Автор: Анкап-тян

What do you think about Rojava?

L29Ah

In the modern world, the level of aggression continues to decline, and the level of publicly demonstrated tolerance for systemic aggressive violence is lower than ever. Therefore, news that in some godforsaken hole in the world, some strange people have been fervently warring for years, prompting many non-combatants to undertake distant and dangerous migrations, is a powerful irritant. One feels the urge to appear, kick everyone into gear, force them to shake hands, and engage in something more useful than self-extermination.

Then, of course, you remember that this is exactly why the USA, RF, and Turkey invaded inhospitable Syria, and you realize that “enforcing peace” is some kind of creepy scenario. Especially when it is done at the expense of taxpayers, while the profit goes to the suppliers of cannon fodder and the seize-rs of oil fields.

Attempts to figure out who is more “right” in this conflict essentially boil down to determining whose system of values is closer to yours, so that you can go on rooting for the least obnoxious team, wishing that they would finally just dominate everyone else.

The Turks appear to be the main assholes in the conflict, playing a role in the region similar to that of the Russians in the post-Soviet space, though I fully admit this may be an aberration of my perception.

The desire of the inhabitants of any given region for self-governance is, of course, completely legitimate in my eyes, while the desire of central authorities to actively manage local affairs is with equal obviousness illegitimate—regardless of whether we are talking about Syrian Kurdistan, Chechnya, or West Virginia. However, the same can be said regarding the desire of regional authorities to rule locally by curtailing the powers of local administrations, and accordingly, regarding local administrations that violate individual autonomy.

As far as I can judge by official data and anarchist propaganda, the situation with individual autonomy specifically in Rojava is quite decent, and for such a heavily war-torn region, it is downright exemplary. There exists a relatively functional grassroots democracy and secular legislation, and the problem of the region’s complex ethnic composition is solved through quotas in self-governance bodies, which is quite natural for such situations.

The gender equality declared by Rojava’s laws always deserves a special mention, placing this entity in the same league as a civilized neighbor like Israel. This state looks like the most obvious ally for Rojava after the USA and Russia finally withdraw their contingents from the region, and Turkey also curbs its foreign military activity. Of course, this is merely a well-wish that good people should stick together, not a real prediction.

Are there any good purely political or military scenarios for Rojava in all this mess going on there? No. The autonomy skillfully maneuvers between several predators, but it lacks the strength to defend its freedom and security relying on its own forces, and it is unlikely such strength will appear.

All that remains is to hope that Rojava can ensure the most favorable PR for itself. Here, it seems to me, they could partially adopt the experience of Georgia, which managed to strengthen itself quite well in its region through liberal reforms, transparency, and openness to guests. Currently, Rojava has the image of a left-anarchist commune, and for Europeans, these guys are associated with squats, looting, eternal irritating street activism with a vague message about destroying capitalism—and similar hooliganism. It doesn’t seem that such customs are actually actively in use in Rojava, which means there is no need to remain within the confines of such a suspicious image. Socialist communes do not fare well in attracting direct foreign investment, whereas the presence of a large number of assets held by foreigners, in the absence of one’s own strong army and friendly neighbors, is capable of providing a more or less reliable protection.

Cuties with guns are great, but if you show lesbian cuties guarding their peaceful mining farm, the liberal community will simply melt

How will courts work under ancap?

анонимный вопрос

Since anarcho-capitalism does not emerge through social engineering, it is obviously pointless to make promises in the vein of “once ancap is established, all courts will operate according to these rules we have set.” We can show how courts operated in historical stateless societies, how they operate now in the non-state sphere, and how they could be organized if the state were consciously outgrown.

The issue of historical non-state legal systems is studied in detail in the book by David Friedman and Peter Leeson Legal systems very different from ours. Someday I will work on its translation, but for now, one can see from the table of contents alone just how many different legal systems existed that did not require state intervention in their operation.

What functions should a legal system perform?

