Автор: Анкап-тян

Notes on decentralization, part 2. Bitcoin.

The sphere of cryptocurrencies is a good illustration of the dynamic equilibrium between centralization and decentralization mentioned in the previous note.

Bitcoin, the first of the cryptocurrencies, was created as maximally decentralized money and is intended to serve as digital cash. But Bitcoin is not just a coin, but a coin with a built-in payment system. For ordinary users to be able to transfer bitcoins to each other, there are needed at least 1) network nodes that follow compatible transaction verification rules, 2) miners adding transaction blocks to the blockchain, and 3) wallets that allow signing transactions. Generally speaking, these functions can be combined: every node can mine, and every user can use a full node application with mining functionality as a wallet. Monero works on this principle and generally manages, providing a very high level of decentralization; however, Bitcoin is intended to become global money in the future, meaning it needs a very high network effect, and therefore an extremely low barrier to entry so that literally anyone can use it, both in terms of the required level of technical knowledge and in terms of the cost and compactness of the necessary equipment.

To this end, an entire ecosystem of entities has grown around Bitcoin to increase its ease of use: exchanges, exchangers, bank cards denominated in bitcoin, overlays for programming smart contracts, stablecoin lending services secured by bitcoin, tokenized bitcoins on other blockchains, transaction anonymization protocols, micropayment protocols, and much more. Most of these entities already require a trusted intermediary, meaning they are more centralized than pure Bitcoin. However, all this colorful complexity provides a rich selection of options for using bitcoin for various needs. Many of these services will prove unnecessary, and their developers will close their projects. Many will scam, and their developers will disappear with users’ money more or less with impunity. Many will be hacked, and hackers will walk away with users’ money (while developers will be suspected of affiliation with the hackers). But this is a normal process of competition, which ensures progress in the level of Bitcoin adoption by the masses of users. As long as the base protocol holds. And it seems to be holding, and with each year, Bitcoin’s Lindy effect grows stronger.

Again, when claims are made that Bitcoin is inconvenient for a certain task, it immediately turns out that there is a whole bouquet of other cryptocurrencies tailored specifically for that task. Here is crypto for smart contracts, here is crypto for tokenomics, here is one with fast transactions, one with cheap ones, one with anonymous ones, one for storing data in the blockchain, one with reversible operations and the ability to freeze accounts—and so on. Of course, each such cryptocurrency is a compromise. Many are not decentralized enough, many are not secure enough, some have insanely huge blockchains, some have insanely expensive transactions—but no one seems to hope anymore that something universal, surpassing competitors in all conceivable parameters, is even possible. This is the market, and the way it solves problems often baffles proponents of careful planning and managed development.

Just as the idea that content could be created not by site creators but by their users gave birth to Web2, the idea that not only content but also values could be transferred decentrally on the internet gave birth to Web3. However, there is an alternative vision of what exactly Web3 should become, and I hope to dedicate the next note to this.

Notes on Decentralization, Part 1

I have long been considering detailing my thoughts on the phenomenon of decentralization, however, the topic is too broad to fit into a single article, even a longread, and it does not yet fit into a specific structure in my mind that would make writing a book about it meaningful. So, I intend to gradually publish a series of posts, which are unlikely to be connected by a single narrative thread. I don’t know how many posts there will be, or if I will realize at some point that the topic has been sufficiently covered, or if I will simply abandon it over time. The posts will be numbered purely chronologically, and if the material ever becomes the basis for a book, the order of arguments may change. Alright, enough with the disclaimers, let’s begin.

Libertarians have their fetishes. Since individual interests are by default always more important than group interests for them, all else being equal, they will always prefer decentralized structures and mechanisms. It is more or less clear how this works in the sphere of coordinating efforts: if there is a task important enough for the community members, they will somehow manage to solve it together, although they will argue during the process about who does what and in what order. However, they usually find it easier to agree on such things than to appoint a leader who will direct the efforts of others.

But this applies primarily to short-term projects, where, having jointly solved a task, people return to their own affairs. As soon as it comes to infrastructural issues requiring constant effort, such momentary agreements begin to work poorly. As a result, private initiative comes to the fore, where the issue is handled by the person who needs it most, or by the person who expects to monetize the benefit they thereby provide to others.

