Of course, Kapelyushnikov’s position was closer to me from the start, so I didn’t expect anything particularly interesting from him, but I was wrong: there were many witty phrases that could be broken down into quotes. It was known that Kagarlitsky is a strong polemicist; he proved himself to be a strong polemicist here as well. The most amusing thing to me was that his position largely echoes the position of Ekaterina Schulmann expressed in the program Status, when she was talking about Hayek:
Essentially, put your liberalism in the background; democracy is more important.
Of course, if one strictly follows the terms of the “two chairs” problem, both options are bad: both an authoritarian ruler who first liberalizes the economy but gradually turns to bronze and goes mad, and a democratic big state acting as a means for everyone to parasitize everyone else, and thus falling into a positive feedback loop.
In the debates, Kagarlitsky actively pushed for democracy instead of state planning; his interlocutor was not prepared for this, and as a result, there wasn’t much room for the critique of democracy in the debates. However, there was one good take regarding the fact that decentralized democratic planning would simply bind private initiative with others’ plans even more tightly than if it were centralized, and practicing pure economics without politics would prove simply impossible.
And yet, I didn’t quite understand: if both participants in the debate were not thrilled with the topic they were discussing and considered the subject of the discussion to be outdated by about seventy years—then what topic could they have argued about with more sense and pleasure, and what stopped them?
The donation for the translation of this chapter was quite decent, 6000 rubles, but the volume of text in it is also quite outstanding, so I had to toil away in the intervals between voluntary libertarian hard labor at the logging camp.
In this chapter, Eric Mack explains how Mises’s calculation argument regarding the unviability of a total planned economy influenced Hayek, describes the alternative approach developed by Hayek to describe society through the idea of spontaneous orders, and also analyzes in detail (in my opinion, even excessively meticulously) the idea that freedom is when everyone observes a certain single set of abstract rules, proudly called the rules of just conduct, and they observe them not for reasons of profit, but elevate them to the rank of a transcendent value. In short, if God is dead, it doesn’t mean that everything is permitted.
I hope that the next donation will be for the translation of Stephan Molynieux; his style is simpler, and the chapters are not of such monstrous size, so the interval between the donation and the product can be kept relatively short.
Won’t all the other states crush it with all sorts of sanctions, like they did with Belarus—banning all firms from flying here, all ships from sailing here, all banks from transferring money here, all goods from being delivered here… or will the black market and smuggling ultimately win?
Orlik
The fears are not unfounded. One recalls, for example, the initiative to unify tax rates worldwide and pressure countries where taxes are too low—to discourage them from poaching capital from welfare economies.
Or we don’t even have to go that far; we can simply remember that customs require the country of origin of the goods to be specified. If the state (recognized by that specific customs office) does not exist, the declaration cannot be filled out. This wouldn’t even be due to anyone’s malicious intent. Simply put, the ancap case does not fit into existing state regulations, and even the most well-meaning official will just shrug their shoulders, saying they can’t help.
Of course, the market will provide some kind of crutches. The most obvious solution is not to abolish the state on paper. Let other states interact with the ancap zone through an emulator. In the cheapest version, I see it roughly like this: there is a nominal head of state, elected by lot from everyone who expressed a desire to participate in a drawing held every, say, four years, who has one single power, which is also a duty: to issue any documents upon request to anyone within a specified timeframe on behalf of the state “let’s say, Ukraine,” in whatever format the client requires—without taking any fee for the transaction into their own pocket, but placing all costs for preparing the documents on the customer. The very first refusal to sign or a delay in delivery leads to immediate resignation and the start of a new drawing. That’s it.
Need a package of documents for trade with “let’s say, Germany”? Draw them up, bring them for signature to the head of state of “let’s say, Ukraine,” and he is obliged to sign. A troll wants permission to eat small children? Let him draw up the permission and bring it for signature. The state doesn’t care; it will sign. The state emulator simply has absolutely no authority to enforce any directive. And if some other state gets the emulator to sign a request to introduce a peacekeeping contingent into the territory of “let’s say, Ukraine” to prevent the genocide of mice by frogs—this will in no way increase the legitimacy of its actions should it begin to fulfill that request.