  1. A system of landmarks. With a legal system in place, people can plan their actions, knowing what the procedure should be in the event of a conflict.
  2. Conflict freezing mechanisms. If a conflict occurs, it can always be attempted to be solved by direct force. The presence of a legal system, however, allows for the start of a conflict resolution procedure instead of an immediate fight. For example, summoning the opponent to court, to a duel, or giving them the business card of one’s insurance agent. The faster a lawsuit is initiated, the less damage will be caused, and the cheaper the process will be.
  3. Mechanisms for determining parties in court. A legal system can determine whether a person must defend their interests in court personally, whether they can be replaced by a representative, organize a class action, and so on.
  4. Restrictions on investigative methods. A legal system determines which evidence is considered valid (for example, a blockchain record) and which the court must ignore (for example, testimony given under torture).
  5. Procedure for choosing a judge. A legal system may require that both parties explicitly agree on the figure of the judge (arbitration), or it may prescribe a specific rigid procedure for applying to a pre-known court (for example, at the place where the conflict arose).
  6. Limitation of judicial powers. A judge may have the right to conduct an investigation, or may be required only to consider the evidence provided by the parties. He may have the right to summon witnesses under threat of sanctions, or may be limited to voluntary cooperation.
  7. Limitation of sentencing variability. The more predictable the outcomes of the proceedings, the lower the costs society members bear from uncertainty. Therefore, a legal system usually includes a certain schedule of penalties rather than leaving such things entirely to the discretion of the judge.
  8. Sentence enforcement system. A legal system may assume that both parties deposit funds in advance to secure possible compensation for a claim, may assume that the plaintiff collects the court-awarded amount independently, or may, for example, provide a system of coercion to execute sentences (for ancap, i.e., a society with an even distribution of the balance of violence potential, such coercion can only be non-violent).

Under ancap, various market agents can provide either a full range of legal services or individual specialized services. For example, a detective agency may provide only the search for evidence for court, a collection service only ensure recovery, a law firm represent the client’s interests in court, and the court itself organize the proceedings and issue decisions according to a pre-agreed legal system.

The development of legal systems is an evolutionary process, and it is impossible to predict in advance which solutions will be in demand in the market and which will not. Whether legal systems will be created by individual authoritative lawyers, consortia of legal service providers, or borrowed directly from existing systems is also impossible to predict.

More detailed information on the mechanisms of interaction between different elements of the legal system under ancap can be read in David Friedman’s book The Machinery of Freedom, chapter Police, Courts, and Laws in a Free Market.

Human+ Aggression-

Can Transhumanism Help Eliminate Aggressive Violence?

Ancap-chan, based on the ideas of Bitarch

The Problem

There is an opinion that the means of fighting aggressive violence offered today are treatments of symptoms rather than the problem itself. What is the point of punishing the manifestation of genetically inherited tendencies; wouldn’t it be more reliable to fix the genes?

To answer this question, I turned to two sources. The first is popular science — Evgenia Timonova’s lecture on aggression. The second is strictly scientific — a review article by a group of Novosibirsk geneticists, “Aggressive Behavior: Genetic-Physiological Mechanisms”. Below is a very brief summary.

  • Aggression is determined by the hormonal background. Several different hormones are involved in the regulation of aggression.
  • Hormones are released as a response to changes in the body occurring under the influence of both the external environment and internal processes. For example, aggression can be caused by violence, or simply by hunger.
  • The predisposition to aggression is partially inherited. The predisposition to hormonal pathologies, which can lead to a sharp change in aggressiveness, is also partially inherited.
  • Inherited factors can manifest to varying degrees under the influence of the environment, meaning that the predisposition to aggression can be reduced or developed through upbringing.
  • Aggression is a complex behavioral construct linked to other character traits, such as exploratory activity, independence, and the willingness to protect loved ones.
  • Specific genes responsible for the predisposition to aggression have not been identified. Even less so have genes responsible for the predisposition to specific types of aggression, particularly the predisposition to initiate aggressive violence. It is clear that there are several genes, located on different chromosomes, not only sex chromosomes.

Throughout human history, there is a clear trend toward the reduction of intra-species aggression. This can be fully explained by Konrad Lorenz’s classical model: the higher the ability of members of a species to destroy their conspecifics, the faster the genes responsible for the predisposition to intra-species aggression are washed out of the population during lethal conflicts. With the mastery of tools, human armament increased sharply, and natural selection went to work, weeding out the most aggressive. However, this happened very recently by evolutionary standards, which is why humans still have disproportionately high levels of aggression compared to their ability to kill people. This, essentially, is what is interpreted as the problem.

What approaches can be taken to solve it at the current level of technological development?