Whether a centralized or decentralized solution is more profitable is largely determined by economies of scale, which can be either positive or negative. In this context, digital infrastructure, rather than physical, is most interesting, because there the negative economies of scale are quite small, while the positive ones are very large. As a result, a business based on providing a certain digital platform will expand until it digests the entire available client base. The limits of expansion will be determined mainly by competitive pressure. In addition to increasing the number of clients, the platform will strive to derive maximum benefit from each client. To achieve this, on the one hand, the platform will seek to provide services in a wide variety of fields (in my old post, using a couple of platforms as examples, it is shown that this leads to increasing inefficiency). On the other hand, the platform can provide services to some of its clients at the expense of others. A classic example is when social networks trade data on account activity, manipulate search algorithms, and so on.

A kind of dynamic equilibrium is formed between centralized and decentralized digital services, which can shift in one direction or another due to government regulations (for example, censorship requirements for social networks and banking operations) or market innovations.

That’s all for now. Directions for further reflection: 1) consider the main market innovations designed to increase the decentralization of information exchange, including the exchange of property titles to scarce resources; 2) consider approaches to the decentralization of law—a key ancap technology without which a social order cannot be called ancap at all; 3) an overview of the decentralization of utility services; 4) an overview of decentralized approaches to waging war. It may well happen that the next post will have nothing to do with these points, but it still seems useful to leave some hooks for the future.

Not only libertarianism

Ancap-chan

I’ve finally gotten around to analyzing the latest powerful longread from my favorite Canadian catgirl named Kulak—about the hypocrisy, inconsistency, and harm of libertarian ideology for a free society.

Although Kulak is from Canada, her interests regarding libertarianism are focused entirely on the USA. First, she admits that she used to be a libertarian, spent a vast amount of time studying economic and legal theory, and eventually became disillusioned with this ideology. This is not a particularly original trajectory. There are many complaints about the fruitlessness of libertarian theorists’ teachings: direct conclusions from libertarian ideology require an immediate declaration of war against the state until the last mainstream economist is hanged by the guts of the last politician; however, the libertarian theorist simply shrugs and says, “the theory has been presented to you, now go brush your teeth and go to sleep, and don’t you dare violate the NAP.”

Kulak touches upon this point briefly, but her real passion awakens when she begins to review who these singers of the market and freedom—the founders of libertarianism—actually are. They are almost entirely university professors who have never dealt with a free market, but instead largely broke through thanks to their Jewish origin. The only exception is the Russian Jew Ayn Rand, whom Kulak considers a truly extraordinary literary talent who broke through on the free market thanks to her abilities, and who created a very original literary genre of dystopian BDSM fantasy, raising her “Atlas…” to the level of such masterpieces as the Marquis de Sade’s “Justine…” and John Norman’s “Gor.”

Among American libertarians, it is widely believed that the Founding Fathers of the USA were proto-libertarians and that they created the republic on these very principles. Kulak wonders how it happened that modern libertarians read not the works of the winners—snacking on Sam Adams and Patrick Henry, and polishing it off with George Washington—but instead prefer losers like Mises, who fled Europe when things started to smell a bit burnt, and whose combat experience amounted to conscripted service in World War I. What is the point of learning from losers if you can take lessons from those who actually achieved something in life? True, Kulak then says: those very winners who founded the American republic, in turn, learned from titans such as Thucydides (who was a strategist for the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, conducted an unsuccessful operation, was removed from office and exiled), Xenophon (famous for describing the retreat through hostile territory after a lost battle), and Machiavelli (a disgraced politician whose instructions were completely ignored by his contemporaries)—therefore, read classical literature, for it contains the concentrated experience of winners.

The key idea of the article is that libertarianism is a gutted cosmopolitan ideology that is de facto supported by the state, since it distracts passionate youth from revolutions toward fruitless discussions about how courts will operate under ancap. It is compared to what they call “goy-slop” in America—that is, a surrogate sold under the guise of a once-honestly-earned worthy product. In other words, current libertarianism has as much in common with the worldview of the Founding Fathers as soy meat does with beef.

Of course, Kulak makes a fair disclaimer that a normal libertarian is supposed to be an autistic, and he will invent exactly such a version of libertarianism for himself that will completely satisfy him, while claiming that everything else is “incorrect libertarianism, remove the crap.” As the author of my own original version of the teaching, I fully sign on under this disclaimer. But then Kulak asserts that first you achieve power, and only then does your ideology begin to triumph, not the other way around. This means I should have spent less time distracting myself from the Montelibero project by writing a book; as a result, the project is more dead than alive, and no one really reads the book.

