Автор: Анкап-тян

On the Left-Right Deviation

@SperryUNIVAC

The idea for this text has been floating around in my head for quite a while, because I really dislike it when words lose any semblance of meaning and turn into simple labels, like the Blues and the Greens at the Constantinople Hippodrome. What is the difference between them? Well… uh… some are blue because they root for the Blues, and others are green because they root for the Greens, makes sense, right? Patsaks and chatlans, as is well known, are not nationalities, not professions, not races, and not religions; they are simply patsaks and chatlans. In the same way, over the last hundred years or so, the meaning of the words “politically right” and “politically left” has undergone total and absolute erosion. It’s not even that the radical right and radical left essentially do the same thing (shedding rivers of blood / calling for them to be shed), as the famous horseshoe theory teaches us. It’s not even that anyone at all is called “left,” right down to the insane regime of the ayatollahs who hanged communists and gays with crane trucks, while the entire Western LGBTQA+++ agenda is convulsing in paroxysms of passion for HAMAS, ISIS, and other Islamic cannibals. The point is that these words have literally, completely, and entirely lost their original meaning (and quite some time ago), yet they have failed to acquire a new one.

Back in 1945, the famous “Nazi Pope” Pius XII (theoretically an ultra-right Catholic conservative), together with Juan Perón (theoretically a left-wing progressive reformer), were together saving Nazis (who are generally considered ultra-right by the public for some reason, though in fact they are further left than Stalin) from Stalin (theoretically an ultra-leftist, at least that is how the West sold him in horror stories about the “red menace” to capitalism). Since then, the question has not become clearer; on the contrary, it has only become more confused, because liberation theology appeared (a left-wing Latin American version of essentially right-wing Catholicism), the People’s Mujahideen (a left-wing Iranian version of essentially right-wing Islam, successfully wiped out by the insane Shiites), and there are left-libertarians (which in itself seems like an oxymoron).

Putin is supported by the same left-wing American woke establishment that supports HAMAS (despite the fact that half of this establishment are neither left nor right, but rainbow-colored, and in Russia you get imprisoned for that, but for them Putin is still the Great Left Leader because he is against the damned America), yet their embodied vox populi — the US Democratic Party — for some reason fought Russia far more fiercely than the supposedly right-wing Trump (simultaneously, moreover, championing transgender transitions for children from age five, unlimited migration, and 56 gender pronouns). Again, if old-school right-wingers, including libertarian icons like Cecil Rhodes, Rockefeller, or Carnegie, looked at all this, they would have unleashed their Gatling guns.

In short, using the adjectives “left” and “right” at present is completely, utterly, absolutely meaningless. They convey exactly zero information because they don’t even work as political labels: we hear “right-wing” and don’t understand if he is for Volodya Pu, or for Khamenei, or for Andrew Jackson (the founder of the Democratic Party, by the way), or for Trump, or perhaps for Hitler or Netanyahu. As we can see, the only thing all these characters have in common is their membership in Homo sapiens.

Of course, a devout libertarian will exclaim that we have long been aware of these problems, and we have long had a solution for them! It is our beloved Political Compass by David Nolan, a libertarian himself and therefore possessing typical libertarian cognitive biases. Firstly, he naturally placed himself in the most prestigious square of “right-wing individualists,” tossing everything tasty in there — personal freedom and freedom of entrepreneurship. Secondly, like all libertarians, he is obsessed with economics, because libertarianism was born as an opposition to Marxism, a movement designed to lash capitalism from a scientific and ethical standpoint, relying specifically on economics. Consequently, to lash communism as effectively as Marx hit capitalism, libertarians were forced to concentrate on the exact same thing. Bob Black, I recall, in one of his scandalous essays called this labor fetishism: the very idea that for both capitalists and communists, the message has not changed in 150 years; they are still obsessed with only one thing — who owns the labor.

Accordingly, Nolan could not have excluded the problem of labor from his diagram simply by definition, otherwise he would not have been a capitalist; however, the result turned out to be extremely unsatisfactory. Why is that? Because both extreme idealist an-caps and genuine state sharks of capitalism, whom libertarians pray to, ended up in his favorite corner: all these Rockefellers, Morgans, gold cufflinks with a dollar sign, etc., etc., who not only spat on the personal freedom of their workers (Ford went as far as prying into everything: who they sleep with and how, whether they go to church, play cards, or swear), but also relied on the state, lived in a touching synergy with it, and had no desire at all to abolish it (like Theodore Vail, the father of the AT&T communications monopoly, which was made possible only thanks to the state).

And here is where the funniest part comes out: formally, according to Nolan, there is simply nowhere to put them! There is not a single cell for cynical bastards who spat on any ideologies (and the American robber barons were as much libertarians as Stalin was) and simply sought power. Well, Rockefeller, let’s say, considered himself a good WASP, was a Baptist fanatic, went to church every Sunday (and many hyper-capitalists of that era did too), but this is the common legacy of Calvinism: if you are rich, you are blessed, so become rich and disregard everything else. The nightmarish Dutch V.O.C., the first transnational corporation in history, slaughtered more people in Indonesia than Pol Pot did in Cambodia, and its Heren XVII (Seventeen Lords, an omnipotent board of directors that had its own private army and fleet, minted its own currency, and declared war on states) were good Calvinists and people who deeply believed in the righteousness of their actions; nevertheless, they acted quite rationally, selfishly, and cold-bloodedly, suffering from no excess of idealism; their only true god was profit.

Accordingly, I propose to finally send these labels to the dustbin of history and not use them for anything other than what they were historically intended for, i.e., describing the sessions of the National Assembly of the Great French Revolution. Attempts to fix the Nolan scheme by adding extra dimensions can also be considered unsuccessful, as the scheme becomes cluttered, and it doesn’t become any clearer where our left and right are. What can replace it that is closer to reality? Two new, simpler, and more logical axes. Horizontally, we will plot Idealism (faith in dogma, utopia, a higher goal) against Cynicism/Realpolitik/Social Darwinism (pragmatism, cold calculation, survival, profit). Vertically, we will take the Will to Power (control, suppression, hierarchy) against a generalized Drive for Freedom (decentralization and personal autonomy). This is a broad and integral criterion, because a person might, for example, advocate for freedom of religion but oppose the freedom to use drugs; in such a case, we would not recognize them as being high enough on this scale. This thesis was most simply formulated once by the famous anarchist mathematician Verbitsky: “If you want freedom, demand freedom for Nazis, pedophiles, homosexuals, everyone. Because people are divided into supporters of freedom and opponents. Those who do not love freedom do not need freedom anyway. And those who love freedom have earned it.”

This compass finally stitches up the holes in political science that we mentioned above, because it evaluates politicians not by their slogans (“for the workers” or “for capital”), but by their psychotype, motivation, and actual method of action.

