Автор: Анкап-тян

I haven’t found a detailed libertarian analysis of the origin of the 2008 crisis. The answer that state regulation is to blame for everything is clear, but insufficient.

Anonymous question

I will use this question to reflect on something abstract.

Humans have a natural abyss of empathy. Not surprisingly, since we are social animals. Thus, a person usually enjoys doing what they consider to be good, especially if others also agree that it is good. But it is usually sporadic acts of kindness that are pleasant. Out of generosity, a person performs a one-time good deed and departs, pleased with themselves—after all, it is wonderful when it costs you absolutely nothing to make someone else feel good. If the recipient expresses gratitude, it may increase their chances of receiving another good deed in the future, but one should not rely on this too heavily. Once good deeds become a routine, they begin to be perceived as work. And for work, one wants payment.

So, we pulled a person out of a destitute anarcho-commune and were quite satisfied with how wonderfully we organized the expedition. But then it turned out that the person is completely lacking in independence, very capricious, doesn’t know how to work, and dreams only of living on a generous social benefit. We fell into a trap, because we have no desire to continue carrying this burden, yet we can’t exactly throw them out onto the street. They live like a pet, yearning and whining. It’s unpleasant.

Now let’s imagine that we have a large external source of funding for charity. In this case, of course, it would be no problem for us to rent an apartment for the person that satisfies their demanding tastes, give them an undemanding job that they can actually perform—and if they can’t, who cares—or simply provide them with an annuity, and let them live for their own pleasure; why not? And why should we personally bother? We’ll hire a separate social worker to sit on a salary and wipe their nose, while we will only rejoice in how kind we are and how much benefit we have brought. It’s pleasant.

That is how the social state works: you take money from the budget and do good at someone else’s expense, because you are a kind person. And taxpayers are kind people, so why would they refuse to pay social taxes, since they go toward good deeds! And if taxpayers’ money is not enough for all our ambitious social programs, it’s no problem—we can issue government debt bonds, or simply print new money; this is far more humane toward taxpayers than taking more from them than they are used to paying.

Kind government men desperately wanted even a poor person to be able to afford a good home. Therefore, special organizations were created to finance these expenses. And banks were ordered to generously issue mortgage loans to poor people so they could afford a house. The trouble with the social state, however, is that someone else’s money eventually runs out.

How did it happen that the mortgage crisis turned into a global financial one? What can you do, humans are social animals. Papers that were considered ultra-reliable turned out to be junk, and everyone collectively began to look suspiciously at their own portfolios of securities, wondering if it was time to dump the junk before others did it first. The global financial market deflated significantly, meaning those who lost their capital outnumbered those who profited from the crisis.

But who is even interested in that ancient crisis when we are living in the heat of a new one? And this one, too, was caused by kind people who terribly did not want miserable people to die right on the streets from the terrible coronavirus. People were put under house arrest, forcibly stuffed with experimental medicines, had tests shoved in every orifice, streets were sprayed with chemicals, beautiful fluffy minks were destroyed—what wouldn’t one do out of love for humanity at someone else’s expense!

This does not mean that covid does not exist. Poverty also exists. And homeless people exist. But when you try to solve other people’s problems by paying for it out of your own pocket rather than someone else’s, you will have much more balanced priorities regarding how much to spend and on what exactly. And that means that your kindness, at least, will not cause global crises.

Montelibero Project News, Issue 7

In the previous issue, I wrote about the fact that excess forest had been cleared on the plot for our future libertarian village and road construction had begun. As of today, the road to the plot is fully graded, and I can now ride my scooter right under the shade of the native olives.

In the second half of October, I personally took a job working on the road construction and plot clearing, and by yesterday, we already had a full women’s crew working. The work is, of course, not easy, but here in Montenegro, the ladies are quite tough, and one has to keep up. After the first working day, I spent a couple of days recovering, but then I eventually got into the swing of things, and over the past three weeks, I’ve even grown a bit stronger.

The plot has brought in its first small income: several kilograms of olives and some firewood. The highest quality olives were salted, and a tasting is expected in mid-December. The lower quality ones were turned into a liter of oil. I will continue the harvest, but overall the scale will remain modest: without special care, the yield of our olives is small.

