Автор: Анкап-тян

Liability of the solicitor of a crime

While recently answering a series of questions in a blitz format, I touched upon the topic of the responsibility of the person who orders a crime, and this sparked a discussion in the Facebook comments. So, I will try to reason through this in more detail.

Let’s consider a sequence of situations.

1. The client demands that the perpetrator commit a crime, threatening sanctions in case of refusal: causing harm to the perpetrator themselves or to some hostages. The perpetrator does as required, thereby avoiding the threat.

2. The client demands that the perpetrator commit a crime, threatening sanctions for non-compliance and promising a reward for completion. The perpetrator does as required and receives the reward.

3. The client asks the perpetrator to commit a crime, offering a reward in return. The perpetrator carries out the request and receives the promised reward.

4. There is a highly competitive market for crimes where many perpetrators compete to offer their services. The buyer chooses the perpetrator who offers the service that is optimal in terms of price and quality, and purchases it.

5. The perpetrator commits a crime, reports it, after which interested parties pay them donations for it.

I have tried to arrange the situations in descending order of the client’s degree of responsibility and ascending order of the perpetrator’s degree of responsibility—from the full responsibility of the former to the full responsibility of the latter.

In a situation where the perpetrator faces a serious threat for failing to fulfill the order, we can de facto consider them a mere tool. That is why, for example, it is quite logical to completely exempt conscripted soldiers from responsibility for participating in a war if they acted within orders and it is customary in that army to execute for desertion or failure to follow orders.

But in a situation where the perpetrator of a crime has the opportunity to resign, or to stage a work-to-rule strike by demanding written instructions for every unlawful order—but does not do so—they share responsibility with their superiors for all crimes committed. This is the case of the Belarusian OMON, for example. In conditions where those who resign can also count on the support of society, the responsibility of those who did not resign naturally increases.

At what point can we confidently assert that the client should bear no responsibility at all? Clearly, this is only possible in cases where the perpetrator acts entirely voluntarily, but is it so in all such cases?

Any voluntary exchange is based on the division of labor. I do not do everything I need myself; instead, I exchange a part of what I need less for something that is difficult for me to obtain on my own. The purchase of an illegal service is the exact same division of labor. But since the labor is divided, so is the responsibility for the damage that this labor caused to someone. Logical? Logical. And what if we continue to complicate the division of labor?

One studied the target’s daily routine. A second purchased the equipment. A third planted the bomb. A fourth sent a text message at the right moment, and the bomb blew up the victim along with the car and three random passersby. A fifth negotiated with the client and coordinated the group’s work. The sixth is the client himself. The seventh is the primary beneficiary in whose interests the client acted. And let’s add payment schemes. And let’s add explosives suppliers. And someone else bought these guys donuts…

A court in the wonderful Ancapistan of the future will have to assess the level of awareness of each person involved in the offense, the degree of unlawfulness of the actions they were directly involved in, the possibility of backing out, cooperation with the investigation, and so on—everything we already see in our usual boring reality. Except that the idiotic practice of imprisonment for the sake of imprisonment will be mostly replaced by monetary compensation or their in-kind equivalents.

Knowledge of principles will not provide a precise solution for all cases in life. It only allows one to have something to be guided by when evaluating a given situation in all its complexity. Therefore, please do not turn the non-aggression principle into a dogma; it doesn’t work that way.

Here you have the direct perpetrators, the filming of a video for the report to the client, and a whole chain of decision-making behind the scenes. The division of responsibility is the most typical practice in the modern state.

Observation Project GrOb

The “Civil Society” movement, led by Mikhail Svetov, announced an ambitious project to organize exit polls in 13 regions and observation in 123 municipalities.

I have no idea where the movement will get so many volunteers to fulfill its obligations, and I suspect that it will be limited to partial coverage of Moscow. Again, organizing an exit poll is relatively simple: you put a couple of people with tablets at the exit of a few polling stations—and there is your exit poll. To organize observation, you need not only to find volunteers but also to reach an agreement with various candidates and electoral associations so that they issue referrals to these volunteers.

As it happened, I was recently convinced to work as a volunteer for the Novosibirsk-2020 coalition, which nominated more than three dozen single-mandate candidates for the city council of deputies. If I learn that representatives of Civil Society are contacting the coalition headquarters and offering their people for observation, I will certainly report it, but so far I have heard nothing of any such activity.

I looked at the website through which Civil Society attracts people to participate in its project. The text boils down to this: here are the contacts where you can leave a request for observation, and here are the details through which you can support us with money. How many people they plan to attract, how many have already been attracted, how much money is needed, and how much has already been collected—none of this is on the website.

Another funny point. Throughout the text, it is stated that the project is being done by Civil Society, but the logo of the Libertarian Party is also present. What the party’s role is in this endeavor is completely unclear from the text.