Let’s see what this gives us in practice. Into the quadrant of powerful cynics and pragmatists of total control, Joseph Stalin and John Rockefeller will fly in like they belong there and settle side-by-side (as well as all the robber barons, from Armour, Morgan, and Gould to Ford, Carnegie, Vail, and Thomas Watson), along with Cecil Rhodes, Mussolini, and Saddam Hussein. All of them wanted only power for power’s sake, stability, and personal triumph. Utopias do not interest them; they use them only as a screen for the masses. The main thing is the efficiency of the system and total control over resources. Benchmarks and regulars of this sector are also the Venetian Signoria, the father of Realpolitik Otto von Bismarck, both ruling parties of the USA, and Latin American dictators almost across the board — from Perón and Batista to Pinochet. Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Nasser, and Marshal Tito also fit here. Many figures of the Third Reich who did not suffer from fanaticism will also end up here, such as the completely honest epicurean, sybarite, corrupt official, cynic, and drug addict Göring (“I decide for myself who is a Jew to me”) and the technocrat Speer (“just let me build something already”), as well as Dönitz, Guderian, and other commanders.

Into the most terrifying quadrant — the powerful idealists and butchers of utopia — will go Pol Pot, Ayatollah Khomeini, Robespierre, Savonarola, the leadership of ISIS, Calvin, and similar figures. These are people obsessed with a great idea (building communism, a Caliphate, the Kingdom of God), for the sake of which they are ready to burn millions of people. Power for them is a tool for reshaping humanity. Many traditionally left-wingers also fall here, from Karl Marx to Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. With some stretching, Napoleon Bonaparte will settle here too (though closer to the border with cynicism). He sincerely believed in Reason, Progress, and the Code, and believed he was building an orderly, secular, advanced world, rid of medieval chaos. For the sake of this beautiful legal empire, he put millions of people in the ground and subordinated all of Europe. Mao is the true titan of this quadrant. Unlike Stalin, who was a pragmatic manager, Mao was a fanatical ideologue. He was not concerned with the stability of the state or the economy; he believed in the utopia of the new communist man until the very end. Enver Hoxha and Ceausescu are of a much smaller caliber, but they also reside here. On the border with the Free Idealists, the Fabians and utopian socialists like Bernard Shaw, Herbert Wells, and other Saint-Simonians will settle. Almost all of them believed that society should be rigidly and totally controlled by the state, and managed by an expert elite of scientist-officials. Many of them (including Shaw) openly admired Stalin and Mussolini for their abilities as “efficient managers.” We will also find Hitler here, although his utopia was pure madness (like many other utopias), along with his main priests — Himmler and Goebbels.

Into the quadrant of Free Idealists and romantics of autonomy will go people such as Diogenes of Sinope, early Christians before they became a state church, Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, the hippies of the 1960s. They believe in a beautiful, just future or in absolute morality, but categorically reject the apparatus of violence, the state, and coercion, and want people to come to freedom voluntarily. Many sincere libertarians with their NAP also fall here. They all idealize human nature and believe that if oppression (state, taxes, army) is removed, people will organize themselves into beautiful, peaceful communities. Due to the lack of will to power, this quadrant is historically defenseless — its representatives are usually the first to be put to the knife by Powerful Idealists or subordinated by Powerful Cynics. Mikhail Bakunin fiercely hated the state in any form and fell out with Marx, brilliantly predicting that if the Marxists came to power, they would build the most terrible tyranny in history. But Bakunin was an idealist: he believed that one only needs to light the fuse of a general revolt for people to unite on their own into free federations without any coercion, so he also falls here. Nestled next to him are Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin, perhaps the most noble and pure free idealist. He sincerely believed that without a state, people would live in absolute harmony, sharing everything necessary according to the principle of anarcho-communism.

The most adequate, from my point of view, is the last quadrant, the Free Cynics and pragmatists of freedom. They passionately want freedom for themselves and their group, but they have no illusions about humanity. They do not believe in the brotherhood of man or a bright future. They understand that the world is cruel and selfish, and they build freedom on the basis of pure pragmatism. This includes the more militant wing of libertarians, cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists, Father Makhno, the pirates of the 17th-century Caribbean, and the authors of the US Constitution. They do not try to build a utopia, but try to carve out a piece of freedom for themselves in this bleak world. This also includes outstanding practitioners of anarchy, such as Ross Ulbricht and even, in part, Ayn Rand. She is often mistakenly placed with the conservatives, but she despised them. Rand is a free cynic in the purest sense. No “brotherhood of man,” no altruism and self-sacrifice (in this, she saw the very root of fascism and communism). Society, according to Rand, should consist of tough, independent egoists who interact exclusively through a free market and capitalist exchange, where no one owes anyone anything.

As usual, for a theory to be working, it must explain the shortcomings of the previous one, and the new compass well covers all the shortcomings of the old one. It instantly explains why modern woke activists find a common language so easily with ISIS and Iran, when on the traditional compass they are at opposite poles. Simply because both have a sacred dogma and a colossal will to power; psychologically, they are blood brothers. Stalin and Rockefeller are completely identical here — they are simply two managers managing human cattle, while Pol Pot and Khomeini are two mad prophets who decided that they have the right to remake this cattle. Marx and Bakunin were comrades in the First International, but Marx moved into the upper quadrant of Powerful Idealists, while Bakunin, conversely, moved into the lower one — Free Idealists, and they became mortal enemies. Rockefeller and Ayn Rand are considered icons of capitalism. But Rockefeller (a Powerful Cynic) destroyed the free market, creating a monopoly with the help of state regulation and bribes, while Rand (a Free Cynic) considered such monopolists to be traitors to capitalism and parasites on the body of free creators.

Citizen Vigilante

In the following text, I assume that everyone has already seen the movie and formed their own opinion, and if not, it doesn’t matter much whether you watch it before or after reading this text.

Reviews often call the film a piece of propaganda, a pamphlet, or a political manifesto. That is not the case. What we have here is an instructional film. It does not criticize the current state of affairs. It provides instructions on how to act and what is needed for that. Here are the narratives that need to be transmitted: if you are a vigilante; if you saw a news story about a vigilante; if you are a TV presenter talking about a vigilante; if you are a witness being questioned by the police about a vigilante. No wide field of opinions is given — only clear, correct answers; the viewer must not be confused, they need clear instructions. The key message is: look, I’m showing you how it’s done. Later, you will do it yourself. This is the only take that is repeated several times in the film, including right at the curtain call.

A successful vigilante needs: to have combat skills, a stable source of income, the ability to articulate their position, neatness and attention to detail, to demonstrate professional integrity, and not to leave the regime with hostages in the form of family members, sticking to superficial connections; always offer simple executors on the opponent’s side to retreat, and shoot only in case of refusal. Outsiders need: to express a clear public demand, saying, “it’s cool that there are such people, we need them very much in such-and-such a country.” Journalists need: to hammer the public and the establishment with the question, “should our system protect victims of violence or criminals? And if it handles criminals poorly, then why hinder those who handle them better? Or are you in favor of more crime?” Witnesses need: while demonstrating a willingness to cooperate, to sabotage police actions to capture the vigilante.

A separate important feedback mechanism is shown, which is necessary for the vigilante to remain within the framework of the public demand, without replacing it with personal notions of morality. The main character always asks the victim if they are satisfied with the procedures of restoring justice already carried out. And only when the victim states that they are not satisfied do they give the vigilante sanction to act. However, a vigilante can, of course, search for injustice directly perceived through the senses in order to correct it immediately. To do this, he simply needs not to move around the city in a Batmobile, but to occasionally use public transport, walk, drop by bars, and so on. In short, not to be detached from life.

