Many thanks to Mikhail Pozharsky, who promoted our translation project of Libertarianism by Eric Mack. As a result, we have seen a surge in website traffic and gained two new translators, though the rain of donations hasn’t quite fallen yet. Nevertheless, the work continues.
The author explains which doctrines of the time Locke opposed with his ideas, where he derives them from, what conclusions he draws, what couple of caveats he accompanies the concept of original appropriation of property with, for what purpose people form a government, at what point they should begin to rebel against it — and why such a rebellion would be just.
Be sure to send your donations to the address 1AFkD2bazCs5YZBBrSD7HsRMWLmRbg6QBo — and next time we will be able to tell you what Hume wrote about the principles of mutually beneficial cooperation.
P.S. It turned out that in addition to the text we pirated, there is another bonus section attached to the book, open to all. But for consistency, we have also posted it on our website, and we will translate it in time. Therefore, the total number of chapters in our progress bar has changed.
The second episode of the third season of our favorite series by Libertarian band has been released. The third season, dedicated to the mechanisms of a stateless society, began with the criteria for the stability of anarchy. We examined several of them, chose one, and settled firmly on it. Bitcoin is an excellent illustration of how this criterion works.
We briefly went through the history of money and described why Bitcoin emerged, why it was created in this specific way, and why it is an excellent tool for a stateless society, without which, of course, things would have been significantly more difficult for us in the wonderful Ancapistan of the future.
I continue to provide you with content for leisurely quarantine reading, this time returning to grandfather Friedman. Chapter 44, Private Law Enforcement, Medieval Iceland, and Libertarianism, is not comparable in size to the previous one, of course, but it is still quite large. Nevertheless, it is much easier to read because this time it is not theory, but history, and based on fiction at that.
In general, the age of the sagas in Iceland is almost my favorite historical period, perhaps second only to ancient Greece, so I edited the text with great pleasure; I wish it were always like this. I hope you will also enjoy the reading, and from there, you can go ahead and download the saga of Egil — and off you go, diving into the world of proto-ancap!
The world is going into quarantine, and it is a good time to pay less attention to the news and instead engage in something more fundamental. If you read English fluently, I recommend getting acquainted with Eric Mack’s book Libertarianism, which our team pirated and posted on my site without asking the author. But if you prefer to read in Russian, you have a great opportunity to sponsor the translation of the book. For now, I am posting the introduction so that you can get a general impression of the text.
The book describes how global philosophical thought arrived at the ideas of libertarianism, how these ideas were formulated, what criticism they faced, and how that criticism is countered. While Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom or Molynieux’s Practical Anarchy are more applied works that may be debatable in some details, here we are in the space of more or less pure theory.
The language of the book is quite heavy, but we are not making an academic edition, so we will adapt the author’s speech as much as possible so that it remains somewhat readable.
In total, the translation will require approximately 75 thousand rubles. For now, I am ready to accept only bitcoins at the address already known to you 1AFkD2bazCs5YZBBrSD7HsRMWLmRbg6QBo , but as much as I am able, I am also looking into anonymous fiat payment systems and perhaps soon you will have a relatively simple way to send money in fiat.
After all, finding such villains is not enough; you also need to compel them to stop, and in most cases I can imagine, they will be reliably protected by their contracts.
анонимный вопрос
And in a world where there is a state monopoly on violence, and in a world where the enforcement of rights is handled by private parties, and even where, as discussed in a recent post, violent collections are extremely limited, the strategy for fighting hacking groups is generally the same: to increase the cost of the attack.
To jump on a trendy topic, let’s liken the activity of a hacking group to the spread of an epidemic. You can invest in individual protection, you can make the transmission of the infection more difficult, or you can find its source.
A hacking attack can cause irreparable harm immediately. For example, a hacker steals your private keys, and your bitcoins vanish to someone else’s address. A virus can also encrypt your disk and demand money for decryption. If you send the money, the data will either be decrypted or not, depending on the strain you were infected with. An attack can also simply cause noticeable inconvenience, as in the case of a DDoS attack, for instance. For the state, catching hackers is long and expensive, and the barrier to entry into the market for such attacks is not particularly high. For a private individual, finding a hacker and preparing a body of evidence would also be costly. Thus, it is unlikely that the cyber-epidemic situation in a stateless society would be fundamentally better.