But I wouldn’t want this post to look like an indiscriminate bashing of a good initiative. There is one nice feature on the website: if you scroll down and select your city, a map of that city will load, and all the polling stations are marked on it. Even if the organizers completely fuck up everything, the map of polling stations is already useful now. I hope that over time the functionality of the site will develop further. For example, it would be visible which polling stations have already had at least someone apply. Then it would at least be possible to assess the scale of the work done.

Libertarian Band – new video

As I promised in the announcement for the previous video, the new cycle on the Libertarian Band channel will be entirely dedicated to the NAP. While we previously viewed the non-aggression principle as a kind of spontaneous order that characterizes sufficiently viable societies, the new cycle describes the exact opposite approach instead of spontaneous orders: the artificial imposition of the non-aggression principle.

The introductory video explains that leaving social morals to natural selection is too rash, and conscious measures are needed to instill a culture of non-aggression. The next video will be devoted to answering a strange question: what exactly is wrong with aggressive violence, since it is an excellent tool—why be squeamish about it?

Belarus 3

This is already my third post about Belarus. In the first one, I gave obvious recommendations that turned out to be practically a forecast. In the second, I gave non-obvious recommendations, and, naturally, reality diverged from those recommendations. Therefore, instead of giving my own advice now, I want to express my happiness for the recommendations that Belarusians themselves are exchanging.

I am talking about a text on Telegraph with the proud title Victory Plan. It proposes a continuation of Sharp’s non-violent transformation from a dictatorship into a freer society. In brief, the plan includes:

  • organizing the main directions of resistance (fronts): protest actions, economic strangulation of the state, propaganda, political pressure, including at the international level, and moral and legal pressure on specific executors.
  • building parallel coordination structures (ministries): non-state economic services, insurance funds to compensate for the costs of state violence, the collapse of state social services, and strikes.

This is a very good plan because, during its implementation, society will receive a practical course in agorism, and there is a great chance that it will get a taste for it. When it turns out that non-state coordination is more efficient and the dictatorship eventually withers away, there is a chance that the new state, which will inevitably be built in place of the old one, will acquire the best traits of liberal laxity and will avoid meddling in things that are not its business for quite a long time. And if it does start to meddle, people will have ready-made recipes on exactly how to put the state in its place.

Is there a chance that after the old regime leaves, a new one will not be built in its place? It is very small, because libertarian ideas are not yet widely distributed in society, and the thought that everyone is better off without a state does not seem obvious to people. They are more likely to repeat the mistake of thinking, “this was a bad state, it’s gone now, now we will build a good one.”

Mechanics of Freedom, Chapter 60

I published Chapter 59, regarding the problem of deriving the ought from the is in Ayn Rand, about a year ago. In it, Friedman examined the arguments for objectivist ethics in John Galt’s speech, found many logical holes, and stated that they cannot be closed by mere rhetoric.

In Chapter 60, The Economics of Vice and Virtue, the author analyzes moral qualities and actions from the perspective of economic analysis and game theory, thereby proposing his own approach to objectivism—that is, deriving the ought from the is. I have previously stated many times in discussions and answers to readers’ questions that a market society is more affluent and benevolent, and therefore less inclined toward the dominating desire to succeed at the expense of others than a society with strong state intervention. Friedman provided a more rigorous foundation for this empirical observation, for which he deserves thanks.

Blitz on long-considered topics

A series of questions from Yaroslav

Is the client of a hitman responsible for the murder, and did the employer commit an act of aggression from a libertarian perspective?

I have already answered almost exactly this question. In short: if the employer and the executor are linked only by market relations, then all responsibility lies with the executor. To the extent that the executor is in a non-market dependence on the employer, a share of the responsibility falls on the employer, because this very share of dependence is effectively their share of participation in the co-organization of the murder.

Is the unintentional infection of a person with a disease a violation of the NAP?

Legally, it is an accident. I have answered questions on related topics a couple of times: regarding provoking an epileptic seizure and regarding killing in response to an imaginary threat.

The measure of responsibility for the person who infected is determined by how capable they were of preventing the infection and how expected these precautions were on their part. For example, in a situation where an epidemic is occurring, it is expected that people maintain distance, wear masks, and so on. If all this took place but the infection occurred anyway, responsibility is waived. If the infector carelessly led a normal lifestyle, responsibility is not waived. The same criteria apply to the infected person—what they did to avoid being infected. However, if there is no epidemic or nothing is known about it yet, then no particular claims arise against the infector.

Should infection be considered a violation of the NAP? As you wish. A violation of the NAP is a purely theoretical construct, while in real life, what matters is who should bear the property claims.

What is the difference between contractual jurisdiction and a state?

