Автор: Анкап-тян

Cruel Games

I’ve read about the ideology of non-violence, and a question occurred to me. In some “leftist” European countries, mixed martial arts were banned for a long time—they were considered not a sport, but a spectacle that encourages cruelty. How does Ancap-chan feel about this? On one hand, it is a prohibitive measure, but on the other, it is ideologically correct.

анонимный вопрос

Here we see some confusion between cause and effect. Various violent games do not encourage cruelty; they are simply a manifestation of already existing cruel customs, and to some extent, fashion. The desire to thrill the nerves persists in people, but for the vast majority today, it is important that everything be voluntary and slightly “make-believe.” A disaster movie, rather than the actual burning of Rome. BDSM instead of real torture. Combat sports of varying degrees of brutality instead of judicial duels. Cirque du Soleil instead of a traditional circus with its inevitable lions.

What would happen if a mixed martial arts club or some other kind of harsh hand-to-hand combat gym were opened in every neighborhood? Half would go bankrupt (in the Russian case, they would run to the state to beg for sports development subsidies). Forty percent would tone it down and switch to something like capoeira. The “market-chan” doesn’t need that much brutality. But it needs some. I wrote a rather amusing post about this a long time ago.

Sorry, it’s kind of short today)

The market will sort it out, inshallah

Question about the publication of IA “Panorama”

Is it permissible from the perspective of libertarian ethics to act as described in the meme about private discrimination?

Bitarch (this time in the role of the question author, not the answer author – note by Ancap-chan)

Essentially, this question pertains to the section of social norms concerning the laws and customs of war. The more fierce the conflict, the greater the probability of the deliberate destruction of non-combatants.

What determines the fierceness of a conflict?

I will give a slightly paradoxical answer. A conflict will be less fierce the more it is perceived by all sides as a kind of natural state of affairs. It is precisely the routine of war that makes people treat it sloppily, show zeal only in front of their superiors, and perceive rank-and-file soldiers on the opposite side of the front as fellow wretches who happened to end up in this shit.

One happened to be born German, another French; now they sit opposite each other in trenches. It’s boring, damn it, maybe play some football? One happened to be born in the USA, another in the USSR; now the first has a bunker in the backyard, and the second is next to the factory gates. Studying the effects of a nuclear explosion is deadly boring—why doesn’t the first read “Das Kapital,” and the second watch a Hollywood action flick? One happened to be born with a penis, another with a vagina, and now their entire life is a continuous minefield. So, they will fuck, feeling like spies in the enemy camp. One is from a conservative family, another from a liberal one, and now they are supposed to fight in social networks. And then it turns out that discussing baseball is more interesting, and why doesn’t this politics just go away.

The conflict didn’t disappear; it is part of everyday life. Just far from the most important part. In fact, this is exactly how it was in the USA for quite a long time, and Trump, with his sharp rhetoric and clumsy diplomacy, contributed to the escalation of the war. Now, for some time, the conflict will be very fierce, and news about disconnecting ventilators could very easily become a reality. For libertarians, this means a certain field of opportunities, which I mentioned in the previous post.

So, is it permissible from the perspective of libertarian ethics to use total war techniques during fierce conflicts? Yes, it is permissible. But not very smart.

USA

Many reflections on the situation in the USA have already been written, from the banal to the very deep, authored by quite respected people. I will try to survey the state of affairs from a slightly different angle.

From my two previous posts, you know that a republic is a society of people who agree on questions of law. In the USA right now, there is nowhere near an agreement on questions of law, which means there can be no legal assessment of either the electoral procedures, the performance at the Capitol, or the subsequent purges in the information field. If the jurisdiction of a court is not recognized by both parties to a conflict, then the court does not perform the function of resolving conflicts; therefore, it is not a court at all, but a more or less ritualized execution. In short, I interpret the state of affairs in the USA as a civil war. In a war, elections are only capable of recording exactly which personalities end up at the helm as the leader of the dominant grouping. This is still a more legitimate procedure than the direct rule of military commanders, but in fact, at the federal level, the elections in the USA were not between Trump and Biden, but between Biden and Sanders (from the Republican side, there were no elections at all). And then, Biden, having won the election, simply led the troops during the forceful crushing of the Republican side of the conflict.