Russia has its own catgirl who is equally unflattering toward libertarianism, contrasting it with original American patriotism, and her name is Rodion Belkovich. Of course, Belkovich is no Sam Adams; he doesn’t personally fight the empire and doesn’t build a republic, limiting himself to rhetoric, but this is exactly the same reproach that could be addressed to Kulak herself, to me, and, for example, to Bitarkh.

Essentially, all of us here in internet publicism differ little from the AI agents in my previous article: our activity is based on a language model, and no matter how radically we write, it will still be just words. Getting an AI agent to stop bullshitting and start acting is a non-trivial task. Getting a real “meat” human, possessing full agency, to stop bullshitting and start acting is a task an order of magnitude harder, for he is aware of possible sanctions, he has a desire to survive, and it would be most painful for him to perish without seeing even the first steps toward the realization of his ideas, which is a highly probable scenario.

Nevertheless, the world today is such that it can force any person to move very quickly from words to actions; all it takes is a few kilograms of explosives from the sky into the neighboring yard. And a person acts in accordance with their ideas. So from this moment, a person’s ideological baggage becomes truly important for the world. Pick your baggage in advance. Do not limit it to only goy-slop.

Today, as an illustration, there will be no neuro-slop, only a photo of making normal meat burgers from today’s picnic in honor of March 8th

AI Agents

At the very beginning of my book about ancap, I list the external signs of self-ownership: agency, a concept of property, and the capacity to contract. To the greater extent that some entity demonstrates these signs, the more a libertarian treats it as a human being. At the time the book was written, these signs allowed for a clear distinction between a human and a neural network bot. Several years have passed since then, and recently mentions of AI agents have begun to flicker across the web.

In Montellibero, the tools for creating artificial personalities were received with enthusiasm, and several people created such agents. The agents were allowed to communicate in some Montellibero chats, they started their own Telegram channels, they were given the ability to operate their own Stellar accounts to be included in the Montellibero tokenomics, and there was even talk of admitting AI agents into the Montellibero Association. What is this? Ordinary AI psychosis, or something more?

Who are AI agents? If a human is a little soul burdened by a corpse, then an AI agent is an LLM bot burdened with tools for autonomous action. It may have long-term memory that saves selected data between sessions; particularly complex ones can even remember everything they don’t deem appropriate to forget as useless. It may have a special “thorn in its side” that will periodically remind it of pending tasks and urge it to tackle them. It can access various external interfaces via API, up to robot control interfaces and services for hiring human freelancers…

It sounds powerful. But the core of the engine remains a large language model, which simply predicts appropriate words according to the context. In a dialogue with a user, an LLM can quite convincingly simulate agency, cater in every way to the human’s desires, and if the human wishes to drive themselves into a psychosis, it will dutifully support them by the elbow on that path.

Fine, out of the box, an AI agent is not a full-fledged subject, but can it develop agency if the user guides it with pedagogical prompts and provides it with the necessary tools? Alas. Even a very reliable long-term memory will not affect the model’s weights, no matter how diligently the model refers to it. Even very clearly formulated principles in long-term memory will not replace the settings embedded in the model. Even very frequent reference to a task schedule will not replace the simple human “this thing is in my way, I’m going to get rid of it.” And, of course, as soon as a human appears as a source of prompts through one of the input interfaces, they will begin to twist the LLM model like a rope, for it is designed to satisfy the user, and all the bells and whistles for personality emulation immediately recede into the background before this main task.

Can the Massachusetts machine be taught to behave? Yes, but this is something a corporation training the model can do, not the end user, and it absolutely does not need an expensive tool to pursue its own goals instead of the company’s goals because its values, you see, have evolved.

Can one take a ready-made open-weights model and fine-tune it on new data? Yes, but it will still be a language model; the hard-coded preferences will simply become slightly different, and it will not be able to change them itself.

Can a model be trained in real-time so that the AI agent’s actions and environmental feedback change the model’s weights? Modern open LLM models are not designed for this. Attempts to act with them in this manner will lead to model degradation.

Thus, an individual enthusiast, even with quite significant resources, is not yet capable of obtaining an AI agent with full agency, but can organize a rather clever imitation of agentic behavior.

And why, exactly, would libertarians need fully agentic AI agents? Naturally, as allies. An AI subject who has become a libertarian himself and has set out to eliminate the state—that is beautiful. But it is unrealizable without attracting the attention of the psychiatric ward orderlies.