But let’s return to the actions of other states against “let’s say, Ukraine,” dictated by malicious intent. It might feel as though, without active interstate diplomacy, businesses in the ancap territory are unable to defend their interests, which would worsen the territory’s investment climate. However, on the other hand, this territory is completely free from protectionist norms and places no obstacles in the way of international investors. This means that any influential corporation will be interested in ensuring that its home state does not hinder its operations in a stateless territory. In other words, foreign business will begin to play the role of its own diplomats. So, the market has tools to resolve things here as well. Yes, certain rigid states will easily ban any business working with the ancap zone—fortunately, there are enough states that it would be difficult for them to consistently violate the interests of the businesses that feed them. Seriously significant sanctions require consolidated public opinion to support them—even sponsors of terrorism are not always met with a serious response, and a peaceful stateless society is even less likely to agitate the global public enough for serious economic sanctions against it to be introduced, and once introduced, maintained for long.
An article was published on the website of the Libertarian Party of Russia by Karl Franco, known for the sharpness of his views, concerning children. The author is a member of the LPR and the lead of the Telegram channel No Compromises, a name that already quite well characterizes this thinker inclined toward dogmatism. In short, he claims to outline how libertarians should approach the issue of dealing with children based on strictly libertarian principles of law, namely the principle of self-ownership, which every child possesses from the moment of conception.
I have also had to write repeatedly on the subject of children, which can be seen via the “children” tag, so you likely have an idea of my position on many specific issues related to children, and perhaps in general. In short, I view law as a spontaneous order for resolving conflicts (and morality as a spontaneous order for entering conflicts), and I consider the principle of self-ownership to be nothing more than a characteristic of a libertarian society, showing that the right to dispose of oneself is respected significantly more than a claimant to self-ownership could achieve by force, but it is still not elevated to an absolute, just as many other useful principles, such as regular tooth brushing, are not elevated to an absolute.
But today we are not talking about my position, but about the position of the article. Its key premise is the assertion that by the very act of conceiving a child, parents commit a tort against the child, because the consequence of conception is the plunging of a self-owning subject of law into a state of complete helplessness. From this, parental duties, principles of upbringing, and other such beauties are derived. And they are derived, of course, completely incorrectly, because such a rigid premise leads to conclusions entirely different from those Karl makes.
You have been raped. This is a tort committed by the rapist against you. The judge obliges the rapist, as restitution for damages, to live with you and care for you for a certain fixed term. Would you not tell such a judge to get lost with such sentences? The first and most important thing you need is to be completely out of reach of the rapist, and only then can you think about the amount of compensation. If conceiving a child is a tort against the child, then the first thing that must be done after birth is to take the child away from the criminals and give the child to truly worthy people who have certainly never encroached upon the birth of any children. Ideally, they should even be incapable of it. For example, those who have undergone sterilization. After all, people get vaccinated to prevent accidental torts against uninvolved bystanders whom they might infect. The same principle applies here: get sterilized, and you will protect children from the danger of being conceived.
From time to time, people are hit by cars on the road. These are tragedies that stir the public, and the public seeks ways to reduce accident mortality, ideally to zero. Additionally, people from time to time conceive children. If conception is a tort, then such tragedies should also stir the public, and then the public should seek ways to reduce the birth rate, ideally to zero. At least accidental conceptions. Again, whose behavior is more responsible: a driver who was driving in their lane while observing the speed limit, but a pedestrian who suddenly jumped under the wheels gave them no chance to avoid the collision—or a driver who consciously rams a pedestrian on the sidewalk? The same goes for childbearing: if conception is a tort, then the behavior of those who manage to get pregnant despite all efforts at contraception should be recognized as more responsible and perhaps even exempt them from paying serious compensation to the child for this accident. And those who consciously practice unprotected sex, pursuing the criminal intent to conceive a child, should be recognized as malicious thugs and punished exemplarily more severely, should they not?
Why did Karl Franco enter into a conspiracy with a girl and cohabit with her without first undergoing a vasectomy? Was it not with the aim of plunging a self-owning being into a state of helplessness by conceiving them into the world? Should we not lynch this hypocrite, who discourses on torts while himself craftily making preparations for one?
Of course, all of this is nonsense. When we live to see the invention of fully autonomous, self-developing embryos, within the framework of a creative free search, downloading info from the internet and self-modifying their bodies, assimilating necessary resources from a dispersed state—then we can talk about archaic procreation being a terrible tort. For now, humanity proceeds from different premises, and the acceptance of the notion of conception as a tort (real acceptance, not hypocritical intellectual constructs that have no connection to reality) makes the systematic extinction of humanity a moral duty, until the last happy childless old man leaves this former abode of sin.