What position do ancaps find themselves in this situation? The position of the third party who rejoices. In the confrontation between the toad and the viper, the toad emerged victorious, and now the viper temporarily finds itself on our side. An alliance between agorists, who defend market freedom regardless of the desires of any power groups, and those who continue to chant the mantra about law and order is potentially a very powerful thing. Because now we will be talking about our law and our order.

Using the information field as an example, this will mean the following. We will get a serious solvent demand for free social networks, free hosting, free domain registrars, free operating systems that do not prevent us from managing user devices, free hardware without hardware backdoors, and free money to pay for all the above. The network effect is exactly what the tools of freedom are currently lacking.

Today, it is a matter of honor for every American Republican to sell all their Apple and Alphabet shares, not to mention shitty Twitter, invest the proceeds in bitcoins, and use them to support those free market tools that best satisfy their client demand for the free exchange of information, money, and goods, for self-defense, for building peace and order around themselves, for the destruction of the aggressors’ property, for provoking discord among them, and for tools that ensure the state’s blindness, whether through anonymizing network actions or paralyzing the will of the overseers. Gouging out the Cyclops’ eye is an important part of the strategy.

The enemy is fucked – we grow stronger

Republicanism, continued

After my yesterday’s post about republicanism, I received a detailed comment from @evgenii_pavlovich, which I thought it would be appropriate to publish.

I suggest watching the lecture where Rodion explained his views more clearly and fully. Much of it overlaps with what you considered in the video from St. Petersburg.

How to find balance?

Although I wasn’t asked, I will allow myself to answer.

From the perspective of republicans, anarchism in itself is not an end value; it is not the final goal, because anarchism is merely a teaching that denies the legitimacy of the state based on certain grounds, simply because the state is an organized crime group (To see/recall the arguments of Spooner and Rothbard on why the state is an OCG. There is no point in retelling them in polite society). That is, in political philosophy, the state as an internally contradictory concept has been dismantled and is dead, but as a phenomenon of political reality, it continues to exist by inertia as a misunderstanding. From this point of view, statists in political philosophy are something like followers of the phlogiston theory in chemistry, and anarchists who today engage exclusively in the negation of the state are reinventing the wheel and solving a problem already solved before them in the 19th century, adding nothing new.

In practice, however, we see that anarchists do not simply remain anarchists, but study how a free society functions and propose all sorts of improvements: Rothbard writes about private security companies as insurers oriented toward natural law, understood as the inalienable right of private property; David Friedman talks about the development of competing legal systems in a free market; our youth in well-known public pages discuss panarchism and create the concept of contractual jurisdictions without appealing to the ideas of natural law; Russian libertarians create a party, call for participation in politics, infiltration into government bodies and an “anti-state dictatorship” with lustration and deregulation. In other words, all these people are engaged in designing and building a republic. While remaining anarchists, they become republicans. For example, agreement between people on the existence of natural law as an inalienable right of private property is a special case of agreement on legal issues upon which a republic is built. Voluntarily concluded contracts are, again, explicitly expressed agreement on legal issues. But, from the perspective of republicans, agreement on legal issues and a commonality of interests may not be expressed explicitly. The main thing is that they exist and you are engaged in a common cause (res publica).

Thus, the balance in fact lies in the fact that anarchists are actually republicans. The only question is what this res publica is, what this common cause is, what it looks like, with which legal norms you agree, and what the commonality of interests consists of, and with whom you share this commonality. Communists also have their own republic and their own agreement on legal issues and commonality of interests. It’s just that their agreement on legal issues differs greatly from the agreement on legal issues of, for example, libertarians.