The presence of a contract that clearly specifies the conditions of jurisdiction. The more blurred the range of issues for which a subject is subject to a certain organization is, the more difficult it is for them to actually avoid jurisdiction, and the more implicit the contract is, the smaller the difference between contractual jurisdiction and a state.

For instance, a hypothetical island owner who places a sign on the shore stating that anyone who steps onto the island’s land thereby accepts a contract of indefinite gratuitous employment for an unspecified range of labor duties—has de facto created a state, which will exist exactly as long as he can produce enforcement of the aforementioned oppressive contract, enslaving all accidental tourists and shipwreck survivors.

When does a person reach the age of agency?

It makes sense to read my old answers under the “children” tag; there are reflections on emancipation scattered across several posts. In short: others recognize the guardian’s right to guardianship until the child expresses a clear desire to terminate this relationship. Accordingly, a child has the right to break the connection with current guardians at any moment, and thereafter either live independently or agree on guardianship with someone else. Since a child does not learn to defend their interests immediately, they will likely need the help of adults, and the task of those adults is not only to ensure the child’s rights but also to convince other adults that the child’s rights have been respected.

Catallactic Theory of Money, a brief review

While a vast number of readers watched as election commission employees in neighboring Belarus performed dangerous pirouettes on step ladders and other feats for the glory of the current dictator, a truly important event took place in this country. Alexei “Kamendant” Tereshchuk published an essay Catallactic Theory of Money. By internet standards, it is, of course, a long-read, but overall the text is quite concise, and despite the roughness of the presentation, the work deserves to be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in economics. Although, of course, those unfamiliar with Mises’s monetary theory will find the essay quite difficult to read, as it is a direct development of it, using Mises’s own conceptual framework.

For Mises, money is a special category of goods used as a medium of indirect exchange. This good acquires its value through a historical process that can be mentally traced back to the time when money was an ordinary consumer good (the so-called regression theorem).

Kamendant generalizes the concepts of indirect exchange and money. He defines indirect exchange as interpersonal exchange in which goods are acquired for their exchange value. Thus, money becomes just one of the possible goods used for indirect exchange. What is its fundamental characteristic that distinguishes it from other goods? Or put this way: what properties allow a certain good to become money?

Kamendant provides a definition of money that contains the answer to this question. Money consists of goods used to reduce costs in indirect exchange. It is precisely about the reduction of costs. If the exchange of one good for another is carried out directly with lower costs than when using some intermediary commodity, then the need for money does not arise.

Mises derived indirect exchange strictly from direct exchange. However, there is rich anthropological material showing that in primitive societies that do not use money, the economy is nonetheless not barter-based. Instead, there are usually various forms of mutual obligations, which gave rise to the debt theory of the origin of money. Kamendant points out that the only condition under which the demand for money as such could disappear is the equality of costs when exchanging any goods for each other. However, it is quite difficult to imagine such a society; that is exactly why societies with a pure barter economy do not exist.

Also quite interesting is the part of the essay dedicated to the so-called functions of money: scarcity, durability, divisibility, and so on. Kamendant indicates the role of these functions. From his point of view, these are simply different aspects of saving when using money. At the same time, only part of the saved costs relates to exchange itself. But beyond that, there are savings on storage costs, change, and so on.

Perhaps I will not try to briefly summarize Kamendant’s entire essay in one post; it turns out muddled and unclear. Read it yourselves.

My only complaint about the text is that it is written in rather poor language and needs editing. The author claims that this is only part of a future treatise on economic theory, and I hope that before the publication of the treatise, it will be proofread a bit better.

Nevertheless, I am terribly glad that Austrian economic theory remains alive and evolving, rather than being reduced to a retelling of treatises from the middle of the last century.

Navalny and Leviathan

When I read about Navalny’s poisoning, I felt completely hopeless. This year, ruling regimes all over the world have finally gone off the rails and have already managed to cause an unimaginable amount of damage to people. And it’s only August! And there is no reason to believe that 2020 is just an anomaly and that things will settle down later. In short, I wanted to fully retreat into internal emigration. To a place where there are no political news, where you have no idea what new orders the disposers of other people’s lives are giving, where there is only a market around—peaceful, cozy, and benevolent. To the place where all decent people actually belong.

I beg you: please, do not feed yourselves to the Leviathan. Stop with these pickets of yours, for which you will be fined—one; jailed for a day—two; given a criminal case—three. Stop the performances with Putin dolls and other risky nonsense. This will not shame the bandits in power. This does not help the victims of the bandits. It simply forces the security forces to turn their extremely unfriendly attention toward you, with a predictable result. You cannot be proud of being a victim of the regime. You should be proud of causing damage to the regime with impunity. But be proud in silence, otherwise, the impunity will turn into a failure.