With that, I will end the general conclusions and move on to various sweet details.

The film takes place in a kind of averaged Europe, but from the visuals, it is obvious that it is Croatia. It is clear why. First, Croatia is almost devoid of the shortcomings that the main character fights against: it is an almost mono-ethnic and quite racist society, without a painful law-abidance drilled into its citizens. In short, Uwe Boll is using the sacred right of a Soviet citizen to shout on Red Square that Reagan is an idiot. Second, the target audience of the film is not Americans at all, and for them, all European countries look more or less the same. Third, those who are slightly familiar with regional specifics can get an extra laugh out of this.

For example, it is precisely in light of Croatian specifics that the episode in the brothel acquires additional meaning. The girl is unaware of why mold is appearing on the walls, which means that this is her first winter on the Adriatic. Obviously, in her native Ukraine, this problem does not exist. And for us, this is a clear signal: the author shows that not all migrants are equally harmful; there are useful, hardworking ones, ready to perceive local cultural values, and they need the local specifics to be explained delicately and to be paid honestly for honest work.

There are probably other cool moments, but I will leave you to discover them on your own. The main thing I wanted to say was said at the very beginning. Before you is an instruction. Take note and apply it creatively.

Prediction markets

Just as I started to be glad that I can now post long-form content directly into Telegram, Sperry released a mega-long post that definitely won’t fit anywhere. I even initially thought about posting it on my own website in chapters rather than on a single page, but in the end, I decided not to overcomplicate things.

The scariest part is that he isn’t joking when he calls this a short essay; I also had the chance to hear several historical anecdotes that didn’t make it into the text, and if he wanted to, it could have been significantly longer. I can’t do that!

So: Prediction Markets. A brief essay on libertarianism, rationalism, ludomania, and mathematics. It turned out to be a very interesting mix. For me personally, the essay is useful primarily because it allows me to distinguish more confidently between the spheres of the predictable—and therefore the plannable—and the unpredictable, i.e., that to which one should merely adapt.

Graeber, Mises, and Evolution

@SperryUNIVAC, whom I infinitely respect for his frantic work ethic and very broad range of interests, besides various commissioned books and military-technical analysis, also runs a small channel (slightly larger than mine) purely for the soul — about coins. I don’t understand much and am not particularly interested in how many ounces of silver were in which thaler, but when he posted a powerful cycle of texts called “What is Money,” I could not help but give it my close attention.

Mainly, the text is a retelling of Graeber’s book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” but in some places, the accents are set differently.

Part 1 — in which the author immediately describes the economy as a zero-sum game, but at least acknowledges that not everyone adheres to this ancient belief. Also, the concept of debt appears on the scene as a moral obligation, which is the basis of all economic magic.

Part 2 — in which it is pointed out that the strong can easily impose debt conditions on the weak that have nothing to do with justice. In general, the idea of debt is based on violence. If there is no possibility to forcibly reclaim what was lent, there is no institution of loans. But if this violence is abused, the moral obligation to pay debts weakens.

Part 3 — here the author continues to retell how wretched these debts of yours are, but for the first time disagrees with Graeber and refuses to unequivocally condemn the concept of debt-money itself. He suggests that since the concept of debt led to the emergence of the state, it must have brought some benefit to human communities under its yoke, regardless of how individual people suffered from it.

Part 4 — here the author, following Graeber, mocks Adam Smith and explains that money did not emerge from direct barter, but first took the form of debt receipts for homogeneous goods convenient for storage, such as grain or livestock, while coins made of precious metals appeared much later and were state-issued.

Part 5 — it describes three types of economic relations according to Graeber: communism (within small groups), exchange (for one-off transactions with strangers), and hierarchy (where debt cannot be repaid, leading to dependency). Communists try to prevent hierarchy, but once they increase in number, the transition is almost inevitable. Markets, meanwhile, are created by states so that people sell their goods for a pittance for the sake of paying taxes (this thesis is designed to cause “butthurt” for all supporters of the strict opposition between state and market).

Part 6 — here the author describes how, besides credit-commodity money, symbolic money has also been in circulation since antiquity, used to assess damage to property, life, and honor; the clash of these monetary systems led to the symbolic money system losing. Roughly speaking, life and honor became commodities. The author also persistently calls Irish bards “skalds,” but those are trifles.

Part 7 — describes how the appearance of iron democratized war, mass violence destroyed systems of credit trade, which led to the invention of coins; it is convenient to pay mercenaries with coins, and so that they could spend them, empires required taxes to be paid in coins. The result was the launch of the main engine of all ancient empires: army–slaves–coins. These changes led to revolutions in consciousness, which is why antiquity is now known to us as the time of the birth of almost all great doctrines.

Epilogue — the pace accelerates sharply, and in one post, it covers the entire history from the end of antiquity to the end of cash. Until the next leap in military technology, which led to gunpowder empires, Europe relied again on commodity-credit money, then regained a taste for coins, but soon smoothly transitioned back to credit receipts—first for precious metals, and then to pure fiat, which subsequently rapidly transitioned into cashless form so that the money circulation could, first, keep up with the pace of monetary operations, and second, with the ambitions of states to control the economy. The word “blockchain” was mentioned, but the word “bitcoin” was not, because it does not fit into Graeber’s concepts.

It is foolish to dispute the anthropological material on which Graeber bases his monetary theory. Therefore, it would be far more logical for supporters of the Austrian School of Economics to agree with the erroneousness of Mises’s regression theorem (that today’s demand for money is derived from yesterday’s, and so on back to a commodity with consumer value, which became the first money), especially since the foundation of economic theory does not crumble from this admission. Money has various functions — unit of account, store of value, means of transfer of value, and so on. There is nothing surprising in the fact that at different times, different peoples practiced different ways of implementing these functions. Later, in the course of history, convergence occurred, and now we call various implementations of these functions “money” under one umbrella.

The regression theorem was needed as a justification that the state is unable to create purchasing power for money. Well, let’s discard this doubtful take: it is capable, and very much so. Take a group of ten people, give an eleventh person nine tokens and suggest they distribute them among this ten as they please, while warning them that in a month, whoever among the ten cannot produce a token will be killed. The tokens will have astonishing purchasing power. The distributor of the tokens will receive a huge amount of benefits. And in a month, they will present you with ten tokens, at least one of which will be counterfeit, because people want to live.

It is not so important who created the first money and when. It is not so important who and by what means attempts to endow current money with purchasing power. For a libertarian, the only thing that matters is exactly how people will organize their interaction in the absence of coercion. If they want, they will provide services to each other without a strict fixation of debt. If they want, they will use commodity receipts or tokens backed by a basket of goods. If they want, they will turn to items made of rare materials or to digital rare assets, such as bitcoin. Or they will use different methods for different situations and different counterparties, as has been the case in history.

In conclusion, I will touch upon an important assertion by Sperry that, from the perspective of survival and prosperity of large human associations, the emergence of the state and the improvement of means of state control over the activities of subjects turned out to be very useful. This conviction has a right to exist, however, there are a couple of remarks.

