While I was fussing with the translation of Friedman, slowly and sadly posting one chapter at a time, Sergei Ankapov completed his own translation, and is now raising money for a print edition. Since my version of the translation is also close to completion, I will, of course, hurry up now, and soon you will have two options to choose from: a free amateur one and a paid official one, with a preface by the author (although, if the preface is worth it, I will also pull it over to my version in time).
That’s how competition works: because of me, it will be harder for Sergei to raise money, and I will simply be ashamed that I didn’t manage within a shorter timeframe, and thus partially undervalued my own work.
The long series of videos about libertarianism on the Libertarian Band channel, for which I wrote the scripts, had a rather blurred ending. The series consisted of sections that—as it happened—contained exactly five videos each. The first section told about libertarianism in general, about different approaches to building a libertarian society, and about ancap as the goal of the movement. The second examined the basic concepts used by libertarianism and their interrelationship. The third discussed the mechanisms operating in a stateless society. Having analyzed law and morality, I wanted to finish by showing how they intertwine when applied to a topic as slippery as children. It was intended that this would conclude the ancap section and shift the focus to agorism.
However, the script was rejected by the rest of the team and completely rewritten, narrowing the topic to abortions alone. Further on, apparently, instead of agorism, an entire series on the NAP will be deployed, but also with a different scriptwriter. And you’re telling me about some split in the LPR. Who even cares about a split in some LPR?
The video turned out well—thorough and rich in factual detail—but it looks somewhat like a book being finished posthumously by the deceased’s heirs. But since I haven’t actually died, I now have the wonderful opportunity to present this video to you.
To get a vivid idea of anarcho-individualism, I can recommend listening to such an anarcho-individualist as Alexander Tatarkov. He speaks quite a lot about his worldview. As for us, we will discuss the differences with libertarianism.
The main postulate of an anarcho-individualist is that the individual determines for themselves how to build their life and their relationships with others, and any norms coming from the outside have the status of well-wishes for them; they have every right to fulfill them, take note of them, ignore them, demonstratively violate them, and so on. Naturally, the anarcho-individualist agrees that they bear full responsibility for their chosen line of behavior, but reserves the right to avoid this responsibility. The only thing in which an anarcho-individualist limits themselves is that they do not engage in the construction of power institutions; this is a taboo. Violating this taboo turns them into an ordinary Machiavellian.
It is not difficult to see that an anarcho-individualist, without violating their principles, can coexist with others in a state of Hobbesian war of all against all, sit in a lotus position achieving enlightenment, join any cooperative activity, or engage in ancapism as a private entrepreneur.
The main postulate of libertarianism is the principle of self-ownership. A person belongs to themselves, which is quite close to the views of anarcho-individualists. But this also means the recognition of the institution of property, for if property is completely denied, there can be no talk of self-ownership, and if property is partially denied, it implies the permissibility of encroachments on self-ownership, such as coercion. Therefore, a libertarian, unlike an anarcho-individualist, limits themselves not only in the construction of power institutions but also in encroaching on someone else’s property.
Since libertarianism was invented, the phenomenon of property itself has been analyzed and is now usually interpreted as a whole bundle of various rights. A maximalist approach to property, where it is interpreted as an absolute unrestricted right to dispose of an object, is very convenient for drawing caricatures of libertarianism or criticizing it in other ways. There are a vast number of such attempts in the information field; among the most interesting, I would name the text by Laksi Katala, Fundamental Problems of Anarcho-Capitalism.
Anarcho-individualism is a convenient basic framework in which a person acts when building their relationships from scratch with an unfamiliar environment where the rules are unknown to them, or where rules have not yet been developed.
Libertarianism is the next logical step toward building a peaceful, prosperous society, where people generally recognize each other’s legal capacity, and thus can develop frameworks for determining property rights and their transfer.
I should note that libertarianism is not entirely synonymous with anarcho-capitalism. To understand the differences, I refer the reader to the corresponding chapter of Friedman’s Mechanics of Liberty: Is Anarcho-Capitalism Libertarian?