Today’s Approaches

  1. Medical. If aggressiveness is treated as a disease, it is effectively cured by barbaric methods such as lobotomy or haloperidol. Along with aggression, everything human in the patient is “cured,” which is hardly different from murder; therefore, an individual approach to each patient using more delicate means must be developed. Complex treatment with an unguaranteed result cannot be practiced on a mass scale, so let us leave this approach only for the most pronounced pathologies.
  2. Educational. Since the genetic predisposition to aggression can be weakened by good upbringing, it makes sense to focus on raising children without the use of aggressive violence. As a result, a child without pathologies will channel their natural aggressiveness into wonderful things, such as research activity or social activism. And for a child with a pathology, it will at least be manifested in a weakened form.
  3. Sexual Selection. This means of reducing aggression in the population is already working quite well. If, for a potential partner, feats performed to win them over are not as important as benevolence and care, then carriers of genes with low aggression have a better chance of having offspring — after which aggressive individuals go off to burn through their lives and get along perfectly well without reproducing.
  4. Acceleration of Natural Selection. When the direct shooting of aggressors in self-defense becomes common legal practice in society, the genes of aggressors are washed out of the population more radically than through sexual selection. The problem here is that the application of lethal self-defense also requires a certain predisposition to aggression; therefore, this approach works well in societies with brutal traditions, contributing to their rapid civilization — after which its effectiveness begins to decline.

Now let’s fantasize a bit to understand what transhumanists might offer us.

Tomorrow’s Approaches

  1. Embryo Selection. A DNA sample is taken from the fetus and analyzed for a predisposition to pathological aggression; if the result is positive, the pregnancy is terminated. This is already how more obvious hereditary diseases, such as Down syndrome, are fought. Convincing the mother to make another attempt at conception is a solvable task, provided there are not too many cultural constraints in society prohibiting the termination of pregnancy.
  2. Gene Modification in Adults. A virus is created that integrates into human DNA and either switches off the genes responsible for the predisposition to aggression or reduces their expression. The technology of gene modification itself has already been created and is actively developing, but which specific genes should be corrected and how is still poorly understood. Direct switching off of genes most obviously linked to aggression currently leads to many undesirable side pathologies in experiments. Moreover, we are talking about a whole complex of genes in different chromosomes, and modern tools are unable to provide such precise and large-scale correction. Thus, I evaluate the prospects of this specific branch of development as modest. But if the methodology can be refined even to the level of modern pharmacological methods of aggression regulation, it could replace them in psychiatry and also be used as a means of rehabilitating criminals instead of the idiotic practice of imprisonment.
  3. Gene Modification at the Embryonic Stage. The method is the same as in the previous point, but it introduces changes to the genome that will subsequently be inherited. The task is much easier since changes need to be made to literally one cell, rather than processing the entire brain of an adult. However, while the forced application of correction to adults can somehow be justified by the fact that they committed offenses, ethical problems arise with children. I assume that the implementation of these methods will occur with a significant delay compared to the previous point, despite the relative simplicity.
  4. Cyborgization. Since aggression is regulated by the hormonal background, it is not absolutely necessary to mess with the genome if the hormonal background itself can be regulated. Currently, this is done with medication, but in the future, implanted hormonal regulators could be used. It is hard to say which branch of development humanity will ultimately follow, but subjectively, the prospect of solving the problem by simply installing an app on a specialized gadget seems very attractive; furthermore, this methodology has minimum ethical barriers — I would gladly acquire such a device for myself.

Conclusion

First of all, I state that the complete eradication of aggression from humanity, similar to the betrization described by Stanisław Lem, is not only technically unrealizable at the current level of capabilities but also undesirable, since aggression is linked to many qualities useful to humans.

Essentially, aggression is a reaction to a stimulus, in which an attempt is made to eliminate the stimulus. Aggression can be opposed, firstly, by patience, that is, a reaction to a stimulus in which an attempt is made to adapt to its effect without eliminating the stimulus itself, and secondly, by flight, that is, a reaction to a stimulus in which an attempt is made to avoid the action of the stimulus. If the entire richness of human reactions to stimuli were reduced to patience and flight, it would close off not only the possibility of self-defense but the general ability to remove obstacles, especially if this involves any small amount of risk.