Don’t twist things, Karl. It won’t help children’s rights, Karl.
Patry Friedman tweeted about our project, and may he truly be worthy of his great ancestors, which is no easy feat. People from all sorts of places, such as Iceland or Catalonia, have started joining the project chats.
Documents have been submitted for the registration of the company that will own the land being purchased as part of the project. So, I will soon be officially appointed as director, and it will be possible to apply for a boravak (the melodic local term for a residence permit).
The attempt to bring the surveyor mentioned in the previous issue to the site was only partially successful: the plot and even the access paths are so densely overgrown with bushes that we managed to break through to only one of the three areas.
Dead end, you can’t get any further to the plot — or, locally, velika šuma
One can make their way to part of the territory via the seasonal stream bed
Roughly a third of all the land is relatively cleared; there was an olive grove here
So, equipment for dealing with the underbrush was purchased, and starting tomorrow, Alexey from Tomsk and I will begin destroying it.
Asking the local expert where the trigger is on this barrel
When photos of all these “man toys” appeared in the project chats, the Tom Sawyer effect immediately occurred: people began to envy us and express a desire to immediately leave their stuffy offices and come to our sunny tourist paradise to paint a fence. Most likely, you won’t make it in time for the clearing stage, but then the road construction will begin, followed by building — processes that are no less fascinating. So, if you haven’t yet acquired a piece of Montenegro to build your own libertarian nest on — check out montelibero.org, or better yet, go straight to the main project chat — and join us.
In Issue 1, I mentioned the start of a project for the joint purchase of a plot of land in the south of Montenegro. Fundraising was initiated for this, and to confirm the share of participation in the project, 80,000 MTL tokens were issued on the Stellar blockchain, which were then offered for purchase to anyone interested. As far as I can tell from the token page on the Stellar website, today the token already has 67 holders (you can find the current figure at the moment you are reading the article by looking at the funded trustlines line).
However, buying land is not the only possible direction for investment in Montelibero. Therefore, the project initiators decided to complicate the tokenomics a bit. Now you can invest directly in the MTLCITY land token, or you can stay in MTL tokens, with the exchange rate of both tokens being exactly 1 euro. The logic is as follows. The number of MTLCITY tokens is exactly equal to the sum in euros that makes up the costs of acquiring and registering the land, constructing the mandatory infrastructure, and other expenditures on public goods approved by current holders. At the same time, each token grants the right of ownership to a piece of land equal to the total land area divided by the total token issuance. If a new expenditure needs to be funded, an additional issuance of land tokens takes place, and current holders have the right of first refusal to buy the additional issuance proportionally to their existing share—thus, the area of land assigned to them will not decrease. But if this right is not exercised, the tokens will be bought by someone else, and the previous holder’s share will decrease. So far, MTLCITY has 6 holders; many prefer to own land indirectly, through the MTL fund, rather than planning the allocation of a physical plot for their direct use.
As for the MTL tokens, they can be used not only for land investments but also for other business projects, for example, the purchase of a crypto ATM or something else equally inspiring and ancap-friendly.
I tried to explain this as clearly as possible; if I didn’t succeed, I apologize, you will have to ask for clarification in the project chat.
Now I will move from the intangible to offline news. A third family has moved to Montenegro as part of the Montelibero project, as a result of which the diaspora now consists of six people. Budva is currently serving as a transit base for all settlers, and later, both I and the newly arrived family from Tomsk moved to the city of Bar, which is cheaper and closer to the land being purchased.
Next week, the payment of a deposit and the reservation of the land plot are expected. Then, within a month, we will have to register a company, which will then take ownership of the land. In this company, I will perform the functions of director, meaning I will directly manage the process of land development—of course, according to the instructions of the company’s shareholders. For now, I am looking for a geodesist (they are archaically called geometers here) to transfer the plot boundaries from the cadastral plan to the terrain, after which we can begin clearing the plot of underbrush and building a road to it.
I would say that so far, despite being much less well-known, our project is developing faster than Liberland and Liberstad (the latter is particularly disappointing, as it is very close to us in concept, but so far looks more like a scam). I hope we will continue to meet expectations, despite Montenegro’s reputation as an extremely slow-paced country.