The new chapter of The Machinery of Freedom, Default Rules, Economies of Scale, and the Stability Problem, is a more in-depth analysis of the possibility of a stateless society’s collapse compared to the first edition of the book. Forty years ago, the author’s mood was more overconfident, but later serious objections were raised against the proposed model, and he had to make a number of clarifications.
The key clarification was the idea that regardless of whether a state exists or not, the social contract is simply a peaceful agreement on which distribution of rights will not provoke people’s desire to violently change the status quo. This echoes, in some ways, my formulation that rights are claims that are tolerated. Then, Friedman adds the apparatus of Schelling points used in several previous chapters and shows that a stateless society is indeed susceptible to the danger of collapse during its formative stage, but if the rules become more or less settled, the resulting inertia will then provide the necessary stability.
Briefly about the problem for those who are too lazy to read the wall of text on LiveJournal:
Journalism is dying; it is a global trend related to the fact that the media have lost their monopoly on the distribution of information. On one hand, bloggers and search engines have killed news agencies. On the other hand, quality investigations and fact-checking have ceased to be profitable. There is less and less money from readers in the industry; as a result, the media are becoming servants of sponsors, and this completely undermines trust in them, especially if the media hide their sponsors from readers. How to solve this problem in a society where there are states regulating the industry is unknown. The question is, can the problem be solved in a stateless society, or will the abolition of regulations no longer help here.
For some reason, it seems to me that in a stateless society, the intensity of the problem itself will decrease. Modern media are losing trust because they write about politics, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to write about it impartially: the reader is politicized, the sponsor is politicized, and if you write ambivalently, you’ll be torn apart from both sides. But in the absence of a state, there is also no hysteria about who is in power, how the looted resources are shared, who is stealing from the common fund, and all that.
Of course, in the absence of a political agenda, there will still be issues of business reputation, disputes about the ethics of certain marketing moves, and so on. You can’t unring the bell, and the world will not return to old models of journalism, so after some time we will consume information in ways and in forms that we couldn’t have imagined recently. And then a new method will come into fashion, and so on indefinitely. Nevertheless, the essence will remain the same: the struggle for attention. Some will convert attention into money, some into fame. Some will work for their own money as a hobby, and some will slog along on sponsorships.
Will old-fashioned quality news content with fact-checking remain in commercial quantities? No, fact-checking is the reader’s personal business, and usually, they just don’t care whether the news is real or from the “Panorama” news agency — they read it, laugh, and switch to something else.
Will journalistic investigations remain? It’s unlikely they will be journalistic. Rather, it will be something like “a company found (or invented) compromising material on a competitor and leaks it through influencers” or “read reviews of new market products.”
Is it a good thing when everyone can receive information from many different sources, and you cannot be sure of any of them? This is much better than receiving information from a single source, believing it, and finding out ten years later that you were lied to.
Yesterday I took part in mini-debates on the subject, where in my opening statement I expressed an interesting thought that I hadn’t encountered in other sources before, so I’ll post it here, unedited.
The state exists in people’s minds: exactly where all ideas exist. Similarly, all ideas about how society should be organized exist in people’s minds. Therefore, the only way to overcome the state is to instill in people a complete conviction that this crap is not needed.
It is far more interesting what ideas can replace the idea of the necessity of the state. In small communities where everyone is more or less acquainted, relationships are more often built on various collectivist values—it’s more convenient. In families, communist relations usually dominate. Similarly, communist relations prove quite natural for anarchic communities as long as they remain modest in size—even if that society shares ancap ideas. Ancaps give free public lectures, donate to each other for various projects, and volunteer so much it’s mind-boggling. Where, one might ask, is the cold world of pure profit, the maximization of profit, and other purely theoretical constructs? It’s all cooperation and the joy of joint creativity. Therefore, paradoxically, ancaps develop a strange doublethink in themselves, where the market is supposed to settle things, but for some reason, mutual aid does.