Since the cost of catching a hacker is high and the probability of success is not very great, there is every reason to impose quite large fines, in addition to damages, on those unlucky few who are actually caught. You can read about the principles of calculating fines in “The Mechanics of Freedom,” in the recently published Chapter 43.
What happens if a hacker is caught, but nothing can be seized from them? For example, they claim they forgot the wallet key. There are no legal grounds to apply thermo-rectal cryptoanalysis, and besides, it provides no guarantee of a result, as the key may indeed be lost. In this case, the only option is to impose installment payments on them, and let them compensate as new legal earnings appear. Or, perhaps, they will decide to speed up the process by remembering the key.
For the end user, I would recommend passive protection methods and insurance. As for the actual catching of hackers, let insurance companies pay for it on a systemic basis if they deem it a market-efficient measure.
Recently, I published a post in Bitarch’s column stating that current trends in technological development are easily extrapolated into the near future, and based on them, we see that the capabilities of private individuals to carry out indiscriminate mass killings continue to grow and could well reach the level of a global threat. From this, the author concludes that to eliminate this threat, not only the institution of the state must be rejected, but also any other factors that potentially place people in a desperate position where there is no particular difference for them whether to die alone or to take all of humanity with them.
Bitarch then expanded on the topic on his VKontakte page, responding to a number of objections. The response boiled down to the idea that the threat is closer than one might assume and that, in general, we need to be more responsible. Unfortunately, this rhetoric added few substantial arguments—how is such a call for responsibility different from Greta Thunberg’s appeals? She also threatens global consequences if we do not all wake up right now.
After that, Bitarch released a third article, and this time proposed a more specific case for consideration. Imagine a dangerous asshole (Harvey Weinstein is used in the example) or an organization (let’s say, for example, ELF) who are given a severe punishment, and instead of accepting it humbly, they demand immediate pardon under the threat of releasing some unpleasant virus according to the dead hand principle. The virus would not kill humanity, but as we see from current events, it is capable of seriously damaging the economy.
Will the emergence of such threats lead to state power beginning to bend? Yes, of course. We have a great experimental state, Israel, which over time moved from the doctrine of “we do not negotiate with terrorists” to the doctrine of “we exchange one of our prisoners for a thousand of yours.” Thus, in states where there is a possibility of holding leaders politically accountable, they will bend to the demands of terrorists; and when the threats of terrorists acquire a global character, whether or not to negotiate with terrorists will cease to be the choice of a specific dictator, and even Putin, in such a scenario, would have to bargain. “I, for instance, agree to make certain concessions to the terrorists, but you, dear Western partners, should lift sanctions on me for such compliance, because as you know, terrorism is so unpredictable.”
Under ancap, this problem is simplified. The terrorist loses a subject for negotiations. Yes, he may be ready to indiscriminately exterminate several million people if his conditions are not met. But what conditions? To whom will he address them? There is no state. He could address, for example, the management of some corporation. Let’s say the same “elves” demand that the management of an oil company stop oil production, otherwise, there will be a coronavirus. After this, the board of directors resigns, and the subject of negotiations disappears again. Of course, this will not prevent the elves from launching an epidemic, but the goal of the terrorist act was slightly different.
Of course, means of protection against such threats will also be improved. For example, total transaction transparency could allow for the rapid location of a terrorist network and the neutralization of the dead hand threat. Or it might be possible to change the terrorist’s motivation. Or even local time-stopping. The debate over whose fantastic assumption will be realized first is quite fruitless. Bitarch claims that defense technologies develop significantly slower than attack technologies. Nevertheless, for some reason, the general level of violence is steadily declining, and if state-initiated violence is excluded from the statistics, it becomes practically negligible.
Therefore, it is not that I disregard the threat being discussed. I simply believe it is not very relevant to ancap, and as for postulating the necessity of outgrowing states, I have other sufficient arguments.
After a very long pause, I am posting the edited version of Chapter 43 The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman. The translation itself was done long ago by Elena Makeeva by order of the LPR. I had to bring the terminology of the early translation into alignment with the one I use in the new one. The old translation seems to have aimed to present the material as simply as possible. In doing so, a number of terms were not translated but paraphrased—much like if I were to write “words close in meaning” everywhere instead of the word “synonyms” in a linguistics article. I had to sacrifice ease for the sake of more rigorous terminology used in economic theory.
