevertheless, we still declare that we will help with settling in those who make it to our remote area, from some Georgia, Armenia, the same Kazakhstan, or, why not, even from Russia. If you can—mobilize all your resources—and come join us.
About two months have passed since the previous newsletter, which means it’s time for the next one. Last time, there was a lot about the First Montelibero Club, which has become the main center of activity for project participants. So, once again, I’ll start by talking about the club.
Since only those who have explicitly agreed to abide by the NAP become club members, it is much easier to count them than the participants of the Montelibero project; today there are 81 people, half of whom I haven’t even seen once because I don’t visit as often now.
Currently, an English club, a movie club, and a discussion club coexist under its roof; lectures are held from time to time, and a coworking space and bar — with cocktails and the best coffee in Montenegro — are permanently operational.
Additionally, a podcast recording studio has been created there. Those interested can subscribe to the channel where they are posted. For now, the content consists of introductions to various project participants, but over time, I hope other materials will appear.
And I would like to say that this is a photo from a typical MTL breakfast, but no, it’s an ML assembly
The project’s tokenomics is becoming increasingly mature. For instance, for the MTL token — Montelibero’s main investment fund — a public offer has appeared, which finally describes in a dry but accessible manner what it is, what it is used for, and how it works. Previously, the tokens themselves were sold directly by the fund in unlimited quantities at a fixed price, but this sell order has now been liquidated. Issuance at a fixed price is still possible, but only in large portions and by prior request. It is expected that this will have a positive effect on the token price and on the activity of the secondary token market.
For the first time in a very long while, I didn’t start the news summary with the MTL City settlement, but that doesn’t mean construction has failed or even stopped. The concrete frames for a residential building with eight apartments and a non-residential building, which will house various technical services for the future settlement, are completely ready. Wall laying is finishing, then comes the finishing work; the buildings are promised to be completed by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, in Russia, general mobilization and the closing of borders are underway. This means that the main source of new recruits for the project is under threat of exhaustion, and we may soon need to reorient ourselves entirely toward other markets. I doubt we will suddenly start catering to Western European libertarians. Rather, we will work more actively with the already established Russian-speaking diaspora.