As for the firewood, it was sold mainly to neighbors, for self-pickup, and quite cheaply—because long-haul trucks cannot reach the plot, so the logistical costs of hauling the firewood far away would simply eat up all the profit. As of today, 475 euros of this profit has been earned. After this, we will likely stop sales, and the remainder is intended to be kept for the future needs of the village, for which it will be necessary to equip a storage area.

Since the construction of houses will soon begin on the plot, a trailer was delivered there, which is planned to be used as a utility room and a guardhouse. And since the permanent residence of a guard is expected, this will also require the deployment of some minimal domestic infrastructure. The trailer had to be hauled up the hill by a tractor, so we will soon need to concrete the steepest sections of the road; otherwise, it will be difficult to deliver many cargoes. In time, the road will be fully concreted.

Since the construction of houses is about to begin, the issue of privatizing individual plots for building has become urgent. For now, a preliminary plan was drawn up, and mechanisms for mutual agreement on who gets which plot were tested in the chat. For instance, I was chased off a piece of land I liked twice, until I grabbed one for which competition was slightly lower. In addition, a drone was purchased; it is intended to perform aerial photography, tie it to the stakes set in the ground by the surveyor (whose coordinates are precisely known)—and then the preliminary plan can be corrected taking into account the features of the terrain and the remaining trees on the plot. A test flight was conducted yesterday; it didn’t go very well, and it is expected to be repeated soon with slightly corrected parameters. The drone, as is customary in Montelibero, was purchased by a private initiative group through equity participation and using the tokenomics built around the project; its use is regulated by an agreement drawn up between them, and whether they use it for entertainment or monetize it in some way is their business; for me, it is more interesting as a practical solution to various problems related to property rights.

Last week, project volunteers carried out a humanitarian special operation: they rescued one Russian political emigrant from an anarcho-commune at a farmstead near Bijelo Polje. Following her, another communard migrated to us on his own (he is the one we plan to use as a guard living in the trailer). This is how communities work under ancap. Ideologically, they aren’t very close to us yet, but they will do as fellow travelers, and we’ll see from there.

But we are, of course, not so much stealing people from other projects as we are attracting our own settlers. For example, the other day a family of five migrated to Montenegro, which is a record for us so far. Unfortunately, the project website is updated very rarely and sporadically because there is no one to manage it, so the settler counter on it is unlikely to be up to date. As for the freshest information about Montelibero, as before—it’s in the project’s telegram channel.

Finally, I would like to recommend an English-language blog about settling in Montenegro by one of the project participants, which is posted in the English-language Montelibero telegram channel under the hashtag . There are slightly fresher impressions of the country and how local life is organized than what you can find from me.

Stéphane Molinier. Practical Anarchy. Translation of Chapter 8, on collective defense.

Alex Dvoretsky kindly sponsored the translation of another chapter by Eric Mack, but the donation caught me in the process of translating another chapter by Stephan Molinari, which I was crafting according to the dictates of my own soul (and in the hope that donations would follow post factum). So, I finished with Molinari first, and now I will switch to Mack.

In the chapter Collective Defense: An Example of Methodology, Molinari analyzes the third most popular question about ancap, after courts and roads: how ancaps will defend themselves against an attack by an evil neighboring state. The book was written before Putin loudly enough declared his claim to be the world’s number one villain, so Germany is used as the model villain instead of Russia, and the dictator there faces a difficult choice: whether to conquer statist Poland or ancap France. I would say that in his fantasies about how the defense problem is resolved, Molinari appears more overconfident than Friedman, who, at least, considers the problem serious, and even admits that for this specific need he would, grimacing and wincing, agree to feed the state.

Legitimacy. A new video from Libertarian Band

I found the time to watch a fresh video from a team whose activities I continue to follow. I was pleasantly surprised. As is usually the case in their recent videos, it provides a fairly solid analysis of the concept under study—in this case, legitimacy. But besides that, this time it also offers a curious prediction: that the acquisition of legitimacy by various non-state entities (like free cities and other contractual jurisdictions) in the eyes of traditional states will proceed roughly the same way as the legitimacy of the Taliban regime is currently being strengthened.

The second part of the book about ancap has begun, and a title for the book still hasn’t been thought of…

The second part of the book is intended to provide a relatively plausible description of an anarcho-capitalist society. I spent a long time considering where to begin, and I started with a tedious methodological introduction on how such a description can be formed in the first place. There is time to build momentum, so I decided that I could afford not to rush headlong into it. After all, it is important to me not to present some single, alternative-free picture of a beautiful future, but to show the principles of how it is all derived.