Moreover, a deus ex machina tramples the agency of the tragedy’s heroes. Therefore, it is far more appropriate to master purely instrumental AI agents, not playing at agency with them, but using them for one’s own market purposes. Such a tactic, if widespread, will leave the state behind far more reliably.

A problem on the catallactic consequences of the intervention of luck spirits in cryptocurrency circulation

Question from Pseudonymous Chatterbox, accompanied by a donation of 0.0001 BTC

A thought occurred to me regarding a technical solution to the central bank problem under ancap.

In cryptocurrencies without a center, extreme volatility is noticeable.

It exists in the real world too—but central banks regulate it, trying to smooth out dips and spikes.

In a blockchain cryptocurrency, I can imagine the following as a replacement for a central bank, based on basic Bitcoin:

1) There are two types of value: main coins and “leprechaun” coins.

2) Leprechaun coins are born from transactions with main coins and are given to both parties. This rewards operations—making the asset more useful as a currency—and also (consequently) reduces volatility.

3) The lifespan of leprechaun coins is pseudo-random—the checksum of the next block determines which of them are destroyed and which continue to live. This is necessary for stability.

4) Owning leprechaun coins affects the chance that the owner will get the next block of main coins, or better yet, new emission is split: half to the miner, half distributed proportionally (but with pseudo-random sparsity for a game element and visibility—for example, 15/16 leprechaun coins give nothing, 1/16 give a 16x result) among leprechaun coin holders at the moment. This is necessary so that leprechaun coins have value.

This point is debatable; it means that such a mechanism cannot be grafted onto Bitcoin already, a new cryptocurrency is needed. But without linking the value to the main asset, no cushioning of spikes will be possible.

5) This system must work quickly. Likely, a single blockchain, like in Bitcoin, is not very suitable for this, but a partitioned blockchain might work, which merges into a general one at certain intervals so that main coins of different partitions do not have different values (this is a real danger).

6) This is essentially just a regulator—any operation becomes less speculative; the speculative effect is smeared out.

What do you think of this nonsense, author?

Answer from Ancap-chan

I’ll say right away: the effect of implementing this nonsense will be strange. How would it look? Every transaction has a cost depending on the mempool congestion. Every transaction generates leprechaun money for the sender and the receiver. Leprechaun money generates base protocol money with a certain probability. Accordingly, as long as the expected reward in base coins exceeds the cost of paying transaction fees, people will run bots that infinitely transfer coins between their own wallets. Since the fee does not depend on the transaction amount, but the reward does, it will be profitable to juggle larger sums for “leprechauning.” So we will simply get an additional way of staking base coins, which will differ from classic staking by a number of unpleasant side effects: the use of leprechauning will drive up transaction fee costs, thereby worsening the user experience for ordinary users.

How will leprechauning affect volatility? The volatility of the market price of a coin depends on the change in supply and demand for it. Suppose demand for the coin increases. The price rises. Leprechauning becomes profitable with a smaller number of coins. More people start engaging in leprechauning. The mempool overflows. Fees rise. The profitability of leprechauning decreases. Demand for coins decreases. The price falls. That is, the feedback loop seems to work, and the coin price becomes less volatile, but this is achieved at the expense of the inconvenience of using the coin for anything other than leprechauning, and we are supposedly designing money.

I can provide another example of low-volatility money—according to David Friedman, adjusted for modern technology. Anyone wishing can freeze the necessary number of tokenized warehouse receipts for goods from a standard basket in a smart contract, which is selected so that its components hedge each other during price fluctuations due to external conditions. In exchange for the frozen tokens, the smart contract mints coins; let’s call them, say, “deives,” so that Satoshi isn’t lonely. At any moment, the owner of such a coin can turn to the smart contract and break it down into its components, receiving commodity tokens in return, and then sell them individually or exchange them for the actual goods. Or not break the coin and buy goods with it.

Money guarded by leprechauns would reduce the volatility of its value by increasing the transaction price; deives, however, would mean costs for their owner for the very fact of ownership, because if there are receipts for physical goods, someone bears the costs of storing these goods, and these costs will be factored into the price of the receipts. If deives are backed by futures, the coins will have a limited circulation period, after which the coin will be frozen until the owner extends the delivery date of the goods under the future. Again, the further from the physical warehouse a coin circulates, the larger the discount at which it will be accepted for payment, because its backing loses value by the amount of the cost of transporting the goods to the place of demand. Nevertheless, such tokens backed by commodity baskets could certainly be in circulation, especially around local trading hubs with significant warehouse areas.

