Автор: Анкап-тян

Montelibero project news, issue 9

The previous issue began with a description of the drainage work on the road leading to the future Monte Libero settlement. Over the past month, the drainage has been seriously improved. First, at the very beginning of the road, the area near the spring was completely concreted, and the overflow from the basin was routed into a pipe under this concrete platform.

Secondly, further up the road, wherever there is a risk of erosion, even a small drainage ditch has been added. In general, the road definitely won’t wash away now. Please forgive me for highlighting such minor details, but with the treacherous weather here, you learn to appreciate exactly those details.

While filling in the internal roads of the settlement, serious drainage was required in one particular spot. Upon closer inspection, it was discovered that groundwater runs close to the surface in this area, and for now, water is seeping directly onto the road. This means we have solved the water supply problem! Or rather, we’ve found an approach to the solution. Now the plan is to lead this water aside along the road across the entire width of the aquifer and collect it in a storage basin, from where it can then be used. In short, to do roughly the same thing as we did down there where we concreted the platform. For now, of course, it looks unsightly:

And besides water supply and drainage, the settlement will also need sewage. We decided to make one common septic tank, and it is already practically ready; all that’s left is to dig a drainage ditch away from it (is that too much drainage in one post?), and then sewage pipes will need to be laid throughout the settlement.

We invited a surveyor, and with his help, we divided all the land into separate plots, which are intended to be privatized. My plot is roughly in the center of this image, with an area of 202 sq.m. I hope that in some time I will be able to delight you in my Instagram with images from my own personal construction.

But actually, besides these two large pieces of land, we were also sold an exclave as an add-on—a piece slightly smaller than seven hundred square meters, to which we have no way of bringing a road except through the neighbors.

We have finally cleared it of thick brush as well. It turned out that it is even terraced, which will save some money on its development.

With all these chores, I haven’t yet had the chance to mount a few solar panels on the roof of the hut (there is a stupid regulation here forbidding the placement of panels on the ground, intended to limit solar generation strictly to domestic needs) and check whether all this is capable of powering a miner. But we hope to get to this soon.

Of course, activity within the project is not limited to construction. We have gradually formed a team for creating various targeted promotional content. They released a video with an annual report on the entire project,

as well as a separate video in the local dialect describing unconditional basic income.

There is an opinion that libertarians are social Darwinists who would happily watch the weak die off and clear the field. In practice, however, mutual aid is quite developed in our small community, and project participants from the outside world have decided to support those who have already moved, regularly chipping in money, from which an unconditional income is paid weekly to all libertarians who moved to Montenegro as part of the Monte Libero project—simply the contents of the piggy bank are divided equally among everyone. This is roughly how social welfare works under ancap, without any taxes. For now, it comes to about two and a half euros per person per week, meaning about ten a month. This amount could increase if more people want to fill the pot, or decrease if more people move in while contributions remain the same. Overall, it is an interesting experiment, and it is still waiting for its team of sociologists for a correct description.

Another social program within the project is bike rentals. For about a month, a couple stayed with us, who during that time rode and explored the entire area, for which they bought a pair of bikes. Now this transport has been handed over to the project, and it can be borrowed for donations.

Another subtle but important area of activity in the project is the improvement of tokenomics—the cryptocurrency engine on which everything revolves. The financial reporting of the Monte Libero fund is becoming clearer, signing transactions with multi-sig, and most importantly, reading them before signing, is becoming more convenient (which means more mindful participation in fund management), and our IT specialists have big plans for implementing various new features. Thus, a branch of the fund in Liquid—a Bitcoin sidechain—is gradually being polished. For now, all tokenomics run on the Stellar blockchain, which means hardcore Bitcoiners simply won’t join us because alts are “cringe.” If it’s possible to implement the necessary functionality within the toolkit available in the older and more venerable currency, it could potentially add more investors.

Recently, news flickered that the Slovenian visa center in Montenegro has closed for quarantine, and this is worrying because it was the easiest way to get a Schengen visa here in Montenegro. The thing is, we want to take a Monte Libero delegation at the end of April to a large libertarian convention in Prague, however, COVID and bureaucracy are capable of seriously complicating this task. So, not everything is smooth, but it’s okay, we’ll push through.

Conclusion of the discussion of the false dilemma

In previous episodes: my summary of Konstantin Morozov’s article “Anarchism against Anarchy,” and my statement of the key thesis of this article by presenting the reader with a false dilemma.