The first chapter provides a less trivial approach—by adding capitalism to anarchy. This immediately reeks of alternative history and other joys of that sort. The second chapter takes a more obvious approach, by cutting the state out of an existing capitalist society.

Next, there will likely be a large section with a more detailed analysis of how the main institutions of society work, followed by a necessary section describing the difficulties of ancap.

The mind is kind, but very narrow

I am not very fond of the genre of public spats, but in this case the resulting discussion seemed like a good opportunity to articulate some considerations.

There is a channel called Dobroum, led by the respected Alexander Elesev. It is positioned as philosophical, and a great deal of attention is paid in it to the problem of overcoming adverse childhood experiences.

For a libertarian, everything here is relatively simple. Violence against children is violence against people. No one has the right to initiate violence against people with impunity. From there, one can talk about the specific mechanisms through which violence against one’s own children, not to mention others, becomes a dangerous practice, despite the relative defenselessness of children.

Alexander, however, devotes a lot of attention to demonstrating how adverse childhood experiences negatively affect adult life. I do not know why he chose this particular tactic of dripping into people’s brains, nor am I particularly eager to find out. It does not matter to me whether it is because he lives in a country where therapists are piled on top of therapists, or because he adopted this idea from a book that impressed him, or because something happened in his own childhood that led to this result. I am almost entirely certain that there is no single reason, because life in general is a complex and multifactorial thing where there are no simple cause-and-effect relationships between two isolated events: isolated events are merely conceptual models, whereas life is actually a continuous flow of impressions.

As a result, it turns out that for Alexander, any peculiarities of someone’s behavior begin to signal some childhood traumas. Even an avatar that one of my readers from Bulgaria ordered for me became a reason for him to talk about my childhood experience. I imagine that for a fitness trainer, my condition would be just as ironcladly linked to a training regimen, for a nutritionist to a diet, and for a political scientist to the political regime in the country.

In my book on ancap, I deliberately did not engage in justifying the initial principles upon which all subsequent logic was built. Factually, the principles of libertarianism are such because that is what we want. We like it that way. It seems right to us. Of course, this may correlate with certain facts, certain childhood experiences, books read, a popular streamer heard by chance, and so on.

Yes, narrowly specialized arguments work well on some people, including arguments along the lines of “if a child is beaten in childhood, they will grow up to be a stupid loser.” But that is no reason to obsess and dump these arguments on everyone and everyone, for they will by no means work on everyone.

On my channel, I have my own little “dobroum” named Bitarch, who has also become obsessed with the single theme of the total elimination of violence. Unfortunately, the comments he gathers are more often mocking in nature, and this suggests that his target audience does not overlap much with mine. I seem to be powerless to influence such cases of monomania, and this fills me with sadness.

I hope that if you see signs in my own writing that I have been seized by some single overvalued idea, you will signal this to me.

Изображение

The possibility of transitioning from a failed state to ancap

There is a fragile states index that takes into account many factors, including the state’s provision of public services, the stability of power, and other elements. Is it reasonable to assume that states with a high rating (coincidentally or not, it is easiest in these states to evade taxes, own weapons, and host information without a “censor”) will develop (or degrade) in the foreseeable future into full or nearly full “ancapistans,” after which an era of prosperity will begin?

Katsist

I have already written on a similar topic regarding the possibility of building an ancap state in fourth-world countries. In short: the pros and cons are listed, and some may believe the former outweigh the latter, while others believe the opposite. It is worth trying.

The same applies to forecasts regarding the developmental prospects of one ineffective state or another into an ancapistan. An anarchic regime—that is, the decentralization of law—is established there relatively easily. But it is far more difficult to understand how to preserve or, worse yet, grow capitalism from scratch in an anarchic society that either denies private property (the dream of the an-coms) or is based on clan interests and collective responsibility (the example of Somalia or Libya).

Furthermore, it is not entirely clear how to eliminate the influence factor of surrounding states. These are surprisingly jealous entities that are willing to deal only with other states, demand that their neighbors be as similar to themselves as possible, and if someone dares to start getting by without a state, they inevitably send their peacekeepers. However, the global trend is clearly changing now, and after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, it seems that violent attempts to reformat other societies in their own image will gradually go out of fashion.