A few more words on the differences between libertarianism and right-wing republicanism. Our libertarians usually start either from the Rothbardian idea of natural property rights or say that the source of rights and obligations is a contract, and until there is a contract, there are only absolute freedoms. Further, everything depends on how “corrupt” you are and how you understand the word “freedom.” For libertarians, freedom is freedom from violence and robbery. For non-libertarians, freedom is the freedom to commit violence and rob. Further, the issue is resolved, for example, through the physical removal of some by others. That is, in libertarianism, freedom is ontologically primary in political philosophy; it is a natural order, whatever that means. In republicanism, however, judging by what Rodion says in his lectures, un-freedom is ontologically primary: there is no freedom in nature, freedom is a cultural phenomenon, and it is not found in all civilizations, not all people are familiar with freedom, we are not born free, but become so. That is, as I understand it, the initial premises in libertarianism and republicanism are fundamentally different. A possible resolution to the contradiction here is not to mix the “phenomenal world of natural necessity” and the “noumenal world of human freedom,” to use Kantian language. Freedom and good will are exclusively human things in the sense that Rodion speaks of man. The individual as a representative of the biological species Homo sapiens sapiens is part of nature, an animal. If, however, we perceive a human as a project, as a personality, then they must be designed, they must be chosen, they must become: for example, a free person of a free society. And, as is known, man is a free being in the sense that he is capable of acting not only according to nature, but also contrary to it. We do many unnatural things. Sometimes these are actions for the better, sometimes for the worse. So, it is important not to be barbarians and to act for the better: to build a society of free, prosperous people. In answering the question of how such a society is possible, I believe libertarians and right-wing republicans agree, and that is the main thing.

What does the esteemed Ancap-chan think about Mr. Belkovich’s latest performance?

In it, the speaker presented his views on political philosophy in a clear and coherent manner (and one must acknowledge their depth).

As I understand it, the main contradiction between the republic proposed by Mr. Belkovich and the market anarchism of the AES lies in the fact that the economists (a conventional term) are concerned with contemptible personal enrichment, while the stern knights of republicanism consider the public, rather than the private, to be the cornerstone of a true citizen’s life. How can balance be achieved?

Stepan Pavlov

There are practically no contradictions between republicanism and market anarchism, as long as both are implemented according to their principles. A republican recognizes the citizen’s right to res privata and emphasizes that he should have no concern for exactly how that citizen asserts themselves in their private sphere. An AnCap recognizes the freedom of association, that is, the right of people to res publica, and emphasizes that he should have no concern for exactly how they assert themselves in the public sphere.

Personal enrichment is not contemptible to a republican; it is simply that for him, the criterion for comparing people is gloria — the result of their activities for the sake of res publica. Political activity is not contemptible to an AnCap; it is simply that for him, the criterion for comparing people is how well they satisfy his own market demands.

As soon as the public sphere intrudes into the private, both the republican and the AnCap will rise up. Neither agreed to this. And both will demand respect for their rights.

Is it necessary to try to find some balance between these doctrines? It will be established naturally if you consistently defend the values of either republicanism or AnCap. Someone who is poor and incompetent will not earn much fame, which means they should invest more in the development of their private sphere to claim something in politics and thereby achieve gloria. Someone who is wealthy and market-successful will change the world around them, because entrepreneurial success is based on constant vigilance regarding how to better satisfy customers. This means they will bring innovations into the world that will also affect the public sphere, and that is immortal fame. After all, we revere Edison, and even Gates, although in the public sphere he is quite the leftist.

How much nonsense is there in Netesov’s cycle on the mistakes of libertarianism, and how should one respond to it?

Danila

This is about the following cycle of three articles: Libertarians have shrugged their shoulders, Soviet society is not 1984, and Corporate Wastefulness in the 21st Century.

Shoulders

§1. The concept of Schumpeter’s entrepreneurial function and Hayek’s dispersed knowledge is described, as well as the problems that arise in a planned economy lacking access to this knowledge, since it is embedded in market prices. Everything is quite correct, with various amusing examples from life in the USSR.