Firstly, after the appearance of Dawkins’ works, the subject of biological evolution is not the species, the population, or the individual — but the gene. Similarly, the subject of cultural evolution is not humanity, not the community, and not the human — but the meme. The fact that memes about the moral obligation to repay debts and the necessity of hierarchies are successfully passed from generation to generation does not necessarily condition the prosperity of human communities in which these memes are widespread.

Secondly, even if we assume that evolution primarily ensures an increase in the adaptability of a population to current conditions, this in no way guarantees that a useful trait that once appeared through evolution will retain its utility in new conditions. Since the appearance of the first states, the conditions of human interaction have changed significantly, and today the existence of a state that controls the daily lives of people and preaches some debt of every subject to it no longer looks so unconditionally useful for the community. With equal success, it can be viewed as a kind of atavism destined to be displaced by other forms of human organization.

Libertarian Theory of War, a review

@SperryUNIVAC

Writing reviews of friends’ books has always been difficult for me, because on one hand there is the demand for objectivity, and on the other—sympathy for the person, which clouds the critic’s vision. Therefore, I usually avoid such a conflict of internal interests, but in this case, I decided to take it on (especially since the theme of war is generally close to me). I decided to do it, but for a long time, I struggled to find the right angle, for although the book is small, it took me quite a while to understand what it is actually about. During the reading process, I periodically felt outraged, then touched, then outraged again, and so on in a circle; things only started to make sense when I finally realized what it reminded me of. That is what I will talk about first.

Once, I read a book of similar size and also self-published called Warlordism 101, dedicated to an instrumental analysis of the warlord concept with various historical examples, from successful ones (Álvaro Obregón, Li Mi) to failures (Baron Ungern, Charles Taylor, Chen Jiongming, and others). One of the goals of its writing was to create a Reader that the Author would be afraid to meet (in his own words)—simply put, it is a small pocket guide on how to become a successful warlord based on historical examples. I haven’t become a warlord yet, but the book, it seems to me, turned out to be quite practical and useful.

The Libertarian Theory of War, however, stunned me upon first reading precisely with its relative uselessness, especially in those sections where the war itself is described. The author’s recommendations take up literally a couple of paragraphs and are formulated in the spirit of “do good, don’t do bad”—meaning, before an attack, one should conduct reconnaissance (specific recommendations on how, with what, etc., are unfortunately not provided); if you go to war, stock up on resources (an important but trivial thought), and so on. In short, from the perspective of the art of war, Sun Tzu is more useful, not to mention Clausewitz.

Mahan, Duhe, Ludendorff, Liddell Hart, Guderian, von Seeckt, Svechin, Mao Zedong, Boyd, Lind, and Warden: for those wishing to partake in the military wisdom of the 20th century (the 21st is still being processed), there is no shortage of non-fiction. Frankly speaking, it would be difficult to expect a modest volume to crack themes comparable to general staff textbooks, but nevertheless, I am used to understanding a book on the theory of war as something slightly different, and therefore I initially treated what was written with great skepticism.

So what, then, are we being offered, if not an exhaustive work on operational art, strategy, and other useful things? While thinking about this (and almost letting the review slide into a typical paragraph-by-paragraph dispute), I had an epiphany. The book, in general, is not about the art of war at all; that is presented in such modest strokes just so that it is there in principle. The author is far more interested in something else: the correlation of wars with libertarian philosophy—that is, reflecting on what goes on (and should go on) in the head of a libertarian who goes to war. Of course, libertarianism as such is not very compatible with classical warfare, where millions march under state flags, but the author immediately makes a pivot and declares war as any confrontation in which one side desperately wants to physically kill the other—permanently, so they don’t get back up. Thus, war immediately moves into the cozy plane of small scales and frantic individualism. One immediately envisions a kind of Wild West, where a farmer with a Winchester shoots back from the attic at a neighbor who decided that the farmer stole his cow. And it is clear that descriptions of what is happening in the heads of both actors in this fun are precisely what interest the author most. He wants to study how deadly conflicts will ignite, proceed, and end in a society of such atomic super-individualist rationalists, sitting on their farms with rifles and killdozers—that is, libertarians.

And here I almost started a paragraph-by-paragraph dispute in the spirit of “that’s not how people’s heads work!!”, but I stopped again because I was finally enlightened. Lem once had a series of sci-fi stories presented as reviews of non-existent books. On one hand, they were so tasty that it was terribly frustrating that the book itself couldn’t be read, but on the other—Lem masterfully opened and closed the topic, describing the plot twists and characters in such a way that there was hardly any need to read the fictional book itself. There is also a genre of in-world books found in various novels or even RPGs, which seriously expound concepts that are terribly important to the inhabitants of that world, but, of course, do not relate to the real world. They are usually composed to make the player’s or reader’s immersion deeper, so they can peek through such a window into the mechanics of relationships and philosophies of the depicted world.

The Libertarian Theory of War reminded me of exactly such a publication: a book arrived from some parallel reality that has no touch with ours, a world of those very farmers with rifles on their own land and without governments (not even large corporations), who need a moral (first and foremost!) guide to action: how to act in accordance with one’s faith if a neighbor stole a sheep, and a private court, misled, for some reason decided that the sheep is his. This is a serious question in a world of atomic rational super-individualists with rifles sitting on their farms: do I have the moral right to go to my neighbor and smash his house, threatening him with a weapon? and what will my neighbors say? and what if he gathers neighbors, lies to them about the sheep, and before I arrive, comes to shake my house? Of course, for us, these things are of about as much practical interest as listing the Sixteen Permitted Heresies, referring to the Daedric Princes in Oblivion, but for the inhabitants of such a hypothetical Libertarian Wild West, all these questions are extremely important.

And here the author can no longer be blamed for stupidity or lack of logic: in his head, as with any good writer, there is a high-quality and internally consistent picture of such a wonderful place, and for its inhabitants, he provides answers to all the above questions. When and how it is permissible for a libertarian to enter a war, why, how to end it, what to do if one has to fight non-libertarians (suddenly a state appears on the horizon, Achtung!) and so on and so forth. Of course, everything is laid out quite concisely, but in an elegant style, and almost all conceivable questions are touched upon briefly (i.e., within a couple of paragraphs), up to potential PTSD and the realization that war changes people. Generally speaking, all thinking people of East Slavic origin have been affected, one way or another, by the sudden war in Ukraine, which, to be honest, has been going on for far too long. And everyone has somehow reflected on their attitude not only toward it, but toward wars in general, even if they hadn’t thought about war before. This book represents an interesting philosophical experience of libertarian reflection on hypothetical wars of libertarians—here, again, the author speaks about what is closer to him and what he feels more deeply.

Who will find this useful? Well, definitely not hard-core materialists who do not believe in a libertarian paradise, nor those looking for specific recommendations like “storming a forest belt under conditions of enemy drone countermeasures” or “features of the strategy of highly decentralized armies.” Escapists will definitely like the author’s world, that’s a fact, and we will all derive practical benefit from this work when the specified world arrives. And the last part of the book will definitely prove useful, where a quite realistic case is considered: states have started to fight (or a war has started inside a state)—what would be ethically justified to do to preserve both one’s libertarian faith and one’s skin in such a situation, is it permissible to side with someone, and if so, to what extent, how, and why, or is it ethically justified to simply get away from this mess as far as possible? In principle, considering that, as already mentioned, the war has affected quite a lot of people, among whom was clearly the target audience of the book, discussing the ethical issues of a libertarian’s behavior in a war between states is clearly not useless. Let us note that at the beginning, the author makes references to his first work—an introduction to libertarianism—and clearly indicates the target audience of the book (essentially, it is a second volume continuing the theme), so from this point of view, everything is correct. If you are not in that audience, there is no point in complaining about the text.