It seems to me that if we are to talk about the prospects of transitioning to an ancap regime for certain states, the prospects for countries with parliamentary democracies look slightly more realistic—where, for example, a political layout has emerged that precludes the possibility of forming a government coalition, and if one can be assembled, it must be done by yoking together parties of swans, crayfish, and pikes in one wagon, as a result of which their ability for effective lawmaking and even budget adoption becomes blocked.

And so: unable to pay civil servants because the budget has not been passed, the government sends most officials home. People live almost entirely without government services, but they retain civilized traditions of respect for private property and the market; after some time, they begin to spontaneously use market substitutes for former government services, and at some point realize that they actually like it. The idea that we should fundamentally stop trying to choose a single government for everyone and each individual begins to find understanding among the people.

It is from such state incapacity that something might actually grow. To neighbors, it is still the same state, just experiencing a temporary parliamentary crisis, but that’s fine—someday the politicians will agree, and we will continue to settle matters with them. This is what politicians from surrounding countries think, so they don’t force their recipes for state organization on them. How many years it will take for a temporary crisis to finally solidify into a stable status quo—I cannot say.

In short, it seems to me that to build an ancap society, it is far more important to have a mature, rational society rather than a gathering of supporters of simple and effective solutions that are just as bandit-like as those of the state.

Nothing special, pay no attention, just a small crisis, it will definitely pass, like May thunderstorms, so to speak

Eric Mack, Libertarianism, starting to translate the bonus section

Alex Dvoretsky, my subscriber on boosty, donated another 6,000 rubles for the translation of a new portion of Eric Mackay’s essay Libertarianism. Thus, I have had the opportunity to work on the bonus online section of the book, which was not included in the original printed or pirated edition. I have translated the introduction to the section, where Mackay says that, you know, you might have gotten the impression that libertarianism got stuck in the seventies, but no, Nozick is not the only one, and Hayek is not the only one singing along; we have a whole wagonload of fresher thinkers, followed by a list of completely unknown names. And I have translated the chapter about a certain Gillell Steiner, who, instead of killing himself against a wall in childhood and thereby immediately entering the public domain, decided instead to publish his musings and enter it fifty years after his death. In short, before us is a pillar of so-called left-libertarianism, and translating his thoughts was not exactly pleasant for me, because who enjoys it when a cannibal clings to you and starts declaring, “look, I’m a libertarian here too.” Fortunately, although Eric Mackay calls him a profound thinker for some reason (or rather, thoughtful), he nonetheless criticizes him in such a way that this characterization begins to seem completely contrived.

Is flying an aircraft over territory belonging to another person trespassing under ancap?

Do you need to ask them for permission before flying? Is it necessary to somehow amortize the risk of the aircraft falling on the property of people located beneath it, and how to compensate for the noise of the engines/propellers? What is your personal/Montelibero/Montenegrin position on this issue?

L29Ah (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.012345678901 Monero)

I like how David Friedman analyzes this and many other questions (sorry for buzzing your ears with him so much). He analyzes the topic in great detail in the book The Machinery of Freedom. I have managed to get through about a third of it so far. Much more concisely—in one of the chapters of The Machinery of Freedom. There, economic analysis of law is also used as a basis for reasoning. This often allows for a fairly clear generalization of those specific answers that I have to give from time to time.

To put it very briefly, the lower the transaction costs for proposed deals to purchase rights to actions that violate others’ interests, the more convenient it is to recognize the owners’ right to prohibit such actions. If necessary, the potential trespasser will buy the right of passage. And the higher the transaction costs, the more convenient the procedure of judicial settlement of such cases becomes through claims for damages. No one defines a specific threshold altitude at which one can fly over someone else’s property, but if the flight caused damage, it will have to be compensated in court. Flights over someone else’s territory at a sufficiently high altitude (so as to at least not crash into terrain irregularities in normal mode and not frighten people with the wild roar of engines) are clearly the second case; obtaining permission to fly from all owners over whose territory it may occur is an unrealistic task.

Specifically in Montenegro, there is state licensing for the import of drones into the country, certain weight restrictions, a ban on flying above a certain altitude, and other highly sophisticated restrictions, some of which can be bypassed, while in others it proves too expensive, and it is simpler to accept that a certain application of drones is too troublesome to engage in systematically. Naturally, we in Montelibero find the complete repeal of all these regulations desirable, because drones can at least be used to take beautiful photos, which is useful for promoting the project. But, of course, the drone owner must be prepared for the fact that if their expensive toy falls on someone else’s plot, they may well lose it. The plot owner is not responsible if a cow steps on the fallen drone, or if his underage son decides to break something off this unexpected gift. He is not even obliged to let the drone owner onto his territory—here, the right of prohibition applies, because the transaction costs for purchasing the right of passage are small.