Next, Konstantin responded to my article on his channel, and in the comments under that post, we had a more or less substantive discussion. This left each party with a feeling of being right, while simultaneously being accompanied by an adjustment by each side—not so much of their previously stated position, but of the approach to presenting it. The final response in the conversation belongs to Konstantin, and I will probably leave the last word to him, so as not to write another update on this same topic shortly.

I don’t know about you, but left-libertarianism has become a bit clearer to me. Not in the sense that I have become closer to it, but in the sense that I now expect less cannibalism from its typical representatives than from some conditional Karl Franco, even if he were thrice right-wing and thrice an ancap.

Konstantin Morozov and the False Dilemma

Let me remind you what this is about. Here is a summary of the first article by Konstantin Morozov—about how libertarians should embrace moral realism and, along with it, agree to certain taxes; and here is a summary of the second article—about how libertarians should embrace moral realism and, along with it, agree to the state and some form of state coercion. For those who doubt whether the articles were summarized correctly, there are links to the original sources that you can review.

In my view, Konstantin is proposing a false dilemma. Here is a chair with the spikes of moral realism; if you sit on it, your desires mean nothing as long as they contradict the only correct objective morality, which will be dictated to you by the state through the mouths of court intellectuals. And here is a chair with the dicks of moral subjectivism; sit on it, and your desires mean no more than the desires of any statist.

Of course, after the marginalist revolution in economic theory, there is no longer any point in seriously talking about the objectivity of values, and moral philosophers can strain every nerve trying to invent syllogisms to prove the opposite—so, without a second thought, I take a seat on the second chair and begin to proclaim from this cozy tripod, trying to do so more coherently than is typical for Pythias.

In my book about ancap, I describe morality as follows:

  • Conflict is a state in which the same object (the subject of the conflict) is viewed as a means to achieve different goals, whereby one use hinders the other or even makes it impossible.
  • Every person develops their own internal settings regarding which behavioral tactic to choose in which conflicts. These are their personal ethical norms.
  • As for morality, it is simply the order of behavior during conflicts that garners the greatest approval in a given society.

Thus, morality is based on the subjective values of individuals, but at the same time, it constitutes an abstract object that can be roughly outlined in some set commandments, while the subtleties of one or another morality can be dissected in hundreds of treatises and thousands of literary texts. In particular, we can describe libertarian morality quite clearly; a considerable number of libertarians accept these norms in general for themselves, though, of course, they will not hesitate to argue over various subtle points.

Naturally, libertarian morality includes a norm on the permissibility of coercion for the purpose of the fair resolution of conflicts (fairness being the sense of proportionality between the value of the object of conflict and the damage caused by the conflict). But at the same time, libertarian morality also requires a person to personally enter a conflict on the fair side, and this completely negates any attempts at a monopoly in the sphere of legitimate coercion. For a libertarian, the value of decentralization is higher than the value of monetary efficiency. All other things being equal, they will prefer a decentralized solution. If a centralized one is significantly more profitable, they may permit its use as a moral compromise and continue searching for a line of behavior that is more morally comfortable for them.

I am not speaking now in categories of “ought.” No one must adopt specifically libertarian morality. But if they do, their actions will be driven by approximately the considerations outlined above. Libertarian desires are better than the desires of statists—for libertarians, because values are subjective. They are also better than the desires of statists for many other anarchists, minarchists, liberals, conservatives, and several other abstract moral types. My task is simple—to formulate these desires and follow them. As for the fluttering of individual moral philosophers around the chair with spikes, I prefer to consider it simply a variety of intellectual masochism. Why not, as long as they don’t pounce on people.

Anarchism versus anarchy, an explication

I read an article by Konstantin Morozov with the beautiful title Anarchism vs. Anarchy.

Briefly, it states that: 1) there is philosophical anarchism, meaning the belief that the state has no moral right to coerce people, and there is political anarchism, meaning the belief that the state should be abolished; 2) political anarchism does not necessarily follow from philosophical anarchism, and one can deny the state the right to coercion without seeking to eliminate the state.

Konstantin claims: principled anarchism requires moral realism—the belief that objectively true moral judgments exist… because otherwise, anarchism itself would be nothing more than a set of someone’s personal desires. Meanwhile, anarchists do not deny the legitimacy of all coercion; they allow it to prevent more terrible coercion. But if coercion is permissible, for example, to prevent even more terrible coercion, then why cannot the state handle this? In other words, if the state behaves well, why should we demand its abolition? And any examples of bad states can always be dismissed as private cases subject to targeted correction.