Ah, and in conclusion, one cannot fail to mention the author’s most original feature. Emotions, which people are guided by (and which are by definition irrational), he considers as imaginary entities, so-called spirits, by which people can be possessed, and which are quite real from the point of view of physical influence on the world and peculiar desires. That is, one can say that a person killed someone out of hatred and revenge for the sad fate of a sheep stolen from him, or one can say that he did it because he was possessed by the spirit of the sheep craving vengeance, and this spirit will not rest until the offender’s blood is spilled. All this is laid out, again, elegantly and poetically; the question arises—how justified is it to introduce extra entities? On one hand, it seems we haven’t said anything new; on the other—the irrationality of human behavior, which leads to quite material consequences, is emphasized, and a uniform view of the entire spectrum of such behavior is provided. So, I hope the metaphor takes root; it is quite unconventional.

A Book About Contracts, Trust, and Trading Enterprises

I asked ChatGPT to style my longread about the problem of contracts as an Arabic treatise. You can see how it handled it in the following text; I haven’t changed a single letter, for as the Lord said: leave man to his manliness, and leave the neural-slop to the neural networks.

A Treatise on How Men Maintain Justice in Their Affairs When There is No Single Sovereign Over Them

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

Praise be to Allah, Who created humans in need of one another and made the exchange of goods the cause of the prosperity of the lands. Peace and blessings be upon His Prophet, who was a merchant before he became a Messenger, and who said:

“The honest and trustworthy merchant will be on the Day of Resurrection with the prophets, the truthful, and the martyrs.”

Know then, O seeker of knowledge, that there exist societies where people primarily acquire what they desire through exchange, rather than through gift or violence. In such societies, well-being depends on trade, crafts, and mutual agreements. However, therein arises a particular difficulty: no one can guarantee in advance that every transaction will prove honest.

This is especially noticeable when one person fulfills their part of the agreement today, while another promises to fulfill theirs only after months or years.

Therefore, wise men since antiquity have resorted to written contracts.

The Almighty said in the Surah “Al-Baqarah”:

“O you who have believed! If you contract a debt for a specified term, write it down.”

Note that the Almighty does not command the recording of the purchase of an apple at the bazaar or a cup of sherbet in a teahouse. For such transactions are completed before a dispute can even arise. One hands over the goods, the other the money, and both depart satisfied.

But it is otherwise with agreements whose consequences stretch across time.

When a master hires a worker, he buys not labor already performed, but a promise of labor. When a craftsman accepts an order, he sells not a finished product, but a promise to manufacture it. When a merchant equips a caravan, he buys not goods, but the hope of future profit.

Therefore, the parties are forced to describe their expectations in detail.

Who provides the tools?

Who is responsible for damages?

How to distinguish diligence from negligence?

Which circumstances should be considered excusable?

Without such clarifications, each will later remember only that part of the conversation which is advantageous to them.

However, another difficulty arises here.

For human life is not like the drawings of a geometer.

Aristotle said that matters of practical wisdom do not possess the precision of mathematical objects. And indeed: if a triangle remains a triangle today and tomorrow, people are constantly changing.

A servant may become the friend of the master.

A student may become the companion of the teacher.

A companion may become a rival.

And a man hired to sweep the floor may turn out to be a skilled cook or a skilled thief.

Therefore, every contract is inevitably drawn up by people who know the future worse than it seems to them.

If the relationship ceases to benefit one of the parties, it can usually be terminated with moderate losses. The worker leaves the master, the master releases the worker, and the remaining disagreements are most often not so great as to destroy the lives of both parties for their sake.

But the most difficult case arises when it concerns the investment of capital.

For here the desires of the parties are inherently different.

He who gives the money would like to see it again someday, and with profit.

He who receives the money would be most pleased by a situation in which the money remains with him forever.

Therefore, commercial enterprises need a force that compels people to keep their promises.

However, here too, excess is as harmful as deficiency.

If coercion is too weak, no one will trust their funds to other people.

If coercion is too strong, then every unlucky entrepreneur risks becoming a slave to their creditors.

For the success of an enterprise is never guaranteed.

A ship may sink.

A caravan may be plundered.

A workshop may burn down.

And thus, not every loss is a consequence of deception.

Consequently, the prosperity of a state depends not on maximum severity nor on maximum leniency, but on the correct proportion between them.

In this matter, wisdom resembles what Aristotle called the mean between extremes.

For there exist two diseases of trade.

The first disease consists in that no one owes anyone anything.

In such a society, merchants quickly cease to trust one another, craftsmen work sloppily, and the borrower perceives other people’s money as a gift of fate.

The second disease is the opposite.

In such a society, every debtor lives under the threat of ruin, every worker chooses only between various forms of dependence, and those in power use their might to destroy competitors.

Both diseases are ruinous.

Therefore, reasonable people treat contracts with respect, but do not turn them into an object of worship.

For the contract exists for the benefit of people, and not people for the contract.

If every letter of the scroll becomes more important than common sense, then the contract gradually transforms from an instrument of cooperation into an instrument of domination.

For this reason, all trade rests on the presumption of good faith.

People must proceed from the assumption that their partner wishes to obtain benefit not through the destruction of the deal, but through its successful completion.

A good contract is beneficial to both parties.

If benefit is obtained by only one party, then we have before us not a contract, but a kind of command.

However, hope for good faith alone is not enough.

One must understand which forces make good faith profitable.

In all times, such a task was solved by communities.

A merchant did not travel simply as an individual.

Behind him stood his city.

His kin.

His guild.

His faith.

If the merchants of some city acquired a reputation as fraudsters, the next caravan from that city was met without former hospitality.

If anyone offended such merchants without cause, he risked bringing upon himself the enmity of the entire community.

Therefore, reputation became a kind of wealth.

Ibn Khaldun wrote that people achieve great goals only thanks to asabiyyah — mutual support and solidarity.

The same is true for trade.

However, here too, excess brings harm.

When belonging to a corporation becomes more important than a person’s abilities, the market loses flexibility.

Then monopoly takes the place of trust.

Privilege takes the place of reputation.

And coercion takes the place of cooperation.

Therefore, over time, other ways of ensuring trust emerged.

One of them was insurance.

In such a scheme, a third party appears, who receives payment for the readiness to cover losses from unforeseen circumstances.

But precisely because the insurer does not wish to pay extra, he carefully examines the behavior of the participants of the deal.

Thus, insurance not only distributes risks, but also encourages transparency.

However, it too is not a miracle.

Insurance protects well against misfortune, but protects poorly against evil intent.

If fraud proves more profitable than honest work, no insurance fund can exist for long.

Therefore, merchants also devised pledges and escrow accounts.

In some cases, the money remains with an intermediary until the obligations are fulfilled.

In other cases, the parties risk a pre-deposited security.

But these means too have limits.