Here we filmed our plot with a drone, but this required flying over the neighbors as well

And how do I turn into Ancap-chan if I’m just an ordinary chan who recently found out about libertarianism?

Katya Latysh (The question is accompanied by a donation in the amount of 0.00008354 BTC. There is also a second half to the question; the answer to it will be in a separate post.)

In my specific case, the principle of noblesse oblige worked. First, I was asked to play the role of Ancap-chan, and then she just stuck to me. It turned out that by starting with a good style and a sufficient amount of common sense, one could create a convincing image, and then refine it through reading literature and countless reflections. Fortunately, kind readers constantly threw me topics for reflection: how does this work under ancap, and how does that work under ancap.

I also think it was a great stroke of luck that I began my acquaintance with libertarian literature with economic works rather than the writings of moral philosophers. I think it was something light, like Callahan’s Economics for the Ordinary Person , from which I immediately moved on to Mises’s Human Action. When I tried Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty and Hoppe’s Argumentative Ethics, I found the line of thought there to be excessively dogmatic, preferring to operate not so much with abstract deductively derived principles as with economic logic. In this regard, David Friedman and his The Machinery of Freedom were a true discovery for me, and (also thanks to the fact that David and I do not live together) I have fervently loved him for more than a year now, which is practically a record for me in terms of the duration of feelings. From him, I would very gladly have a child (a small homage to your second question): the potential father not only has a magnificent pedigree but also possesses restrained self-irony, an extremely sane approach to raising children, and on top of that is a connoisseur of historical reenactment (though that is personal).

Now I will try to abstract myself from personal experience and generalize slightly. It seems to me that the optimal path for developing oneself as a libertarian is roughly as follows.

  1. Upon learning that such an attractive ideology exists, immediately realize that so far you only know a few of the most striking positions. Get acquainted with some overview work that provides a fairly general outline of libertarianism. I think I managed to give a maximally brief overview of this kind in the first (and so far only) part of my future, currently untitled book about ancap. Of course, other works with similar goals are also suitable; they don’t have to be text—they could be videos of some successful lectures. A popular economics course would also help significantly, but without the shamanism regarding various macro-indicators, and instead something as close to ordinary life as possible. This is important for establishing an economic worldview, because economics is, in essence, the logic of how incentives work.
  2. Realize for yourself the key point: libertarianism is about the person, their activity, and their interaction with other people. Any logical abstractions, such as “society,” “the state,” “violence,” “inequality,” “justice,” “the market”—these are nothing more than tools of analysis. They have no independent value and certainly no agency. It is not the state that robs and kills, but people who have become arrogant from the realization of how cool a gang is protecting them. It is not “the market” that decides, but people within the framework of market relations. It is not socialism that leads to poverty, but people practicing socialism. This means that libertarianism can be practiced here and now, without waiting for a libertarian revolution or a decree on ancap.
  3. And after that—mostly practice (filling gaps in theory as they are identified by turning to experts and reading specialized literature). A conscious preference for voluntary relations and a conscious avoidance of robbery. Settling conflicts privately, without turning to gangsters. And if you have to turn to them—at least realize that this is precisely a gangster racket operating according to concepts deeply alien to a free person, and there is no need to pay attention to the beautiful facade on which various words are written, such as “state,” “law,” “Spartak is champion,” “Kosovo is Serbia,” “dick,” and whatever else they write on facades.

Perhaps, after some time, you will feel the urge to begin broadcasting your libertarian agenda as widely as possible. This is, of course, an impulse that is hard to resist, but it is very desirable to do this in such a form as to not look ridiculous; otherwise, you will become a walking anti-advertisement for good ideas. For this reason, for example, I do not appear in videos and prefer to avoid discussions in oral form, as that would be a much more pathetic sight than texts. Similarly, it would be counterproductive, for instance, to boast of a deep understanding of economics without having any reasonably well-placed capital or a streamlined business: counterparties will reasonably suspect that the knowledge is detached from life and will prefer the advice of celebrities.

I hope I managed to answer the first question, and Bitarch will answer the second; I will most likely also add something of my own.