There is uncontrolled pathological aggression. It is usually associated with brain injuries and diseases or serious hormonal imbalances. The forced treatment of such diseases, in my view, is a special case of self-defense, especially since such aggression is usually identified when a person is already violating the NAP. The more the result of the treatment resembles a natural level of aggression, the better; but if medical intervention produces side effects that make a person’s life difficult (for example, if they are completely deprived of manifestations of aggression), this would be an undesirable but justified result. I am also prepared to consider the presence of a predisposition to pathological aggression in a fetus as sufficient grounds for abortion or genetic correction at the embryonic development stage — provided there are reliable, proven methods of diagnosis and correction.

As for the natural level of aggression, it is already gradually decreasing in humanity, and in recent years, this has been accompanied by a significant decrease in violent crimes. Therefore, measures to force this decrease seem completely unnecessary to me. Non-violent upbringing of children is already becoming an ethical norm. Sexual selection is already working fully in favor of caring partners rather than dominant ones. Civilian weapons, for all their utility, already look somewhat archaic. Not yet at the level of crinolines and frock coats, but somewhere at the level of evening gowns and three-piece suits. Cute, sophisticated, but unusual.

And finally, I will note once more that the optimal solution seems to me to be the ability to arbitrarily regulate one’s own hormonal background. For example, through the use of an implant. It would certainly be useful for suppressing outbursts of aggression, but I suspect that I personally would use it for the opposite: in situations where my level of aggression is insufficient. For example, before using a weapon for self-defense. Or in order to stop procrastinating and sit down to write a long-postponed post.

The Overman in the world of cozy ancap

Mechanics of Freedom, chapters 3.2 and 3.3

Chapter 3.2, Police, Courts, and Laws in a Free Market, was translated a long time ago by Elena Makeeva by order of the LPR. I have finally edited it; in time, the same fate awaits the other four chapters translated for the LPR.

This chapter examines a central piece of Friedman’s picture of society under anarcho-capitalism: the concept of private competing law enforcement agencies, which will take on the role of police and partially insurance companies. It also describes the interaction of such agencies with private arbitration courts.

Chapter 3.3, The Stability Problem, concerns the question of whether this beautiful system of private law enforcement agencies will be stable, or whether they will inevitably form a state. Naturally, Friedman argues that everything is stable—otherwise, there would be no point in building such a complex system—and then provides the justifications for this thesis.

I have also reworked the table of contents in accordance with Friedman’s internal chapter numbering, as he numbers them here, doesn’t number them there, and does something completely random elsewhere…

Right-libertarian feminism

The proposal to allocate a column for Miss Liberty on my channel split opinions almost down the middle, with an unusually high proportion of readers participating in the vote—usually, not many people bother to like or dislike. Therefore, she decided not to unsettle the audience with off-topic posts and started her own Telegram channel Right Libertarian Feminism.

Stop by, read the introductory article, subscribe if you feel like it, and invite your friends to subscribe if you think they would be interested.

Your opinion on nap.world?

Valya

As Mikhail Svetov, the creator of nap.world, claims, medium is the message. The one who speaks is part of the message. Therefore, it is not enough to examine the proposed text of the non-aggression pact; one must look at the person proposing it.

Mikhail’s rhetoric is hate speech. Even in his New Year’s greeting, he wishes torment and death to all “bad people.” It is important to understand: the proposal to conclude a non-aggression pact is not a declaration of peace. It is a declaration of war. A war against everyone who does not sign the pact. To Mikhail and his supporters, everyone outside the NAP agreement is not a legal subject.

Most likely, you are under no threat as long as you do not draw their attention. But if you initiate violence, or even publicly approve of someone else initiating violence, that’s it—you become a permissible victim. Lies will be told about you. Your counterparties will be discouraged from cooperating with you. If you have done something illegal, a report will be filed against you. But they will not physically lift a hand against you.

What does this remind us of? To me personally, it resembles the tactics of radical feminists or SJWs. They will find any instance of harassment or racism and broadcast it loudly. They will peck at you for any approval of such things. They will twist the facts about you and do everything in their power to make you persona non grata.

Feminists started before Svetov, and we can see where such tactics lead. They lead to the world becoming less sexist. Harassment turns out to be dangerous. Sexist jokes are laughed at less. Sexist advertising sells worse. The vile feminists, whom one wants to recoil from in disgust, make the world better. For them, it remains just as dirty, patriarchal, and unjust. It becomes better for us, the more moderate ones.