They work well where the subject of the transaction already exists.

They work worse where the subject of the transaction is yet to be created.

Precisely for this reason, the most risky type of trade remains the investment of capital in new enterprises.

As the market develops, a greater number of interactions become customary.

Rules appear for them.

Standards.

Intermediaries.

Insurers.

Arbitrators.

Experience.

The world of trade gradually becomes like a beautiful garden, where the paths are paved with stone, dangerous places are fenced off, and a signpost stands at every intersection.

It is comfortable to live in such a garden.

But it is difficult to get rich.

For high profit arises where there are no paths yet.

Therefore, the largest fortunes are created not in the garden, but beyond its fence.

There, where merchants set out for unknown lands.

There, where seafarers seek new routes.

There, where people invest money not in an existing business, but in the mere possibility of its appearance.

Just as Sinbad the Sailor once obtained diamonds from a valley to which no safe path led, a prudent investor seeks opportunities where others see only danger.

Yes, dreamers, adventurers, and fraudsters will always gather around such enterprises.

But beside them, people capable of distinguishing fruitless madness from fruitful madness will also appear.

And it is they who will become the pioneers of new markets.

Others will come later, when the risk diminishes and the profit becomes more modest.

And therefore it should be concluded:

Contracts are necessary.

Reputation is necessary.

Surety is necessary.

Insurance is useful.

But none of these instruments is capable of completely ridging a person of risk.

For risk is the price people pay for the opportunity to discover something new.

And thus, the greatest riches are born not where there is no danger at all, but where people know how to face it with open eyes.

The Problem of Contracts

In the comments of Bitarch and Voluntarist’s post, a discussion flared up regarding contracts and their binding nature. Opinions ranged from the view that a contract is sacred to the view that a contract itself is not worth the paper it is written on, and that only the good will of the contracting parties matters. All this was accompanied by questions about how an ancap society is even supposed to be built if contracts are not observed there. I will try to outline my approach to the problem.

Ancap is a free market plus the decentralization of law. That is, on one hand, it presupposes developed exchange relations—gifting and coercion are not completely excluded, but they certainly do not dominate. On the other hand, there is no top-down guarantee that the exchange will prove to be fair. Especially in situations of deferred exchange, when one party to the deal provides real value right now, while the other promises some presumed value later.

Within the framework of this text, I will understand a contract as the accompaniment of an exchange transaction by certain non-obvious conditions. These are precisely what must be fixed in explicit form, because otherwise, it will inevitably turn out that the parties understood each other differently. There is no particular sense in composing a detailed text describing a transaction for buying vegetables at a market. Often, people don’t even ask for the price: a person simply scoops up the goods, shows them to the seller, the seller names some amount within reasonable limits, the person pays and leaves; everything works on defaults—so much so that one can even not know the language and simply show numbers on a calculator.

It is a different matter if it is assumed that the transaction should take place only if both parties agree to some deferred interaction. For example, there is an employment contract. One party promises productive labor, the other promises payment for that labor. But beyond this, a desire arises to ensure that the parties agree on which party provides the space, tools, and materials; what labor is considered productive and, accordingly, subject to payment, and what labor, conversely, is sabotage and subject to a fine; to what extent the employee is responsible for damage to the employer, and to what extent the employer for damage to the employee, and so on. Fixing this agreement in an explicit form allows, firstly, the parties themselves not to forget after some time what agreement was reached, and secondly, to appeal to this agreement in the event that any of the parties decides to involve third parties to secure their interests.

I need a diligent worker to build a palace…

There is an obvious problem here. Long-term relationships are inevitably accompanied by changes, sometimes quite radical. These changes may be impossible to predict in advance, or their possibility may have seemed too irrelevant at the start to be described. You hire a worker—and after some time you find that they are now a business partner or even a spouse. Or, conversely, that they are a competitor who secured the start of their own business using your client base. Or less radically: you hire a person for cleaning, and it turns out they also cook well. Or they clean the premises so thoroughly that they simultaneously “clean up” some valuables stored therein.

But employment is only half the battle. After all, if the relationship has changed significantly but both parties are interested in continuing it, the new relationship can be formalized through changes in the contract. And if one of the parties is interested in breaking off the relationship, they can simply leave the job or, accordingly, show the worker the door. In this case, the parties may have unresolved claims, but if the breakup is not delayed, the volume of claims will be small, and it will then be easier to write them off than to insist on a final settlement.

It is worse if we are talking about investments. There, a unilateral breach of relationship is precisely what the investor wants to avoid from the very beginning, whereas the recipient of investments is initially interested in exactly this scenario: just give me your money and leave forever. In order for investments to exist as a noticeable phenomenon despite such a powerful asymmetry in incentives, a systemic factor of coercion of the investment recipients is needed, so that they strive to fulfill the original agreements rather than presenting the investor with a fait accompli: the money is spent, there is no return, maybe something will be returned someday, inshallah. At the same time, when this factor works too harshly, the entrepreneur bears additional risks: the success of a business is never guaranteed, even if the entrepreneur did everything in accordance with the original business plan for which the investments were obtained. He may indeed find himself in a situation where the investments are spent, success is not achieved, there is nothing to return, and then the notorious coercion factor begins its violent actions to collect the debt. The cheaper coercion is for the investor, the more readily he will invest in dubious projects, and the harsher the conditions under which he provides investments will be.

The investment climate is precisely formed by the perception of such subtleties: how likely is the sudden intervention of third parties and natural forces into the bilateral relations fixed by the contract; how conscientious are entrepreneurs in following agreed-upon plans, or are they more inclined to collect money for one thing and spend it on another; but also conversely, how likely is it that the goal of providing investments is not the creation and development of a business, but the enslavement of the entrepreneur and turning him into a serf.

In other words, both extremes harm the economic prosperity of society. The conditionally left extreme is bad, where it is impossible to motivate a worker, and any somewhat complex project is simply not implemented because everyone has scattered to their own affairs and steals every single nail from work. And if you are foolish enough to lend money, you had better say goodbye to your money immediately; it will be spent on all sorts of good things, but by the very design of society, you are entitled to no benefit from this. But the conditionally right extreme is also bad, where a worker has a choice between several types of indentured contracts and starving to death, and if someone wishes to work for themselves using borrowed funds, the payment schedule will put them in conditions as difficult as those of a hired worker, only with the hourly prospect of falling into debt slavery. If someone starts a business using their own honestly saved funds, the person who has the resources to coerce their workers and debtors into order feels an irresistible temptation to use those resources to put spokes in the wheels of an independent competitor, even if this would be considered an unlawful act.

Ifrits or djinn? Marx or Pinochet?

Applying this to the topic of contracts, it means that, on one hand, contracts, being evidence of the existence of complex and structured declarations of the parties, are absolutely necessary in a society with a developed market and, generally speaking, should be respected. But, on the other hand, the desire to observe any contract to the last letter at any cost, as well as the desire to describe all conceivable conditions of interaction between the parties in contracts with incomprehensible precision, is counterproductive and leads to the loss of that very respect for contracts, since they begin to be perceived more as a tool of violence by the party who drafted the contract over the party who was given a ready-made text to sign.