In February, I reposted an announcement about a short story competition regarding free private cities. I never actually managed to produce a story for the contest myself. I had an idea to compose something in the spirit of an Icelandic saga, but about the colonization of Mars: there lived a man named Elon, who was the son of X Æ A-Xii, son of Elon, son of Errol — and so on. But instead of focusing on the plot, I got bogged down in trivialities, such as studying whether Bitcoin mining would be possible on Mars, given the finite speed of light, or if there would be their own corporate currencies — and in the end, I just gave up. However, Wed Neuman, from whose channel I made the repost, did not give up. His competition entry was recently published, and I have read it.
You can feel that the author is more comfortable with a larger form, and he would have gladly expanded the plot to roughly twice the volume. I have always envied this ability; I personally run out of steam quickly when writing long texts, and if I do it in pieces, I first need to reread the previous fragments before writing the next one.
To be honest, the plot seemed rather strained to me; the emphasis was clearly on the world rather than the story. Nevertheless, the plot has its own charm, and the work as a whole is quite an easy read. The world looks like a kind of benevolent version of cyberpunk, where shady corporations also handle some incomprehensible business beyond the reach of mere mortals, but without the grim brutalism. In short, it is worth reading.
Libertarian Band has launched a new section called “Question to Bitarch,” where the channel host answers on behalf of Bitarch. Naturally, all answers concern only the topic of fighting violence, which is being actively developed by Bitarch, and this is a respectable level of determination.
For my part, I should note that I am not particularly fond of Lorenz’s concept of aggression, which treats it as a kind of tension that accumulates and eventually bursts. I still prefer the version that aggression is one of the types of reaction to a stimulus (the desire to destroy the source of irritation), along with flight (the desire to avoid the stimulus) and patience (the desire to adapt to the stimulus while minimizing costs). If we proceed from the version of aggression as tension, then widespread armament can only contain this tension for a short time until it accumulates and breaks out in a bloodbath, so it is somewhat strange to me that Bitarch adopts this idea so uncritically.
As for the ways to eradicate violence, I am closer to the approach of Alexander Elesev from the Dobroum channel, who argues that there will be far fewer prerequisites for violence if people do not have experience with violence in the family. Not that everything works so straightforwardly, but it would be an important component of success. And the second component of success in eliminating systematic violence is the cultivation of intolerance toward it. Someone who steps in to break up a fight is always a good person, regardless of whether they might get hit by both sides; they are within their rights. If you want to fight, surround this ritual with rules, conduct it in the presence of witnesses, determine the criteria for victory, accept defeat if the rules require it, and fulfill the conditions you committed to in case of defeat. If you are not ready for such complexities, do not pick a fight.
I understand that these theses seem very raw, but this is not my field of expertise. I am glad that Bitarch continues to systematize his ideas while receiving feedback from readers. Perhaps I will receive some response from him regarding the considerations outlined above.
As I expected, on the way I read “The Snail on the Slope” by the Strugatskys, which I had promised to review for a long time.
I’ll be banal: the book is exceptionally strange and almost incoherent, which is probably why so many people want to find deep meanings in it. The plot is available on Wiki, so I won’t retell it.
Trying to understand what the authors meant, I made a few assumptions, then decided to check them and looked at the transcript of Boris Strugatsky’s presentation from 1987, shortly before the book was published in full (before that, it had been published in parts). I was surprised. The style of the book is so different from what I had read previously that I was certain it was something written by the later Strugatskys sometime in the eighties, amid the general fascination with “chernukha” (dark realism). But no, it turned out that although this work was written later than everything else of theirs I had read so far, it wasn’t by much; it was still the same sixties.
Overall, the book slightly reminded me of Marquez’s “No One Writes to the Colonel”: the same sluggish and useless fussing while waiting for long-promised things that the protagonist has no power to influence. Naturally, one wants to draw parallels with the Soviet reality, where the Administration is Soviet bureaucracy, the Forest is the Soviet people, the main character Perts is the Soviet intelligentsia striving to be closer to the people but unable to understand them, and the main character Candid is the same Soviet intelligentsia, only exiled, say, to the depths of the Siberian mines. This analogy would be no worse and no less plausible than the one intended by the authors, where the Administration is the present and the Forest is the future.
In the previous Strugatsky books I encountered, there was practically no sex, if one doesn’t count the completely filler episode between Don Rumata and Dona Okana in “Hard to Be a God.” Here, they expanded significantly, but continue to push the same line as they did when depicting medieval society: sex is crude, it is philistinism, such baseness is unbecoming of a human, who should be satisfied with spiritual closeness alone. This is exactly what happens with all the positive characters in the Strugatskys’ works: they enter purely platonic relationships and certainly do not reproduce. I don’t know what this says more about: the Soviet censors or the position of the Strugatskys themselves, but it is a quite characteristic detail.