As a community grows, ancaps naturally need to mature, learn how to make money by satisfying market demand, and establish coordination between specialized organizations—but, of course, bypassing state restrictions. The world of ancom, warm and cozy, falters when scaling in the face of complex division of labor, competition, and other things unpleasant to a child’s mind. Ancom is already felt within small communities today, and therefore seems utterly real. Ancap can be traced in individual phenomena, such as the world of cryptocurrencies, black markets, and the like. A certain level of abstract thinking is required to see in this the engine of the future world order.
So I see nothing particularly terrible in the fact that people begin their acquaintance with anarchy specifically with anarcho-communism. The wider the movement becomes, the further it will move away from its original ideals and approach ancap. Many ideological ancaps started as communists. The most famous example is, of course, Hoppe. Examples of the reverse transition are hardly observed. Therefore, I wish for this community, without losing harmony with the real world, to eventually master the entire aesthetic of capitalist relations as truly just.
In a chibi version, ancap inevitably looks like a gift economy, i.e., ancom
Free trade leads to a wide variety of goods appearing on the domestic market, and they are cheap. This is not surprising, because free competition reaches an ideal state. Everyone has equal access to the market. There are no hints of anyone’s monopoly.
Free trade has a strong negative consequence. Many local producers cannot withstand competition from foreigners, go bankrupt, and leave the market. In critical cases, this phenomenon can become mass. Entire industries perish, and the population becomes impoverished. Goods are sold cheaply, but this pleases no one. There is no money to buy them. The second negative consequence is that the money of local residents ends up in the hands of foreign sellers and flows abroad.
How to solve this problem without the state?
Anal Magician
I tried for a long time to imagine a situation in which this internally contradictory set of statements could be observed, and I succeeded!
I take a boat, a tent, a laptop, a solar panel, a shotgun, cartridges, a net, fishing rods, and a couple more dozen kilograms of gear—and I head to a small island a kilometer from the nearest shore, where a village stands on the coast. The island is uninhabited, and I declare it mine, although fishermen and vacationers often hang out here, but it hasn’t occurred to anyone to settle here yet.
Then I begin to manage the household.
I can catch fish; it will be enough for fish soup, and if I build a smokehouse, I can preserve some. But in the village, they smoke fish in the same way, and my goods brought from the island are not in particularly high demand. I could plant a garden, but the soil is mediocre, manual non-mechanized labor is unproductive, and everyone in the village has plenty of such produce.
I could go to the shore with a shotgun and demand money from vacationers for the right to hang out on my shore, but they don’t take the threat seriously and are only willing to pay if I provide some service in return. In response to my warning shot in the air, they tell me that I’ve gone crazy and that they will, of course, sail away, but tomorrow they will return with weapons, because they are willing to tolerate my presence in a place where they are used to vacationing only as long as I don’t interfere with them. I reply that I was joking, bring out some smoked fish to go with their beer, we hang out together, and the incident is resolved.
Eventually, I arrive at the following business model: I catch fish for personal use, continue running this channel, occasionally write articles for hire, and begin to play the role of a hospitable hostess of the island, who entertains vacationers with conversation, and in return receives donations, primarily food, and occasionally, depending on the mood, sex. From time to time, I swim to the village to buy everything I need. The goods there are inexpensive; I cannot compete with their producers in any category, and my money gradually runs out. Eventually, I realize that I have begun to spend too much effort and time on activities that bring me a disproportionately small income, and too little remains for writing texts for money, and the internet here is half-dead. So, I end this prolonged vacation, pack my things, and return to where there is internet, a hot shower, and other blessings of civilization that allow me to focus on what I am more competitive in.
Yes, under ancap, any business model can well turn out to be unprofitable. Free trade is precisely what allows one to quickly realize such things and switch to more profitable activities. And if profitable activity with existing competencies is fundamentally impossible in a certain area, then one must change locations and go where those competencies are more in demand.