One should act openly only when backed by power. Until then, we are partisans in this war declared upon us by the state. We must not be visible. Only grotesque rumors should be known about us—that we are everywhere, that 90% of the country’s economy is in the shadows, that no one follows the regime’s orders except for completely naive weirdos, that only suckers keep their money in fiat while the right people keep it exclusively in crypto, that official employment for a normal person is just a smokescreen for shadow earnings, that a normal person has contacts for every occasion, and it is thanks to them, not the state, that he peacefully prospers.

Of course, it is not like that now. But such rumors and beliefs have the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is why it is useful for us to broadcast them. This is a far more effective struggle against the regime than rallies or, Lord forgive me, anti-corruption investigations. Against any regime, not necessarily Putin’s. Against the phenomenon of political power as such.

The Fate of a Hero

If ancap happens, how will land sales in the state take place, and to whom will the money go? To previous rulers?

Ilidzhin

I have already answered a related question in a post about the continuity of pension payments during the transition to a stateless society. There, I noted that the transition mechanism will vary depending on exactly how ancap comes about.

The most peaceful and calm way to transition to ancap, from the perspective of state functionaries, is through minarchism, which is precisely why it is attractive. As a result of liberal reforms, the state’s share in the economy shrinks, taxes decrease, state property is gradually privatized, and all of this is replaced by private institutions. Over time, only the name of the state remains, and eventually, the last newly dismissed government official, leaving the last government office rented from a private company, turns off the light. The money received from privatization during minarchist reforms is spent on the bankruptcy procedure of the state pension system, the repayment of the national debt, and so on. And if, due to favorable market conditions, some unspent money remains after privatization, it is simply distributed equally among the citizens.

If the transition to ancap occurs through the formation of extraterritorial contractual jurisdictions, then after some time the state will simply become one of such jurisdictions, losing its right to legitimate aggressive violence and its tie to a territory due to the shift to contractual relations with clients. In this case, that state property which is found unnecessary for carrying out the functions of a contractual jurisdiction will simply be sold, as non-core assets are usually sold. The privatization of the state itself will most likely happen through a shareholding mechanism: each citizen receives one share, and then some hold, some sell, and some buy up shares, thereby gaining control over the ECJ. This mechanism is prone to corruption (see voucher privatization), so it is unlikely to happen without scandals.

Finally, ancap may emerge as a result of agorist practices bleeding the state dry until it collapses on its own. But in the process of being bled dry, it will sell off those assets that still hold some value, and by the time of liquidation, all liquid state property will already be in the hands of enterprising agorists, including former government employees who privatized it into their own pockets. Those who find this unfair can simply try to do it before others. Agorist logic is harshest here: state property has already been declared ownerless property, effectively controlled by a gang of accidental heirs to the great robbers of the past. Whoever manages to seize a piece of this property non-violently is a success. Whoever manages to seize it violently is not a success, and property claims may be made against them later.

What Belarusians and Tsikhanouskaya Need to Do, Part 2

Since I wasn’t far off the mark with the first part of my advice, and events unfolded quite closely to the proposed scenario (instead of arresting the entire headquarters — only the deportation of the president-elect; instead of diaspora activity — a nationwide strike), I will venture to suggest a tactic for ending the confrontation.

The essence of the tactic: no one allows any doubt that the president-elect is indeed Tikhanovskaya, and she continues to act precisely in this capacity. And what does the legitimate president-elect do? Of course, she schedules her inauguration.

There is no need to wait long. The inauguration is scheduled for the nearest Sunday, at the largest open venue in Minsk. Foreign leaders are officially invited to it. The Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians will certainly agree, and another dozen leaders will announce that they are sending their representatives. Then begins a bombardment of the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs with notifications that the president of, say, Croatia gratefully accepts the invitation of the Belarusian side, arrives for the inauguration at such-and-such a time, and requests that a meeting be organized.

In the same way, the inauguration organizing committee with a straight face issues instructions to heads of agencies: organize traffic closures, provide security, set up a stage, seating for invited guests — and so on. If an official sends a refusal, an announcement of their removal from office follows, and a request is sent to the deputy.

In short, the winning side simply begins to give orders, and representatives of the losing side are faced with a choice: either they play by the new rules, or they personally drop out of the process, and tomorrow new faces occupy their offices. Orders are also given to the OMON squads — they are given a week’s leave; after all, they have just worked very hard.

Additionally, the defense side appeals to the investigative authorities with a proposal to close the cases of Tikhanovsky and Babarika in connection with newly discovered circumstances. The circumstances, in the form of a crowd of thousands speaking actively under the windows at that time, speak for themselves.

I will not elaborate on further details; I think the line of thought is more or less clear. Fake it until you make it.

After the first two acts of the play, only the final one remains to be played: we shall overcome