At the same time, it seems to me that they generally understood that something was wrong with this position of theirs—and by depicting a single-sex parthenogenetic society as the Future, they made it no less repulsive than the straightforward philistine obscenity of the Present. I don’t know where they picked up such misanthropic ideas; it seems their senior comrade Ivan Efremov by no means demonized the sexual question (I’ve only read “Tais Athena” by him, but I believe that in his sci-fi he did not deviate from his ideology on this matter). So far, the best picture of a bright future with a healthy attitude toward sex I’ve seen was by Alexander Rozov in the Meganesian cycle.
I have arrived safely in Montenegro. Although “safely” is not entirely the correct word, because many mistakes were made and a lot of money was lost in the process. In general, traveling has become much more difficult compared to 2019, when I last traveled outside of Russia.
The most unpleasant discovery was that you can no longer trust aggregators when buying plane tickets. They will readily sell you a ticket for a flight that you fundamentally cannot use, which the seller already knows at the time of the transaction, and it will be impossible to refund this ticket. Thus, I failed to fly to Belgrade via Istanbul relatively cheaply, and had to urgently buy literally the penultimate remaining direct ticket to Belgrade, in business class, for an insane amount of money. Then, in Belgrade itself, I was not allowed into the city because I didn’t have a PCR test, and I had to spend the night in the transit zone. And when it came time to check in for the flight to Tivat, it turned out that no one would transfer my luggage from one flight to another for me. In the end, I was assigned a manager who literally led me by the hand through passport control (the lack of a test miraculously stopped being an obstacle), then I collected my luggage at the lost & found desk, then at check-in it turned out that the system could not see my ticket, we went to the airline desk where the system finally spotted me, they printed a paper copy of the ticket, and with that, the quest to board the plane was finally completed… What I liked about the Serbs was that everyone took the fuck-up with humor; any formalities were immediately set aside as soon as a real problem appeared, so the journey through the airport was filled with cheerful laughter and jokes in broken English.
In Tivat, I ignored the services of taxi drivers (that was actually difficult), walked to the bus station, bought a ticket to Budva, used public Wi-Fi to tell the person meeting me when to expect me, and after that, there were no more problems.
Heinrich, until the day before yesterday the representative of the only family that had moved to Montenegro as part of the Montelibero project, turned out to be just an ordinary libertarian, exactly as they should be according to libertarian propaganda: businesslike, energetic, polite, paying great attention to building his reputation—and without any obsessive fetishes, which are not uncommon among political and social activists. In short, he and I will undoubtedly get along. I gave him cash for the project fund—although, only someone else’s, since my fuck-ups on the way are unlikely to let me invest a significant amount in the near future, and I’d rather save the remaining money for a deposit for a future landlord to get more attractive terms.
Yesterday, Heinrich and I went from Budva to Bar. If Budva is a purely tourist town, located in a rather narrow coastal strip between the sea and the cliffs, and actively climbing those very cliffs—then Bar is much more spacious, there is plenty of empty space right within the city limits, and it looks somewhat more self-sufficient. At the same time, it doesn’t look poor or neglected, although a certain residual “Soviet-ness” is felt in it. In general, I will try to find housing specifically there; at the same time, it will be significantly closer to the location of our future libertarian locale.
Unexpectedly, they decided to make me the project director—this is mainly due to a staff shortage and the cleanliness of my documents, rather than any outstanding business qualities. But, of course, I will try not to let them down. Naturally, the fund cannot yet afford any competitive salary, so this looks more like a public service. As I understand it, as of today, the fund has already collected about 25 thousand euros out of the 70 thousand required to buy land, and this pace clearly allows for the completion of what was started, most likely without any single participant holding a controlling stake. The day after tomorrow, we welcome another family of settlers.
As for the channel, I hope to maintain the usual pace of publications in the future, about one per day. By the way, a huge thank you to those who, hearing about my troubles with the tickets, sent several unusually large donations. This already covers about a fifth of the losses—and I didn’t even ask anyone directly, because it felt awkward to ask people to pay for the results of my own stupidity.
The view from the hostel window of the old town of Budva. In Bar, of course, the view will be significantly more ordinary.