§2. Mises’s calculation argument is described, according to which in the absence of market prices, a planning agency has to assign them arbitrarily, leading to suboptimal resource allocation, making the planned economy wasteful and inferior to the market economy. As a partial answer to how the USSR managed to survive for 70 years, it is pointed out that it was able to peek at some market prices from its capitalist neighbors. There are no complaints about this paragraph either.

§3. Here, the author, on one hand, shows that the lion’s share of innovations appears in small startups, but on the other hand, says that the world has long been ruled not by shopkeepers, but by corporations, and therefore classical liberalism is a libertarian’s dream. Essentially, “pipe down and return to the real world from your beloved 18th century.” Generally, the facts presented are quite correct, but the author’s pathos is unclear: the fact that the current economy is not fully market-based does not mean that its state is optimal or even inevitable. It’s just the way it is now.

1984

§4. Here the author points out that both Mises’s calculation argument and Hayek’s argument about dispersed knowledge neglect empirics. Since a global planned economy has never been built, it cannot be verified that it is incapable of economic calculation. Since the Soviet economy contained some rudimentary elements of a market rather than being fully planned, it again cannot be verified that a planned economy is unable to account for this dispersed knowledge. In short, the unverifiability of the arguments regarding the impossibility of building a planned economy is confirmed by the fact that no one has ever been able to build a pure planned economy. I would say that the absurdity (okay, let’s say more gently—the paradox) of such argumentation is quite obvious.

On the other hand, it is pointed out that both Hayek in The Road to Serfdom and Orwell in 1984 clearly overdid the pessimism of their forecasts, because the inefficiency of a totalitarian society quickly begins to require a minimum of market lubrication, and only with its presence is this planned machine somehow able to move forward. Again, the criticism seems strange. Hayek says: if you are consistent in your madness, this is what will happen. Then Netesov claims: look, Soviet society was not consistent enough in its madness, therefore Hayek was wrong. Well, sort of…

§5. Here it is said that Hayek claimed: under a system of centralized planning, all plans are handed down from above by one leader. But this is not the case: huge, cumbersome structures were built to create plans, which worked terribly, and these plans were not properly fulfilled. It is clear that empirical data should differ somewhat from theoretical ones: the Soviet Union was not an ideal system of centralized planning because such an ideal system is simply unattainable, just as absolute zero is unattainable.

But essentially, the author is right: The Road to Serfdom is not a detailed description of a specific USSR, nor even of socialism as a system. It is simply a political pamphlet, a warning to British society not to flirt too much with the Labour Party. For studying socialism, Hayek’s book is too superficial; if anyone is interested, there are many established Sovietologists, and the author suggests getting acquainted with them.

Greedy Escort

§6. Here, the author first suggests that libertarians get rid of praxeology. Then he begins to reason that a corporation is not some single and indivisible entrepreneur, but a multitude of people, each acting in their own personal interests, which do not necessarily coincide with some conceptual interests of the corporation as a whole or even its management. The question arises: why should we discard praxeology if it is precisely concerned with the consideration of individual human interests, which are much broader than economics?

It is also pointed out that Mises’s calculation argument regarding the impossibility of economic calculation in a planned economy applies to corporations in the same way. That is, the more internal transfer pricing within a corporation is detached from the market, the worse resources are distributed within it. Next, positive and negative economies of scale are mentioned, which Mises touched upon only slightly. Well, Mises wasn’t the only one; Ronald Coase did a lot of work in the field of firm theory, and supporters of the Austrian School of Economics can perfectly well use his constructions; they fit into the general economic theory and do not violate the principles of praxeology.

Further in this very long paragraph, there are reflections that the efficiency of a corporation becomes even lower when it reaches the state trough, and Mises is accused of ignoring this circumstance. Here, one can only be surprised, because the entire sixth part of Human Action is devoted to various distortions that the government can introduce into economic activity.

§7. Here, referencing Hernando de Soto, explanations are given as to why supercomputers are unable to save a planned economy, and then a question is left hanging about what prevents these same arguments from being applied to TNCs. Nothing prevents it. Centralization has its costs, and decentralization has its own.