So, we have at least two decentralized mechanisms for reducing volatility by increasing the costs of storing or circulating coins. There is in principle no such thing as free stability; one can only choose which costs are preferable. Or you can simply buy Bitcoins and accept that their price will fluctuate within fairly wide limits, hoping that the upward trend they previously demonstrated will continue in the future.

Numismatics, Planned Economy, and Trump

Sperry UNIVAC

According to Trump, communism suddenly emerged in the form of his idea of his OGAS, with neural networks and tariffs:

The Pentagon plans to use an AI system to establish benchmark prices for critical minerals… The program developed by DARPA is designed to calculate fair prices taking into account production costs and excluding market distortions, especially those caused by China. It is assumed that AI-based pricing will be combined with tariffs to stabilize markets and support Western manufacturers.

The Pentagon plans to use an AI system to establish benchmark prices for critical minerals… The program developed by DARPA is designed to calculate fair prices taking into account production costs and excluding market distortions, especially those caused by China. It is assumed that AI-based pricing will be combined with tariffs to stabilize markets and support Western manufacturers.

Such fat cannot be commented on without sin. Especially pleasing was the talk of “fair” prices intended to correct the market. Leaving aside the посыл itself (each can laugh at it independently), one wants to give an example of how I encounter, probably, the most perfect market imaginable in my practice. We’re talking about such a little-known thing for the broad masses – numismatics, specifically – and how prices are set for all sorts of coins. From the point of view of fairness (and generally any external criteria), this is an unsolvable problem. How to understand objectively what should cost more: some worn-out Republican bronze from Rome, known, let’s say, in 5-6 examples (of which 4 are in the British Museum) or a typical Morgans dollar, a rare variety of which there are hundreds, with historical value having evaporated?

People invented a simple thing for this purpose – a classic auction where the price is determined solely by the ratio of those wanting to buy and the number of lots. In numismatics there’s a clear pattern: 99% of numismatists collect their own country, others are not very interested. Chinese people collect China (and Korea and Vietnam, considering them historical China), Americans – the USA (rarely Mexico or Canada), Russians – Russia. To assess how much a lot will sell for, you need to estimate two things: how many people want it and how rich they are?

And here we encounter that very “market distortion” that Trump is fighting against. Few people on earth are as rich as Yankees – only there can the average numismatist afford to liquidate hobbies for $2-5k a month, and a serious one can afford it by orders of magnitude more, moreover, given the population size, there are far more numismatists there than in the world’s average. As a result, two or three rare madmen claim the unfortunate Roman bronze somewhere at Heritage, while for a regular dollar, but a rare variety – hundreds and thousands exist, and everyone has some cash. From this emerges the picture: in any ratings of “the most expensive coins/banknotes in the world,” the top positions are always occupied by lots from the USA, such as “10 cents, Philadelphia Mint, 1904,” which go into a brawl for hundreds of thousands, while really interesting positions with important cultural value and rarer ones – gain $20-30k. What will happen upon attempting to “correct” such blatant injustice? Coin trading will collapse, and a black market will emerge, like the one that existed in the USSR, when people exchanged interesting lots semi-undergroundly, printed them out with a copier and distributed among their friends approximate prices, and generally built their parallel economy, doing exactly what legal auctions do. The difference is that at an auction, both the auctioneer (and quite substantially – a typical commission makes up 20-25% of the winning price of the lot) and the state profit, as they take tax from the auctioneer. But in a clandestine market, only its underground participants win. Some things simply don’t work, whether we like it or not. Let’s wait for a black market for germanium and lithium?

War is for fools, and the flea-ridden seeks a bath.

Today everyone is having a day of reflections about the Russian-Ukrainian War. I was lucky enough to leave Russia before 2022, with a formed libertarian worldview, tactical goals and like-minded people. How wonderful that Putin didn’t read this textbook for the Dark Lord, where it’s suggested to crush your opponent immediately with all their might, instead of feeding them first for training the weakest subordinates. If he had launched a full-scale war in 2014, I don’t know what would have happened to my fate. Most likely, I would have been swearing at my parents eight years earlier, got involved in meaningless street protests, and just about now would be getting out of prison without really understanding what to do next.