The Bitarch proposes using antifragile tactics (according to Taleb) to fight the state—that is, tactics that only grow stronger through opposition. If everyone whom the state prosecutes for victimless crimes declares that the state is a bandit and that they do not recognize its jurisdiction, it will undermine the legitimacy of the state, and the wider the repression, the stronger the delegitimization. Is this an antifragile tactic? Yes. The first such cases will receive wide publicity, and the prisoners will be seen as political. As the movement develops, attention will not be as intense, but this will be compensated for by the scale of the movement. However, such blatant disrespect for the court will more often lead to longer sentences, so it will be difficult at first to decide to bring politics into one’s case.

But what if an irreconcilable community actually forms around the idea of signing the NAP and intimidating everyone who hasn’t signed it? Let’s look again at Taleb, the book Skin in the Game. He shows how an inflexible, irreconcilable minority, evenly distributed in society, gradually imposes its rules on a flexible majority. In the US, political correctness became a norm recognized by the majority. In Russia, the example of implementing an accessible environment for the blind is more obvious. You won’t find a blind person on every street, but every traffic light beeps, and everyone trips over tactile paving: this is a norm imposed by an inflexible minority. Those who shame NAP non-signatories have a chance to achieve the same effect.

First, they will purge the ranks of decision-makers. Then they will intimidate the liberal opposition. Next, they will begin to harass those who approve of the actions of security forces—and then the security forces themselves. And at this stage, the idea of massively refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of state courts looks like a completely natural progression.

In short. The nap.world project as executed by Svetov is aesthetically repulsive to me, but if he gathers enough fanatics, the world around me really might become better. And after that, it would be good if they lusted themselves. Like the djinn from Andrzej Sapkowski’s story “The Last Wish.”

How Mikhail Svetov Dug Himself In

Miss Liberty

After Zalina Marshenkulova on Svetov’s show got drunk and just chatted about life instead of having a proper discussion, I didn’t expect her to prove herself to be a good debater, but I hoped for the best. But, my Goddess, how wrong I was! Of course, over three years, Zalina has become better at conveying her thoughts, and instead of wine, there was now water on the table in front of her, but the main factor in her success at the debates was still Svetov himself. It was enough to let him speak freely, and he dug his own grave, much like Rudoy did in the debates with Prosvirnin.

I consider the subject of the debate itself to be Svetov’s strangest and stupidest mistake. The title was promising: “Feminism: a struggle for rights or privileges?” But Mikhail didn’t particularly try to talk about the struggle, the rights, or the privileges. Already in the opening speech, I suspected something was wrong when he reduced his presentation to the trivialization of problems by feminists and some flaws in how Zalina managed her Twitter. This wouldn’t have been scary if it hadn’t turned out later that these essentially exhausted all his grievances with Zalina and feminism.

Mikhail came to talk about feminism, but spent the entire debate on how his opponent behaves on social networks; it was petty. Especially since he describes his own Twitter primarily as a private space and explicitly says that his influence on the discourse is greatly exaggerated, otherwise, he claims, we would have lived in a wonderful Russia of the future long ago. As a result of such an approach, Zalina’s rhetoric was often reduced to discussing tweets. As a viewer, I wanted to see a struggle between two points of view here and now, not archaeological excavations of someone’s posts and explanations for their words.

My favorite quote from the past debate:

While women die of anorexia, in the same way men die of melancholy. I absolutely do not want to draw an equal sign here, because both, of course, are tragic

Mikhail Svetov, fighter against the trivialization of problems

The phrase is so funny and wild that I can only address the men: don’t be melancholy, men, you are great!!!

I imagine the scene: a typical anorexic girl, who has spent several stints in psychiatric hospitals, destroyed all her internal organs, ends her fleeting life from dystrophy. And next to her, a man dies of melancholy, like poor Hachiko, because the girls wouldn’t give it to him, an incel, and therefore life is over. May the Goddess preserve you, two victims of social injustice, femine!

Svetov could have tried to return Zalina’s serve about death from anorexia, even with a take about similar problems among men, but not to cite melancholy as an example: no, damn it, men don’t die from torture in prison, their psyche isn’t maimed in the army, they aren’t bullied if they are fat or, conversely, scrawny. Melancholy is the main scourge of men!