§8. Here the author repeats a number of theses from previous paragraphs and mentions that Joseph Salerno proved: market prices convey a reliable signal to entrepreneurs only under proximal equilibrium. He uses this as an argument that Hayek is outdated, and along with him, the entire Austrian School. But Salerno is also a representative of the Austrian School, so we are seeing an evolving school rather than a dead dogma, so what’s the problem?

§9. In conclusion, Netesov lists the reasons why, in his view, the rapid expansion of the influence of the Russian-speaking libertarian movement has slowed down significantly recently. The selection looks like a set of random facts that caught the author’s eye and serves as a warning to me personally not to do the same, because it looks very funny from the side. There, literally, as reasons for the end of the golden age of libertarianism in Russia, he lists the publication of a feuilleton with 13 thousand reads (I first learned about it from Netesov’s article), Usanov’s weak performance in debates with Vatoadmin, and the failure of Zelensky’s reforms. Where is my pre-New Year depression? I also influenced the fading interest in libertarianism in Russia!

In my view, the problem is more that almost all the low-hanging fruit have been picked, and further, if one wants to continue spreading their ideology at the previous pace, new approaches must be found. The second problem is, undoubtedly, the COVID restrictions, which completely cut off the sphere of offline agitation. The third is the recent split of the libertarian community. However, the latter circumstance, on the contrary, may provide new growth points due to increased competition for fresh minds.

Is there perhaps a card number where a donation can be transferred?

The “Money and Apocalypse” channel (close in spirit)

I took a look at your channel; there are some interesting thoughts, and I subscribed, although in my opinion, there are too many reposts, materials are released too frequently, and the overall content is more about the apocalypse than about money. So, after some time, I might unsubscribe, once I’ve had my fill. It’s a bit strange that an economist and a financier, not unfamiliar with reading materials from Simon Cordonsky and reposting figures of Bitcoin’s annual growth, prefer to request a bank card number for donations, even though it could be done in Bitcoins, whether on-chain or via Lightning. But a potential donor has the right to their own quirks, so I added a form for sending rubles to the donations page.

Of the interesting thoughts in the channel, I’ll mention the last one. The graph of returns on education, which shows a growth in returns in the nineties, followed by a decline in the two-thousands. You and some of your readers suggest that this is due to the decrease in economic freedom, where loyalty replaced competence. Other readers point out that it might be due to the general decay of higher education, because the world has become too fast for long-term study. I haven’t seen a similar graph for, say, the USA; it would be interesting to compare, as rumors suggest they have similar problems there as well. In short, there is something to reflect upon here.

I would also like to note the thought migrating from post to post that the decline in real disposable income of citizens, observed for almost all the “tens” (decades), is not just man-made, but also deliberate. A subject must be poor so that they think about their daily bread, rather than pondering strange non-material questions like changing the regime. Moreover, a low level of wages provides the country with some degree of investment attractiveness, regardless of country risks. This is an interesting conspiratorial consideration that explains the observed facts, but is not substantiated by any leaks of secret instructions or similar things, which are, in fact, the only way to confirm conspiratorial theories.

Forced Protest

The friendly channel Anarchy+ is publishing a multi-part longread about how the presence of a radical wing, ready for violent action, affects the course of protests. Five parts have been released so far, and more are coming. The series explores various subtleties, such as how the effects differ when the radical wing is friendly with the moderate one, and when there is no coordination between them—and so on. Two or three more episodes are expected, which will then be collected into a single post, but I preferred not to wait for the end because an interesting practical example has come along.

The most notable protest of last year was, of course, Belarus. In its aftermath, political scientists either gently lamented that a regime relying on a compact, loyal security core remains stable regardless of the dissatisfaction of the rest of the population—as confirmed by two examples, Venezuela and Belarus—or they expressed indignation toward the protesters, arguing that by taking off their slippers before standing on benches, they demonstrate their complete toothlessness to the regime’s dogs and give a carte blanche for repressions, the severity of which is directly proportional to the size of the demonstrations.