The chapter is titled Answers: The Economic Analysis of Law and is of a completely monstrous size. This is not surprising, as Friedman essentially tried to squeeze into one chapter the material from his separate work titled Law’s Order, a reference to which is provided in the appendix to the book, and which, unfortunately, is currently available only in English.
The peculiarity of Friedman’s approach is that he derives law from economics, rather than from libertarian principles, as the latter are unable to provide clear answers to many specific applied legal problems (greetings to all supporters of the opinion that any legal norms can be derived from a single simple NAP).
I received a request to organize a way to subscribe to regular donations to support the project. Unfortunately, I am not very familiar with the tools usually used for this. Therefore, to start with, I suggest that everyone interested in ensuring sufficiently broad and regular funding for the project message me privately on Telegram or Facebook. Then we will discuss how best to organize this so that it is convenient for you to pay and I do not need to reveal my identity.
There is one currently not very well-known argument as to why humanity will sooner or later have to accept the impermissibility of initiating aggression: the simple survival of our civilization. After all, with the development of technology, the conditional total harm that one person can inflict is constantly growing.
For example, now even a poorly educated fanatic in a truck can knock down a hundred people, and if they try very hard and load a mixture of fertilizer and diesel into it, they can kill a maximum of a thousand.
Now imagine the world in 30 years. Gene engineering equipment has become cheaper; biohacking has become a popular hobby for schoolchildren. Genomes of pests such as natural smallpox, plague, and influenza A/H1N1 are available on the darknet. A psychopath could trigger an epidemic, killing, say, 1 million people.
Another 50 years pass. Flying cars with compact nuclear reactors have appeared. And along with them, ways to overload such a reactor, creating a new Chernobyl in New York or Moscow. 10 million people are now at the mercy of a psychopath.
The distant future. Space ships for flights to Alpha Centauri have begun to be built. Antimatter is used as fuel. If someone doesn’t value their own life, they can take the entire population of planet Earth with them, turning it into a stream of neutrinos.
As can be seen, the population that one person is capable of destroying grows exponentially with the development of technology. Just like the trendy COVID-19 coronavirus. In such conditions, there cannot even be a thought of using violence against a person, because essentially each of us will possess not just a deterrent weapon, but a Doomsday Weapon (DDW). Humanity simply will not survive if it does not recognize the universal NAP, even toward the most unpleasant individuals like child killers.
I anticipate in advance the cries of etatists about the usefulness of the state. For example, they will say: “Look, you’ve just described the hell it will be without control by government bodies.” Only in reality, the state only increases the risks of uncontrolled use of DDWs—both by creating incentives for people to use it as a deterrent against aggressive violence from a stationary bandit (the state), and by spurring the development of such dangerous things in inappropriate conditions even without the goal of using them as DDWs.
The US government, of course, can limit biohacker experiments, but they will be gladly welcomed in some Mumbo-Jumbo, where they will work much more covertly from public control and possibly intentionally help in the creation of DDWs for the Mumbo-Jumbo government. Look at the ban on stem cell experiments in the US, which simply pushed developments to China and other countries, where they were carried out without any public notification.
I am also very surprised by the position of some libertarians who seriously consider the possibility of enforcing court decisions through physical violence. In reality, not only violence, but even harsh ostracism that puts the violator on the edge of physical survival (for example, refusing to sell food in a store) can provoke them to use a DDW (dying of hunger is no better than dying from a bullet, therefore complete ostracism can be perceived by the violator as physical violence). It is not for nothing that Kim Jong Un is not blocked from the sale of vital items, but is only forbidden from receiving luxury items like Ferraris and Swiss watches. And he doesn’t even have a DDW, but rather a fairly weak deterrent weapon.
So think about what is better for you: 1) A world with the enforcement of court decisions through reputation and soft forms of ostracism, which turn out to be sufficient in most cases. 2) A world with a slightly higher probability of enforcing court decisions through physical coercion, but with a tangible “bonus” chance of becoming one of the characters in George Stewart’s science fiction novel “Earth Without People.”