The most important thing in contractual relations is the presumption of good faith of the participants. Both the parties to the contract and public opinion must be confident that a contract is, firstly, a privilege of equals (a document describing unequal relations is called a “statute”), secondly, stems from the parties’ desire for their own benefit, and thirdly, a good contract is beneficial to both parties. It is this presumption of good faith that makes one party seriously and benevolently consider the other party’s statement that the previous terms of the contract are no longer beneficial to them and therefore it is desirable to revise them, or if this is impossible, to carefully terminate the contract.

But good faith is not inherent in everyone and not under all conditions. In order for the presumption of good faith to justify itself, rather than prompting one to enter into contracts with fraudsters over and over again, one must understand that powerful incentives work toward this very good faith. It remains to understand what these incentives could be in a world with a developed market and an absence of centralized coercion.

Historically, such incentives were provided almost exclusively by the counterparty’s membership in a particular community that bore a share of responsibility for its member and was therefore forced to independently ensure their good faith in relations with the outside world. If merchants from a certain polis cheated while trading, subsequent merchants from that polis might be robbed or denied entry to the harbor. And if merchants from a certain polis were robbed without reason, a punitive expedition might sail in their stead. Or no one might sail at all, because your polis had acquired a bad reputation among traders. If you hire a stonemason from the guild of free masons, he will work so as not to bring shame upon his corporation. If Swiss mercenaries flee the battlefield, who will be interested in hiring Swiss mercenaries?

However, relying only on such insurance groups also entails costs. At some point, for example, it may turn out that you have the right to hire only a union member, otherwise both you and your worker are guaranteed problems. And now membership in a professional community becomes not a sign of quality, but simply an imposed inevitability. Tying a person to a corporation deprives the market of flexibility, forces the loss of profitable opportunities, slows down progress and, ultimately, harms general prosperity, not to mention that it provokes conflicts out of nowhere—that is, when outsiders poke into things that are seemingly not their business, claiming that they have an interest in this matter.

But if a person does not belong to a group that bears responsibility for them, how can their good faith be guaranteed through purely market incentives? In many cases, insurance can help. A third party is brought into the transaction, who receives an insurance premium and in exchange undertakes to guarantee compensation for damages from unforeseen circumstances that arose despite the good faith execution of contractual obligations by the parties. This party is interested in paying nothing for the insurance event and will therefore try to prove the bad faith of one party or another. This means that the parties become interested in drafting the contract and conducting business as transparently as possible so as not to be left holding the bag when it comes to the prospect of insurance payments.

Will such a scheme help us? Alas, only partially. It does not protect against conscious fraud if the profit from it exceeds the amount of the insurance premium. The fraudster has left with the money, and the insurance company shrugs and says that there is clear bad faith of the counterparty, which they did not insure against and do not intend to insure, because today you pay for the loss from a fraudster’s actions, and tomorrow half of all deals will become fraudulent.

To provide guarantees in trade and employment, escrow account mechanisms and various collateral schemes help quite well. In the case of escrow, the participants of the deal lose the ability to receive payment until they prove the fact of execution of contractual obligations to a third party. In the case of collateral, the loss of one participant of the deal from the actions of another is compensated by the value of the collateral. But this does not help protect the investor at all, because in investments for creating a business from scratch, it is specifically the investor who puts in the money, and the entrepreneur only gives a promise to direct this money toward creating a business that should bring profit.

Is this vulnerability so critical? One must look at the context. The market develops a habit of typical actions because they save transaction costs. In a developed market, competition leads to a decrease in insurance commissions, so insuring risks becomes not particularly expensive, and this is done almost everywhere. The world of typical market interactions turns into a cozy park with paved paths, detailed infographics, and fences in all dangerous places. Sweet, cozy, beautiful, and zero drive. In other words, the profitability of business decreases. A good haul can only be made by opening a new market. And only here do we enter the space of unprotected investments.

Venture investing, based on a bare business idea, is a conscious risk for the chance of a big win. Yes, this sphere will attract strange people: project-pushers, “info-gypsies,” simple fraudsters. But from the investors’ side, those who are ready to deal with such a crowd will enter this sphere—those who can sift through insane projects to find those whose insanity looks noble, reinforce inventor-maniacs with clever managers and technical specialists—in short, the market will reward those who set sail not in a washbasin, but at least in a caravel. And then legends will be composed about them, and someone will also earn money on the reproduction of these legends.

No more drinks for Sinbad!

Contracts, restitution, and pocket courts

The Austrian School denies objective value—value is determined by the subjective assessment of the parties at the moment of the transaction. However, Rothbard’s theory of restitution requires that a penalty correspond to the “actually transferred asset.” If value is subjective, then a corporation’s private court is entitled to recognize a $10 million fine for resigning from a post as a legitimate “transferred title”—and qualify the employee’s departure as fraud, opening the way to forced restitution through labor.

Who determines the proportionality of a penalty clause in a contract, and on what basis, if objective value does not exist and the interpretation is carried out by a court hired by one of the parties?

Konweni

As stated in the wording of the question, value is determined by the subjective assessment of the parties at the moment of the transaction. Accordingly, if a penalty amount is specified in the contract in case of its termination, it means that at the time of signing, the value of concluding the contract was higher for the potential payer of the penalty than the amount of the penalty itself. And if the penalty specified in the contract seems absurdly high to an outside observer, this tells us that it was absolutely imperative for the party in question to conclude this agreement at that moment. Another explanation is that the party signing the contract did not read the penalty clause or rashly assumed that it was some kind of nonsense that no one would take seriously, the key points were discussed verbally, and everything else is just empty legal blah-blah-blah.

However, since the question specifically refers to Rothbard’s opinion, he does not make the qualification about the actually transferred title of ownership for nothing. If an employee had been paid an advance and then left the job without working it off, then the penalty is justified, and its size can be calculated precisely from the amount of the advance (for example, the unpaid amount plus the costs of an urgent search for a replacement employee). But if the labor has not yet been paid for, then the asset has not been transferred, which means that penalty sanctions are inappropriate. This is simply a matter of a broken promise. The employer can try to demonstrate to the court what costs he incurred as a result of the employee’s actions, and the court may well take these calculations into account.

Of course, the contract may contain a clause stating that all disputes are settled in a certain court, which is a pocket court of the employer, unknown to the hired employee at the time of signing. The problem, however, is that the court itself does not engage in the enforcement of its decisions, and in the absence of a state, the plaintiff will have to do this themselves at their own expense (and they will also have to put the court entirely on their payroll, as clients are unlikely to flock there on their own). Of course, through his pocket court, he can impose a crazy penalty on the employee who fled from him, and then send thugs to force him to work it off, provided that the employee does not have such funds. But the economics of such actions only begin to add up in colonial conditions, that is, in the presence of overwhelming military superiority of a cohesive group of colonizers over a fragmented mass of natives. Directly in a free society, being a part of it, it will not be possible to pull off such tricks systematically; the non-legal nature of such an organization of work would be far too obvious. Even if this does not lead to unexpected sanctions from actual or potential counterparties, the employer will have to organize forced labor in a society with free labor, where no one will help him, for example, catch runaway workers. You need it, you catch them. And new workers will likely go and be hired by a competitor.