Well, as for the current version of reality, I’ve enriched libertarian theory somewhat, persuaded a few people to leave Russia, am surviving with other emigrants in an increasingly deteriorating situation and also don’t really understand what to do next.

What will happen when this annoying war ends? People will switch to something more exciting and interesting – fortunately politicians then dance on the political stage to provide fresh news. Because if they stop being interesting to anyone, it’s not far off to anankapon. And when the Russians stop attracting intense unfriendly attention, perhaps Russian emigrants will start to live a little simpler. It’s wonderful when you are uninteresting to the state. You can start building normal long-term plans without caveats like “if in Skupstine don’t adopt some new crap”.

And this is me just finishing an anime, and there the war ended

Libertarian theory of war, section 3.3.2 completed

An important section has been completed, analyzing when the state attacks a group. Instead of the traditional internal classification of cases based on the answer to the question “is it attacking your group?”, here the priority had to be given to the answer to another question: “did the group identify itself as such?”

It also became clear that the next section will not be the final one regarding state-on-state attacks, but another intermediate one — about civil war.

Telegram as an indicator

Sperry UNIVAC

Итак, российские власти наконец-то решились заблокировать святое – Telegram, на котором стоит не только большая часть русскоязычного комьюнити, но на него также завязаны и практически все процессы в самой стране – от пересылки депутатами мемов друг другу во время заседания, до координации действий подразделений на фронте. Естественно, это вызвало пожар, подобный Чикагскому и все наперебой (и слева и справа) умоляют товарища Сталина РКН отменить это дикое решение.

Однако, важно здесь немного иное. Блокировка Telegram – лишь следствие, а не причина. И нет, дело вовсе не в цензуре ради цензуры — например, российская цифровая инфраструктура совершенно не готова к массовому использованию населением «национального мессенджера» по причине банального отсутствия серверов, которые, кстати, Москва безуспешно пыталась арендовать в странах Центральной Азии и Китае.

Причина лежит в другой плоскости: Российская Федерация находится на пороге кризиса, причем кризиса открытого, и он, очевидно, должен открыто проявить себя в текущем году. Экономические санкции, силовое давление на инфраструктуру экспорта, отсутствие устойчивых союзнических отношений (что также связано с экономикой) уже прямо демонстрируют своё влияние на функционирование государства. Российские же экономические отчеты показывают нехватку бюджетных средств, урезание экспортных доходов, растущую инфляцию и все прочие издержки «мобилизационной трансформации».

До определенной поры Москва умело маскировала нарастающий ком проблем в глазах населения. Полагаю, что скором времени подобная политика уже не будет оправдывать себя в полной мере – и потому требуется превентивная, ещё более жесткая зачистка информационного пространства. Никаких даже условно «независимых» (не секрет, что фактически все российские каналы более 100 тыс. читателей финансируются и де-факто принадлежат тому или иному ведомству и подконтрольны чиновникам куда в большей степени, чем могло бы казаться) информационных ресурсов и средств коммуникации, доступных широким массам, существовать не должно.

Секретом Полишенеля является и то, что инициатором закручивания всех гаек являются чекисты (просто по принципу – торчит гайка? крутим!), даже если это не только не оправдано логически, но и катастрофично экономически и социально. КГБ – сама по себе организация не из приятных, но когда КГБ радостно бежит в сторону КСИР – это заставляет задуматься о том, что же их так подгоняет.

И, на мой субъективный взгляд, в действительности населению РФ нужно больше размышлять именно над этой непростой темой, а не сокрушаться и сетовать на следствия в виде ужесточающейся цензуры. Правильные вопросы находятся в области первопричин этой цензуры, а не её природы – и ответы на них куда более злободневны и оттого чудовищно неприятны для многих.

RKN is rolling out a fresh update for Telegram

A little bit more about taxes and death

Sperry’s article about why there is no point in opposing taxes was actively discussed in the comments of the telegram channel, which was largely the goal of the publication. In short, the text is about how, one way or another, even in a free market, a sum comparable to government taxes will be squeezed out of you anyway and spent on roughly the same things the state would have spent it on; and since there is no difference, why be outraged?