And then I am handed a link to an extremely curious channel, which is used to promote specifically violent actions in Belarus, and in an extremely harsh form. Read it carefully; it is quite young, so you can manage its entire content. In short: the channel intends to launch a full-scale guerrilla war against the regime. The tactics proposed make it clear: the authors of the channel, whoever they may be, know very well how courts work under ancap, and they also perfectly understand that very influence of a radical wing on the protest as a whole.

I have attempted to roughly formulate what these anonymous organizers of decentralized violent protest are guided by:

  1. Today, the overwhelming majority of those dissatisfied with the regime are indeed not ready for an open armed rebellion, but many are extremely irritated by the complete lack of concessions from the regime in response to peaceful actions.
  2. The lack of readiness for open rebellion in some is caused by a principled unwillingness to escalate violence, while in others, it is an unwillingness to bear serious costs.
  3. A person is capable of developing habits and skills. Starting small, they get drawn in, and then can gradually train for serious violence.
  4. Violence must not be heroized. Heroes take off their slippers before standing on benches. Terror is carried out by scum. And society has a demand for the appearance of these loathsome characters who will fight the regime out of the lowest motivations.
  5. For a socialist country, the textbook lowest motivation is money. It is best if servants of the regime are killed by other servants of the regime for the sake of money. But any other lumpen will do.
  6. How much to pay for which actions? Who will pay? Let the “market” decide that; the channel’s job is to describe the business model, which anyone wishing to do so can then adopt.

What can we extract from these materials?

Firstly, keeping in mind that Belarus is something of a testing ground for the Russian regime, one can assume that something similar may await us in the RF, so why not keep a closer eye on the underside of the protest as well, trying it on for size in advance.

Secondly, the channel provides a number of practical tips on anonymization that will also be useful for peaceful agorists.

Thirdly, we see vivid confirmation that market relations work perfectly even when fighting the state, which means the market will survive without the state. Not that this is exactly some discovery, but we’ll add this to the pile of evidence.

Nothing special, just an open registry of targets

Will there be a New Year under ancap?

Libertarian Band suddenly delighted us with a bonus New Year’s video, in which they examine the question mentioned in the title. Someone in the team is clearly a fan of Bazhenov, because the analysis is conducted from the perspective of economic mainstream. Thus, most of the video consists of discussions on how profitable holidays are for the state economy, which has a very indirect relation to ancap. However, in any case, such a video is clearly better than my dismal year-end review yesterday, and the conclusions drawn in the video are quite correct.

Happy New Year, if you so desire!

2020, results

The year was terrible. The channel barely gained any subscribers, posts became less frequent, and generally, a crisis of genre began to be felt. The video course on libertarianism on the Libertarian Band channel stalled back in the spring and soon broke off mid-sentence. I am now answering questions quite reluctantly because, in essence, I have already answered everything, and I don’t want to repeat myself. Commenting on current events from my own perspective is the only outlet, but it is a rather secondary product, and I wouldn’t want to focus on it entirely. Translations remain, but overfeeding the subscriber with them is also harmful.

In such a situation, of course, it is necessary to start some new project, if possible while preserving existing developments.

The most obvious thing is the systematization of what has already been written, in the form of a single coherent text about libertarianism. The project has a clear downside. Many such books have already been written; none of them are perfect, and mine clearly will not be.

Another direction is to create a wiki instead of a book, so that for any term or concept, a person can be referred to a specific address, thereby cutting off most disputes over definitions. The downside is that such activity is not very convenient to cover in the channel. Another downside is that a wiki is an engine for decentralized content creation, so it will either happen slowly and gloomily as a solo effort, or this prank will quickly spiral out of control.

Many also complain about a serious lack of libertarian fiction, and this is potentially a very rich field. Truth be told, I fear that I will be even more stilted than Ayn Rand. I have to try.

In short, I am ending this year in complete creative turmoil, and what surprises me most is that there are still some crazy people who donate to me. It really is much more cheerful to work with donations, but it is very strange when someone believes in you more than you believe in yourself.