At the same time, I will note that in the same example with the island, having capital and knowledge, I could have opened a yacht club, or a hotel, or a diving school, or organized a larger-scale fishing and processing operation—and turned a profit. Singapore itself was dirty and poor until it attracted investments, so the same place under different conditions can turn out to be either completely prospectless or a gold mine.
And in conclusion, I will finally answer the question posed in one phrase. How to solve the problem of market inefficiency without the state? Entrepreneurial initiative.
At the end of last year, I published a translation of Mike Mazar’s article On the Doctrine of Deterrence. Later, in the video of the same name by Libertarian Band, I placed this doctrine into the overall sequence of my story about libertarianism. I thought that this was generally enough, and why repeat it ten times. But in discussions, it is often evident that opponents interpret the doctrine of deterrence in a one-sided way. So, I want to present to you a short article by Bitarch with some reflections on this matter.
In RAND’s theory of deterrence, there are two different approaches that are usually mixed into a single concept in Russian-language literature: “deterrence by threat of unacceptable damage.” It is very important to be able to distinguish them, as they are essentially two completely different defense strategies. We are talking about deterring a group aggressor, such as a hostile state or a contractual jurisdiction.
1) Deterrence by denial. Defense is organized in such a way that the opponent cannot achieve their stated goal (for example, to subjugate the residents of a certain country through violence, thereby gaining more benefit than the damage from military action). This strategy arises naturally in a society with a uniform balance of violence potential (BVP), i.e., where practically every resident of a certain territory has a common weapon like a Kalashnikov rifle and the skill to use it. An opponent can, of course, “genocide” the residents of a given territory using weapons of mass destruction, but why?! You get no profit from the dead, while economic sanctions and international isolation for using WMDs are guaranteed. For deterring any rational opponent, this strategy is quite sufficient.
2) Deterrence by punishment (deterrence by punishment). Defense is organized through the threat of inflicting some harm on a potential adversary in the event that they initiate aggression. In the classical sense, this is a synonym for the phrase “nuclear deterrence.” It assumes the delivery of nuclear strikes against the enemy in case of aggression, and in some scenarios, even against the civilian population in cities. It is clear that such actions will provoke a counterstrike, and both sides, if not the entire world, will be destroyed. According to most experts, a limited nuclear war using only tactical warheads against military targets cannot exist in practice; therefore, nuclear deterrence can be taken as a synonym for “Mutually Assured Destruction” (M.A.D.) or “doomsday weapons.” It follows that choosing nuclear weapons specifically for a deterrence by punishment strategy is extremely disadvantageous in terms of the resources required to create and maintain them in combat readiness. Developing a new type of virus will cost one-tenth the price of a single nuclear missile or less, storing an ampoule in a refrigerator costs almost nothing, and the fact that, if used, the virus could turn against you as well is also not a problem if you think in the category of “we will go to heaven, and they will just die.”
The concept of deterrence by punishment has well-known disadvantages in specialist circles, which is why the authorities of many countries are consciously abandoning it:
1) Proxy violence. The aggressor attacks not in their own name, but by supporting “ihktamnets” [unidentified combatants], remaining as if uninvolved. The “ihktamnets” act on their own and deny any connection to the aggressor’s government. As a result, there is simply no one to retaliate against using WMDs.
2) “Salami tactics.” The aggressor acts in very small steps, gradually encroaching on the victim’s interests. Each of these steps is so small that it cannot serve as a reason for the use of WMDs (which would, naturally, entail the mutually assured destruction of both sides).
In the modern world, all states act quite rationally, so the most profitable defense strategy against them will be deterrence by denial—or more specifically, the presence of simple weapons (non-WMDs) held by absolutely all residents of a specific territory. This will also help a stateless society prevent the creation of a stationary bandit (its own state) from within.