Ancap-chan’s Commentary
Morals are formed more by practice than by theoretical constructs. Trying to limit oneself now in legitimate means for the sake of possible consequences in half a century is roughly the same kind of panic-mongering as the desire to abandon carbon dioxide emissions to prevent global warming.
People indeed regularly face the question of conflict between tactical and strategic goals. The longer the planning horizon, the greater the probability that the issue will be resolved in favor of strategy. But it is unrealistic to influence someone else’s time preference with exhortations. So, either we gradually develop a stable ancap, with a habit of defending our rights and not permitting systemic violence, and then the planning horizon for people will be sufficiently distant—or we will continue to languish under the state, captive to purely short-term tasks, and watch with horror the increase in the potential for terror—both private and state—up until the collapse of humanity.
I’ve fallen ill and my head isn’t thinking clearly, so I took on work that requires minimum intellectual effort: I laid out and posted the drafts of all the chapters already translated by volunteers Practical Anarchy by Stéphane Molinier — I don’t have enough energy for editing yet. Thus, the particularly impatient can familiarize themselves with the text without waiting for me to polish everything.
The volunteers picked up such speed that they devoured all the donations previously collected for translation, and after a few chapters, I actually owe them. So I very much ask you to replenish the funds so that they don’t stop halfway. Send money to the wallet 1AFkD2bazCs5YZBBrSD7HsRMWLmRbg6QBo. A crisis is a great opportunity to buy bitcoins on the cheap, don’t miss this chance. Translate some for a good cause, keep the rest as a stash.
Bitcoin is a digital asset designed to perform the function of money, and it indeed possesses a number of properties inherent to good hard money. It is not surprising that among those who actively use Bitcoin, there has been a supposition that it is an excellent safe-haven asset, and that in the event of a financial crisis, money would flow specifically into it. As for gold, it is a safe-haven asset with a centuries-old history, and the fact that it would rise during a crisis was not subject to any doubt whatsoever.
Nevertheless, let us recall how gold behaved during the previous crisis. From March to November 2008, while the mortgage crisis was gradually turning into a financial one, the price of gold fell: everyone needed dollars specifically to plug the holes. And only when central banks began to compete in who could lower interest rates faster and buy up more junk papers did the resulting excess of dollars lead to a two-year rally in the gold market, during which its price reached an all-time high.
Gold in the last crisis: first down, then up
Currently, we are at the very beginning of the crisis. Just like last time, everyone is first running to the dollar. But, unlike in 2008, when quantitative easing was far from immediate, there was no delay in pumping the economy with fiat this time. On the other hand, it must be noted that immediately before the start of the crisis, the price of gold was close to all-time highs, as central banks had been actively buying it for several preceding years. It is possible that a number of countries will now feel the need to sell part of their reserves, and this will put pressure on the price. Thus, on one hand, many new dollars suitable for buying gold will appear in the market, and on the other, there will be a lot of gold sold from reserves. It is impossible to predict with certainty which of these opposing factors will be more significant over a horizon of up to a year. Further on, of course, the factor of the growth of the dollar mass will outweigh it, and gold will begin a new rally.
Today, Bitcoin is gold for geeks. Institutional investors have not yet had a chance to properly enter, and by their standards, the liquidity of this asset is completely negligible: the daily trading volume of Bitcoin is some measly thirty billion dollars, which is essentially nothing by the standards of stock and currency exchanges. Therefore, even a very modest sell-off of Bitcoin is capable of seriously dropping its price. But conversely, even very modest investments from the “big players” are capable of seriously heating it up.
In addition to the fact that the global economy will soon be flooded with dollars and other fiat, the reduction in supply will inevitably influence the price of Bitcoin: there are less than two months left until the halving. Therefore, if you have free fiat, now is a great time to enter Bitcoin. If there is an opportunity to take a fiat loan for about three years, investing that money in Bitcoin could also prove to be an excellent decision. Of course, one should not take microloans for this purpose.
In conclusion, I will comment on why buying US government debt may be more attractive than buying dollars. Purchased dollars sit in a bank, and a bank is an unreliable thing during a crisis. Bonds, however, are registered directly to the investor, and therefore the risk of their loss is incomparably lower. The liquidity of US government bonds is quite comparable to the liquidity of the dollar. So, there will be people willing to hold them even at a negative interest rate, although this seems counterintuitive.