And now I will answer the asked question directly. Who will assess the proportionality of the penalty and on what basis? The employee will assess it, based on their own subjective considerations. If they pay voluntarily, then it is tolerable. If not, see the paragraph above.

— Hm, maybe I should sign? But that portrait on the wall is far too suspicious…

The Problem of Cartel Collusion in the Sphere of Protection under Ancap

Mancur Olson, in “The Logic of Collective Action,” proved that small groups with concentrated interests always win the coordination game against a diffuse majority due to the free-rider problem. Three CEOs will agree over dinner; a million customers never will, because each rationally waits for others to take the risk first.

What specific mechanism in ancap prevents a cartel agreement between two or three of the largest protection agencies to divide territories?

Konweni

This is a question that also concerned David Friedman. In the chapter “The Mechanics of Freedom,” concerning economies of scale, he reasons that in the law enforcement market, there seems to be a more pronounced positive economy of scale than he initially thought, which in turn increases the likelihood of a cartel agreement.

It seems to me that the cause of this excessive pessimism is the overestimation of the importance of direct armed protection in the security market. Literary descriptions of the security market under ancap are filled with some kind of universal protection agencies that are responsible for security in general across the most diverse aspects and scale easily. Of course, such an initial monopoly, already given in the problem statement, leads an honest analyst to conclude that such agencies will tend to grow significantly and enter into cartels, and their impact on people will be completely total, making the sale of such security services terribly dangerous for clients, as it is only one step away from total enslavement.

But where will these protection agencies come from? Who will be their clients, and what services will they buy from them?

Suppose I don’t live in peaceful Montenegro, where every house has a legal shotgun plus a couple of black guns left over from the war, but, say, in some place like Brazil. I have reasons to fear street attacks, car theft, and break-ins at my home. And then, a startup opens in the city that is ready to serve me, even if I wander into the favelas. What does such a startup need, within the technologies relevant at the time of writing this post? To reach an agreement with the company that owns the lamp posts to place cameras on them, as well as landing pads for drones with a charging function. Then, AI tracks suspicious actions, such as breaking into a house door or a car; a drone takes off from the nearest pole and demands a justification for the legality of the actions. In the case of an aggressive response, it applies measures of influence to the suspect, for example, firing a taser, after which it calls a live squad to process the detention. Similarly, in the case of an attack on a person: it flies in, demands they stop, reasons with those who ignore the instruction, waits for the squad, and returns to the nest. And then comes the court proceeding regarding how much to recover from the aggressor.

After working in this market for six months, the startup is surprised to find that its services are becoming less in demand because the city has become noticeably safer. And what, should they now start harassing me clandestinely so that I renew my subscription? No, of course not; they will simply make the subscription cheaper, and the drones that spend most of their time idle will be used, for example, for delivering pizza.

And what about peaceful Montenegro—do I not need protection agency services there at all? Of course I do. I need it so that when I break my leg while hiking in the mountains, brave rescuers in a helicopter fly to me and pull me out of that hole. Or pull me out of a car that flew off a cliff. Or find me in the sea when a storm carries me far from shore on a SUP board. Or get a cat down from a tree.

You realize that a Brazilian security startup won’t be able to enter the Montenegrin market because that market is completely different? Protection agencies are doomed to locality due to the local nature of threats, and are also doomed to a small size because the nature of threats also tends to change. It is harder for a large company to change, which means inefficiency, and inefficiency means saying goodbye to market share.

But surely there are functions for protection agencies that would be in demand globally? Of course there are, but these are specialized functions. For example, to find someone anywhere on planet Earth who owes me a vast amount of money and refuses to return it. Or a person who killed my mother and knows that I would like to burn him on her funeral pyre because she will need a servant there. Such agencies will not sell a subscription for service; they will have to take on rare one-off orders, as this market is too specific. It is impossible to build global dominance with the prospect of bending anyone to your will and subjecting them to your sinister market power based on this.

And what about the prospect of an external armed invasion? Shouldn’t private military companies be the backbone of any respectable social order if it wishes to call itself ancap? Shouldn’t such companies unite into a mega-cartel dictating its will to all of humanity? To the great regret of the adepts of this branch of human development, in peacetime, the peaceful average citizen is not inclined to finance the military. He doesn’t need war; he doesn’t buy it. An invasion army can only be equipped if you establish taxation on your territory. However, a militia for protection against an invasion army organizes itself in the presence of a free market—quickly, efficiently, and not too expensively, as shown by the experience of at least the Ukrainian war.

Continuing to settle into Nostr: building a pyramid

In my previous post on this topic, I told you how I set up my own personal Nostr relay. I used strfry, which is quite popular for large relays because it is stable and performant. However, I also wanted ease of configuration so that I wouldn’t have to work magic with console commands every time. An attempt to attach a web control panel on top of the existing relay was unsuccessful. The Khatru relay suggested by Grok turned out to be a project abandoned in early 2026. But its developer is @fiatjaf, the author of Nostr itself, and he doesn’t just abandon projects. So I started looking into what he is developing as a replacement and came across Pyramid. This is a specialized relay for community management; meaning, while it can handle basic relay functions, it also helps manage various private and club-like features.

After some tinkering, I uninstalled strfry and installed pyramid. Voila — I have an engine for developing an online community, and half a day later, the first invited client of the new relay appears. We discuss the process on Nostr in the comments of my previous post, and I tag the software creator. Fiatjaf likes this comment and then comes to me on Telegram, congratulates me on installing Pyramid, and starts asking for feedback on both the relay and Nostr in general. We already had a chat history from the time when he created a popular custodial Lightning wallet in the form of a Telegram bot, and I actively promoted it (that project was wound down, and Nostr emerged to replace it).

Anyway, I gave all the feedback I was capable of, given my limited experience and competence:

  • I asked for a more convenient format for adding a new user to the relay: the user clicks to leave a request, I click to approve or deny the request — basically, the familiar Telegram method. I received a promise that this would be done soon.
  • I asked for a monitoring service for relay availability from different corners of the network, suggesting an implementation option that doesn’t require renting servers all over the world. Fiatjaf said the option was doubtful, but he would try to attach one third-party service instead.
  • I asked for a service for local key generation so that new users could be sure that the Nostr client would not have access to their private key. He replied that he had already built a whole set of such utilities — both for offline key generation and for offline event signing, so security advocates can sleep soundly.

That’s where my imagination ran out for now, but I certainly assume that readers have or will soon have their own brilliant ideas.

Anyway, for anyone interested in testing a specialized relay for community management, welcome. Leave requests in the comments, and I will send the invitation link via DM — for now, this is the not-so-convenient connection mechanism in place.

https://stuff.fiatjaf.com — a collection of various things from the author of Nostr

https://github.com/fiatjaf/pyramid — description of the Pyramid relay

https://relay.ancapchan.info — my relay, where you can observe the community participant tree growing and publications appearing from them

I hope you won’t need a special guide on how to set up a Nostr account. Since it is a very decentralized ecosystem, there are already tons of ways to enter it, as well as ways to use it. But anyway, let me recommend that you start exploring via the Nostria client. I also know the developer there, Sondre Bjellos, a participant in the Liberstad and Montelibero projects; he lives three kilometers away from me (when he doesn’t head back to his native Norway, of course) and is very actively developing his client.