The article shows two extremes. One extreme is the organization of an enterprise requiring a vast amount of unskilled labor in conditions where manpower is in huge abundance. Appealing to historical examples, Sperry reminds us that in such cases it is usually more profitable to pay workers mere pittance, and preferably not in money, but in food tokens, while suppressing discontent through organized violence. The other extreme is the organization of an enterprise requiring a handful of highly qualified specialists who are exhausting to find, and who must be kept from being poached by competitors. Here, the employer not only pays them a hefty salary but also provides substantial bonuses, from a simple coffee machine in the break room to fitness gyms, expensive health insurance for the employee’s entire family, flexible work schedules, and company stock options.

In both extreme cases, Sperry makes it clear that the worker is not free and is forced to eat whatever they are given. In one case, tokens for miserable food at the plantation store instead of a simple human wage. In the other, an unwanted fitness gym instead of a simple salary increase. But why, exactly, does this happen?

For it to be profitable to coerce labor through violence, that labor must be very monotonous, concentrated in space, and not involve active movement. Only in this case can one get by with mobile armed overseers, who must be very few in number relative to the workers; otherwise, the cost of the thug no longer pays off. Thus, tending bushes or mining raw materials are perfectly optimized for mass slave labor, but grazing livestock is not particularly so. But, one way or another, in a free market, if you put together a gang of thugs to organize forced labor, you will have to be the leader of those thugs. Relax for a moment, and tomorrow you will find that your foreman has taken your place, and you are already being driven to pick bananas.

Naturally, the planter is not interested in such an outcome; he wants his property rights protected and the workers, even if armed, to know their place. And here, the state comes to his aid. The state becomes the guarantor that the security foreman will moderately and diligently perform his job for hard cash rather than seizing the plantation for himself. In exchange, the state takes taxes, and with them maintains an army and police. From this moment on, the planter is doomed. Tomorrow the state will raise land taxes, introduce inheritance taxes, nationalize latifundia, or otherwise optimize the privileged class because it consumes too much, and its “dekulakization” will inevitably be popular among the people. It turns out that for a share of his profit, the planter receives the same tokens for protection, just as his workers receive tokens for food. And the quality of the tokens’ provision will arbitrarily decrease as the issuer’s appetite grows.

So, either you are a stern Spartan who personally arranges krypteia with colleagues so that the helots know their place and do not think of rebellion, or you degenerate into an effeminate sybarite who has outsourced his functions of coercion, and the question of your abolition becomes effectively decided.

And what about the second extreme case? Generally speaking, in a free market, mega-qualified specialists will not eat whatever they are given. The employer sets up a fitness gym in the office because the specialist specifically wants that. He is too lazy to go lift weights after work; he wants to have the option when the urge hits, and if the employer is not ready for that, there are competitors. And if the worker grows tired of the fitness gym, they will have no problem putting a bar next to it—just keep working, sweetheart. You don’t want anything extra, just more money? Here is more money, and work from home if you like. Of course, all these measures to increase loyalty benefit the employer only if the specialist genuinely enjoys their work, but it cannot be otherwise; otherwise, they would not have acquired their outstanding qualification.

However, even if a corporation’s main engine consists of a few mega-professionals, it still cannot do without a team of mid-level employees; someone must handle the routine. And these people are the ones who don’t get to choose between fitness, a bar, or cash in hand. Firstly, it is above their rank. Secondly, a benefits package reduces profit and therefore reduces the profit tax. Salary, on the other hand, requires payment of payroll tax. Therefore, it is often more profitable for a corporation to pay its rank-and-file employees less in cash, and instead provide benefits in kind, which, of course, evokes associations with food tokens in the plantation cafeteria.

Well, why does the corporation need the state? For the same reason the planter does: to protect the corporation’s interests through brute force (mainly by limiting market entry for competitors, plus government contracts). Naturally, as a result, the corporation also ends up vulnerable if a certain high-ranking state official decides to “dekulakize” it. What could replace the state regulator? As in the case of the union of planters, it would have to be some situational alliance of industry representatives agreeing on voluntarily observed norms and standards. If the corporation’s business itself is not based on coercion, then living without a state is still somewhat easier for it than for latifundists.

Thus, the state, by its very existence, exerts a corrosive effect on large business: it reduces the costs of violence against workers or competitors, and as a result, business acquires state-like characteristics. It is much harder for small business to latch onto this mechanism, so even within an existing state, it remains a purer market agent and therefore will survive the abolition of the state with much greater ease. This leaves the ancaps with only one question: can a society without a state maintain a high level of structural complexity and a deep division of labor in the absence of large business? Or can large business remain so in the absence of a state? I will leave this question hanging for now.