The article would be incomplete if the author had not taken the trouble to address the obvious question: why does the state suppress its competitors in the matter of legitimate coercion? As a justification, it is argued that a proper state, to which philosophical anarchists should have no complaints, limits competitors for the sake of adhering to uniform, transparent procedural rules—in other words, to exclude vigilantism. That is, self-defense is fine, but dismembering a neutralized offender is not fine (shout out to Alexander Tatarkov and his constant leitmotif “we don’t need state prisons, give me the person who molested my daughter, I’ll sell him for organs”).

In the second part of the article, the author analyzes the question of how one might try to bypass the holes he found in the justification of political anarchism through moral subjectivism. It will not be possible to justify the state’s claim to exercise justified coercion if there is no single and universal standard for the justifiability of coercion. Next, he gallops through Stirner, Svetov, Belkovich, and Hoppe. Konstantin’s objections to the ideas of the aforementioned individuals boil down to the following:

If the individual himself is the final authority in determining good and bad, then why would coercing someone into moral orders to which they did not consent be wrong? Their subjective judgment on this matter cannot carry more weight than the equally subjective judgment of the person exercising the coercion that this coercion is justified.

In other words, in Konstantin’s opinion, if we take the position of moral subjectivism, we leave ideas about the necessity of abolishing the state even more without any support. For some, the state is evil; for others, it is good; everyone is right, let’s move on.

In conclusion, the author states that the most promising direction of work for anarchists is the search for strong practical arguments in favor of the idea that a stateless society will be effective, while any militant rhetoric directed at the state would be better tempered, looking instead at plans for various useful reforms.

I have already summarized Morozov’s previous article on moral realism once, but I never commented on it, and in the meantime, he has written more. In the next post, I do intend to speak out on the interesting questions he has raised.

Oh, if only people were as kind as beavers!

I have one tiny but lovely channel in my subscriptions, primarily about practical agorism, but occasionally it drifts into reflecting on more abstract things. And not so long ago, it suddenly began a series of posts on the bitarchy theory of restructuring humanity based on a violence inhibition mechanism. Naturally, I couldn’t pass this up; I waited until the series finished, and now I recommend it to you, along with the channel itself.

It begins with this post, and further on, you can read many posts almost consecutively up until this one, the final one. Fortunately, they are mostly short. I usually lack the tediousness to dive into overly detailed breakdowns of complex topics, so I gladly leave those to the men, and then I assimilate the resulting product and recommend it to others if I find it worthy.

The author concludes with a significant remark:

The question remains open: “what would be the most clever replacement for Lorentz’s theory?”. I’m still thinking.

State 2.0

In a friendly project Libertarian State (formerly called Anti-State, which sort of hints at the evolution of thought), a translation of Aviezer Tucker’s article Panarchy: State 2.0 has been released. The article is not particularly remarkable, as it outlines the main ideas in defense of panarchy established by the originator of the term, Émile du Châtelet.

Following this, Wed Neuman, who actually runs this channel, released his own article on state 2.0, where he begins with a critique of Tucker and then develops his own theoretical constructs, moving from the original ideas of panarchy to the concept of charter cities.

To start, Wed redefines the concept of the state. Instead of the representation of the state as a monopolist of legitimate violence, which repels libertarians, he proposes to define the state as a stably maintained infrastructure for human habitation on a certain, not necessarily strictly fixed, territory. This is a far more “herbivorous” understanding of the subject, which brackets out all sorts of discussions about stationary bandits and other journalistic rhetoric, focusing instead on the actual organization of life.

The main prediction of the article is that as charter cities spread, state 1.0 will increasingly be reduced to the role of a concierge, receiving a fixed payment for this.

Regarding strategy, Wed still sees Paul Romer’s approach as the most optimal: on clean, uninhabited territory, from scratch, preceding construction by obtaining firm guarantees from the state, and detailing their own charter, on the basis of which further interaction between state 2.0 and its citizens will be built.

It is not hard to see that we, in Montelibero, are acting suboptimally according to Wed: we haven’t officially notified the state that we are conducting political experiments on its territory, but instead try to seep through stealthily and, if necessary, legalize ourselves only after we have developed. I don’t know, it seems to me that this is actually more reliable: it is much easier to gain factual recognition than prior permission. Imagine if Satoshi-sensei had asked someone if he could launch Bitcoin…

Stefan Molyneux. Practical Anarchy. Translation of Chapter 9, again on collective defense.

Chapter 9 concludes the first part of Stephan Molneux’s Practical Anarchy, which is dedicated to methodology; following this will be the second part on argumentation, a considerable portion of which has already been translated and published in draft form by volunteers. Therefore, in my spare time, I will refine the next six chapters slightly and will report back once they are done, to avoid making too many small updates.

While in the eighth chapter Molneux explains why collective defense against external invasion is more effective under anarchy than under a state, in the ninth he uses several historical examples to show what is wrong with the state’s so-called defense.