There is a well-known assertion that monopolies do not form in a free market. This, of course, is not true: in a free market, everyone has the opportunity to secure a monopoly for themselves. All it takes is very little: simply invent something that others haven’t thought of, implement it, and start selling. That’s it, you have a monopoly. If your product is in demand by the market, this monopoly will also bring you superprofits. Then competitors will catch up, and for a while, you can maintain your superprofits if you enter into a cartel agreement with them. Then someone will start to break it, hoping to seize a larger share of the market, and after some time, nothing will remain of your cartel.
But why suspect people of bad intentions? Let your cartel agreement remain sacred and inviolable, because each of its participants has learned the prisoner’s dilemma by heart and knows how to think a couple of steps ahead. Let’s raise our glasses to the cloudless future of your business!
Alas, the weather is fickle. Tomorrow, someone will appear who dreams of a monopoly. They will invent something that no one has thought of before, implement it, and start selling. After that, it will suddenly turn out that this was a substitute product for your cartel’s goods, and now you have competitiveness problems. You will urgently have to agree to increase production and lower prices to maintain market share, but still, your horse-drawn carriage, which was so progressive until recently, will gradually begin to lose to that wretched tram.
What is to be done? The market is free, entry is open to anyone who wishes, and this is an unavoidable obstacle for anyone who wishes to rest on their laurels from past achievements. One should invent some kind of thing that would allow limiting free entry into the market; then the old, respectable business will certainly be threatened by nothing. What should it be called? There, let’s call it the state! Great, all that’s left is to implement this product and start selling it.
Ah, what? Did I answer the wrong question? Well, sorry…
Oh, youth! They promised to bury the cities in manure knee-deep! What went wrong?
Let’s imagine anarcho-capitalism. A developed capitalist economy with a deep division of labor and the dominance of commodity-money relations, plus the absence of state power—meaning, no monopoly on rule-making or the enforcement of those very rules. Are gender prejudices regarding which lifestyle generally suits which sex possible in such a society? Of course, they are. This means there is ground for feminism; in other words, the question is at least not meaningless.
Theoretically, one can easily imagine a situation where the collapse of the institution of the state leads to the triumph of hardcore paleolibertarians building their own contractual jurisdictions, where women are denied agency entirely and are considered a type of family property. A woman wants to found her own contractual jurisdiction with different rules? A woman wasn’t given the floor.
However, any attempts to force a conceptual model to work that differs significantly from the real needs of active subjects will face more or less active opposition. First, individual deviants occasionally express doubt that the existing order is the best; then, such cases accumulate, giving birth to a sufficiently formed ideological movement, and then, as the classics of Marxism assure us, the idea takes hold of the masses and becomes a material force.
Of course, bare ideas are not enough; they preferably need economic backing. Slavery is not only immoral but also economically inefficient. Oh, in this specific case it is efficient? Perhaps, but it is still immoral. Similarly, a woman’s opinion should be considered not only because she is an equal human being, but also because it may prove useful. But even if she is a shrew, she is still a human being.
What methods are permissible for promoting feminism under ancap? The same as for any other social movement: PR campaigns, private discrimination, shaming, and similar methods of moral pressure.
To what degree of obsession can feminism go under ancap? Theoretically, to a degree as serious as it is now. But here, again, not only rhetoric but economics are important. Yes, men are potential rapists, but specifically Vasya is a valuable employee. You want him fired? Do his job for the same money. Yes, diversity on the board of directors increases a corporation’s income on average. But if diversity becomes an end in itself, it becomes a cargo cult, and income drops. In short, rhetoric is verified by common sense and is accepted without much discussion if it does not particularly contradict it.
In addition to everything said above, I suggest rereading the chapter Bargaining in the Absence of Government from Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom. Equality turns out to be the Schelling point in the issue of gender rights, and discussions on this topic will inevitably revolve around equality. Therefore, imbalances in gender privileges in one direction or another will always generate serious opposition, while equality itself is quite easy to sell to the public.
