Автор: Анкап-тян

Rodion Belkovich. Blood of Patriots

Some time ago, Rodion Belkovich visited Novosibirsk to present his book “Blood of Patriots.” When I asked if there were plans to publish the text in electronic form, he replied that there weren’t, because “I know you libertarians—you’ll buy one copy and put it in the public domain.” Well, if that’s how it is, so be it. I had to get a paper copy, scan it, format it—and now I am putting it in the public domain. Considering how many footnotes are in the book, it was quite an adventure. The text contains my donation link, in case you decide to thank me for the publication. A link to the author himself could have been included, but he does not keep his details in the public domain, and that is his choice.

Кровь патриотов: введение в интеллектуальную историю американского радикализма

The Litreev and Milov Debate

On January 23, debates between Alexander Litreev and Vladimir Milov will take place on Alexander Plyushchev’s YouTube channel regarding recent events in the USA and various ideological interpretations of what is happening.

Alexander Plyushchev is an Echo of Moscow presenter who recently organized debates between Mikhail Svetov and Maxim Katz on the same topic at an absolutely abysmal technical level, and now, apparently, wants a rematch against the multi-person streaming software.

Alexander Litreev is an Estonian IT entrepreneur known for creating the Red Button mobile app and the Vee VPN service. He is a member of the Tea Club, with whose technical support the debates will be conducted, so I hope that Plyushchev will be able to focus on the show rather than fighting with the audio.

Vladimir Milov is an economic commentator for the Navalny Live channel, and also runs his own YouTube channel. He is a former Deputy Minister of Energy. Co-author of the report Putin. Results and several others, as well as the economic part of Navalny’s presidential program. A fan of Barack Obama, and based on this love, he is ready to love even the late Joe Biden, who served as Vice President under Obama.

The reason for the debates was a tweet by Milov stating that Twitter is a private company, so why, he asks, are libertarians outraged by Trump’s blocking. Litreev replied that Twitter is fully within its rights, while we are all within our rights to be outraged by the blocking from a moral standpoint. Vladimir countered with a question as to whether he would have the right to kill Alexander if he headed a monopoly private military company, while the rest would be left only to be outraged by this from a moral standpoint. Alexander was stunned by such a distortion and invited Vladimir to a debate. The latter initially declined, citing the fact that it didn’t go very well with Svetov, but then changed his mind and agreed. And when Svetov, in turn, began asking to go instead of Litreev, Milov replied, “get in line, young man”.

Thanks to the Tea Club for asking to promote the event; I went into Twitter to figure out where it all came from, and it was fascinating, but where do you get so much time to be in it constantly?

The state wins, anarchism does too

The Anarchy+ channel, from which I continue to draw ideas from time to time, demonstrated a creative application of game theory to the anti-statist movement. As I have mentioned repeatedly, game theory is used not for proofs, but merely as a tool to illustrate the logic of one’s reasoning.

The reasoning there is roughly as follows. We are constantly presented with someone like Mad Max as an example of anarchy, and we get angry and try to show that we are “white and fluffy” and want something entirely different. The proposed model breaks down the outcomes of the war between anarchists and the state into a simple matrix, where our desired state of anarchy is the outcome “anarchism won, the state lost,” and the amorphousness we are warned about is the outcome “the state lost, anarchism lost as well.”

At the end, the article leaves a question hanging regarding what to put in the “state won, anarchists also won” square. If the state is defined as a system of centralized coercion and anarchism as a system of distributed deterrence, the author interprets the win-win situation as unattainable.

Of course, panarchists respond to this: nothing of the sort. Federalization, the transition to a system of extraterritorial contractual jurisdictions or functional overlapping competing jurisdictions, is precisely what the sought-after win-win means. The state wins because it is preserved as a system of centralized coercion, while its legitimacy increases sharply. Anarchism wins because the state is decentralized, the influence of citizens on politics is strengthened due to the drastic simplification of changing jurisdictions, and the state’s susceptibility to systems of distributed deterrence also increases.

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.