Unlike the translation of Eric Mack, which is funded by Alex Dvoretsky, and David Friedman, which is funded by Dima Kovalenko, a permanent sponsor for the translation of this particular book has not materialized. Bitarch was involved here, but he seems to have lost interest; I would be glad if someone else takes the initiative.

Differences between the Chicago and Austrian schools

Today I came across a translation of an article by Zolotorev regarding the differences between the approaches of the Chicago and Austrian schools of economics. The author refers to a certain discussion about these differences that he conducted via correspondence. I suspect that this discussion was largely triggered by an article by David Friedman, in which he discusses this very difference in approaches in detail. He linked to it on his Facebook, and later returned to this topic several more times there. And this (I don’t rule it out) started with my question about what exactly he finds unsatisfactory about the ASE – in an online interview that he gave to Russian-speaking readers to mark the release of the Russian translations of The Machinery of Freedom.

In short, if there is public interest, I can translate Friedman’s article, as well as individual more or less substantive reactions from the Austrians. I will, of course, measure this interest by the number of donations received in the near future. There is also an interest for me here, because I am very interested in Friedman’s economic analysis of law, on which I plan to base much of the second part of my book about ancap, and I want to have a clearer idea of how compatible all these considerations are with the ASE.

Marriage

Legal marriage is a tripartite transaction. Can an unregistered marriage (a bilateral transaction) be considered ideologically correct from the perspective of ancap and libertarianism? If so, can it be said that a state that has “banned same-sex marriage” (actually just refusing to enter into certain types of transactions, but not criminalizing homosexuality and relationships—as in Russia, for example) is violating LGBT rights? Under ancap, will there be something similar to a registry office (ZAGS)?

Moskvich

Marriage has many functions, but none of them is defining. Marriage can be a union for joint housekeeping, but there are also guest marriages. It can be a cooperative for raising children, but there are childless marriages, as well as raising children outside of marriage. It can be used to establish the right to legally represent one’s marital partner—but in a traditional society, this right may remain with the partners’ parents.

The most general thing that can be said about almost any marriage is that it is a relationship involving a certain sufficiently long-term and sufficiently broad trust between people, which then manifests in the spheres where these people wish to realize themselves. In housekeeping—so be it. In sex—so be it. In children—so be it. In political activism—here, marriage is an indispensable thing.

Why inform others of one’s marital status? Primarily to notify those around that in a certain human collective, its participants grant each other such-and-such rights. Does such a need persist in a stateless society? Yes, it does, because people generally value predictability. This person is taken; one should not hit on them. Great, that is certainty. From this person, one can demand the debt of another person because they have a joint household. Convenient? Convenient. A child should not be unclaimed; someone is certainly responsible for them. If you see an unclaimed child, you know exactly what to do. Little girl, where are your parents?

Thus, as long as people enter into long-term trusting relationships, they will most likely communicate this at least to their constant circle of communication. But do they need to bother and formalize their relationships with a serious formal contract implying the possibility of forced enforcement? That is unlikely. People frequently conduct commercial activities without drawing up papers, let alone organizing daily life, regulating sex, or undertaking a joint crossing of the Atlantic on a yacht. Marriage is a relationship of trust, and people are usually inclined not to spoil these relationships with paperwork.

Another matter is that others may care about what is happening between people in a marriage. What if it is same-sex, closely related, with teenagers, animals, or dolls. Even in the most tolerant libertarian society, those around want to be sure, at the very least, that the marriage is voluntary, and that there is no domestic violence or other archaic chthonic horrors. But even here, it is completely unimportant to others what kind of paper these relationships are formalized with; they will hit the face, not the passport.

I believe that under ancap, a notary system or something similar will be preserved—for example, instead of notaries, volunteers with a good reputation could act as witnesses. These witnesses will confirm the facts of concluding certain agreements, a tiny fraction of which will be marriage contracts. I do not believe in the mass recording of transactions in blockchains; they either have a terrible shortage of space, or their expansion will quickly run into economic and technological limitations. On the other hand, current registry offices are also big data collection points, but this role is already shifting to various online social platforms, and it is unlikely they will handle it any worse.

E-karma

I read Latynina’s article about the subject with great interest. In some ways, it echoes a recent video by Libertarian Band about the Metaverse, but the article is far more detailed than the video. From an economic standpoint, the e-karma scheme looks decent, although it’s not entirely clear to me how it is protected against bot farms. Here, I lack the IT qualifications to assess the viability of the idea presented, so it would be great if some IT specialist could do so in the comments.