Svetov’s story about men who ruin their lives for the sake of building a career looked about as convincing. And this in the context of discussing labor inequality! Like, don’t rush into the labor market, girls, it’s scary here, destinies are broken here, stay home, take care of your appearance. According to Svetov, it turns out that the most terrible male problems are some vague melancholy and their own privileges.

Speaking of privileges, by the way. What a topic for debate was missed! How I would have liked to see a competent analysis of the feminist myth about privileges. It is here that the feminist discourse about the all-pervasive patriarchy and the methods of fighting it is weakest. I would have liked to hear about the harm of legal privileges: Svetov only slightly touched upon the topic of maternity leave, and yes, Zalina answered the question about positive discrimination manifested in the leniency of cops toward girls at rallies. And yet, the struggle for benefits is exactly that part of the feminist discourse that can be most convincingly dismantled specifically from the positions of libertarian ideology.

Alas, the debates turned out sluggish, Svetov looked even weaker than in the argument with Kagarlitsky, and for a conversation at such a level, the high-ranking debating parties had no need to rent a hall — they could have exchanged barbs in cozy Twitter with equal success.

Interview with Mikhail Pozharsky on Libertarian Band

While I was relaxing in Germany, the well-known and highly respected libertarian Mikhail Pozharsky visited Novosibirsk to give a lecture. It is a great pity that the lecture itself was not recorded, and consequently, I was unable to listen to it. Fortunately, the Libertarian Band studio team caught Mikhail before his presentation and conducted a fairly thorough interview.

In my opinion, it turned out to be very interesting; thanks to Katya Khudoleva for the questions. It’s great that the studio proves itself to be a quite viable team, even when someone is away for a while. I would have asked different questions, but I’m not sure the result would have been better.

Perhaps Ancapistan is better built in fourth-world countries after all?

Well, let’s say, in Somalia, Micronesia, and other failed states, since it is easier there to achieve a more or less even balance of the potential for violence with relatively small resource expenditures (conventionally speaking, buying a Kalashnikov) due to the absence of an overwhelmingly powerful agent enforcing a monopoly on violence in that territory, as well as the culture of servility and economic structure that has formed around it?

L29Ah (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.00013567btc)

I will remind the readers that the balance of the potential for violence is one of the criteria for the stability of a stateless society according to Hirschleifer. Other criteria are a stable community composition and the absence of a significant number of people pushed to the brink of survival. Indeed, some secluded tropical paradise where coconuts fall right at your feet and where peaceful, smiling natives with Kalashnikovs live can easily build an anarchic society. But it is not enough to have anarchy; what is desired specifically is anarcho-capitalism.

And anarcho-capitalism requires a bit more than the absence of a state. It requires capitalism, which means commodity-money relations. So our imaginary tropical paradise will need a full-fledged commodity economy integrated into global trade. But international trade requires international recognition, and that is a serious limitation.

While composing his Meganesian cycle, Aleksandr Rozov particularly emphasized that the stateless society in the Pacific Ocean is being built not by real natives, but by outsiders. In reality, they are full-fledged white people with the notions of property, freedom, and law appropriate for white people—they simply deny the state. They only pretend to be natives in order to legitimize their claims in the eyes of the international community and avoid becoming pariahs leading a miserable existence under economic sanctions.

In real life, a similar project of anarcho-colonialism was attempted by the Seasteading Institute, but it encountered numerous legislative and technological restrictions, and now, judging by the website, it has degenerated from a libertarian project into something smelling of eco-activism.

So it is hard to say what is easier: to ensure the transition to anarchy in a capitalist state, to ensure the transition to capitalism in a failed state, or to organize a “freedom landing” in some toy state in Oceania. One thing can be said for sure: the matter is not limited solely to the balance of the potential for violence.

A white man with an automatic rifle in a tropical paradise

Mechanics of Freedom, Chapter 3.1

Usually, when I start working on the translation of another part of David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, I stall for a long time. He precedes each part with a poetic opus of his own composition, where the wit of the content is compensated for by the clunkiness of the form. Fortunately, this time I managed to deal with the poems relatively quickly. In them, David naively wonders how the world order manages to exist in such harmony despite the government’s disregard for these things, and how government services themselves only provoke a smirk: as if this public good is not very much of a good.

What is anarchy? What is the state? In this chapter, Friedman defines what he intends to rail against throughout the rest of the part, while leaving the clarification of all the philosophical murk to Lysander Spooner.