Автор: Анкап-тян

Why is minarchism bad?

If we imagine that any functions of government institutions can be outsourced to private entities, how would problems such as a crowd of people dissatisfied with the lack of state-guaranteed pensions and disability payments be resolved in an ancap society?

Alexey

The question seems inconsistent to me. If the functions of God are outsourced to private entities, then how do we solve the problem of a crowd of people dissatisfied with the lack of a God-guaranteed reward for spiritual merits? If the crowd makes claims against God, they are addressing the wrong party, because His functions have been given to private entities, and it is they who are accountable. If the claims are made against the private entities, then one must look at the content of the contracts concluded with them, and depending on this, the legal proceedings will yield one result or another. It is not necessary to gather as an offline crowd to file a lawsuit; class-action lawsuits are perfectly coordinated on the internet.

As for the first part of the question—what is bad about minarchism—it is far more useful to make it clear why it is good. It is good because it quickly and reliably provides a serious improvement in the quality of life for many people. As the great minarchist Kakha Bendukidze stated, reforms are when everyone quickly becomes better off. Minarchism becomes bad when it suggests stopping at what has been achieved. From that moment, the rollback toward a large state begins. At this point, minarchists need to be pushed aside and the dismantling of the state should continue, not giving them time to recover and ignoring demands to leave a small piece to play with.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest for your review an interesting interview between the minarchist Yaroslav Romanchuk and the ancap Boris Yurovsky regarding the practical measures proposed by the Austrian School of Economics for post-Soviet states. A particularly juicy moment was when Romanchuk stated that ancap and communism are utopias incompatible with human nature: you should have seen the range of emotions on Boris Savich’s expressionless face)))

Otherwise, the interview is quite constructive; Romanchuk proposes a mix of the successfully implemented Georgian reforms of the aforementioned Kakha Bendukidze, the reform program of the Ukrainian minarchist Gennady Balashov—and adds to them my favorite idea about the decentralization of law by removing the licensing of judges and the monopoly on jurisdiction, in order to remove restrictions on the widespread distribution of the only fair court—the arbitration court. In general, I liked it very much. Actually, I love minarchists.

How to show an apolitical person the inconsistency of ideas regarding state redistribution, support for the poor, and social welfare?

A question from the Telegram channel Right Argument, accompanied by a donation of 124 rubles. And yes, if you were wondering how advertising could be bought on my channel—this is roughly how it would look.

The reasons for apoliticism can vary, but they usually boil down to the fact that a person pointedly places their immediate self-interests above some abstract values, and therefore doesn’t consider politics to concern them in any way. Thus, we need to show the person how state redistribution and state social welfare jeopardize their self-interests. And for that, in turn, we need to understand what those interests consist of.

I have recommended a similar approach before when explaining how to tell your mother about ancap if she is traumatized by the nineties.

The most common type of apolitical person who approves of state intervention is the one who simply doesn’t want to bother thinking about all this nonsense. The state doesn’t trouble their head with taxes because the employer acts as the tax agent, yet people receive some pensions, study, get medical care, and occasionally receive some benefits. Various loud words about the state robbing someone have as much value to such a person as any annoying advertisement. If someone tries to convey this information, it means they expect to make money from it. Maybe the State Department is paying them, or maybe they’ll start extorting donations now.

In this case, it’s best to sprinkle in anecdotes of two types from time to time. The first: how a certain mutual acquaintance successfully evades taxes, made money on Bitcoin investments, or settled a complex issue within state jurisdiction through a private contact—and so on. The second: how someone was fleeced for extra money through property taxes, had some entitled social payments withheld, or had their business seized in favor of the “brass,” and so forth. In short, provoke cynicism toward the state in the person—essentially, that all the fairy tales about the state being necessary for people are written for suckers, while self-respecting gentlemen will, of course, grab a piece of the state if given the chance, but seriously rely only on themselves and other respected gentlemen.

The second type of apolitical statist is encountered much less frequently. This is a calculating guy who has all the necessary benefits and social payments, considers receiving them entirely fair, and will most likely gladly provide consultation on various nuances of welfare. Having grown accustomed to the unpredictability of politics, he doesn’t bother his head with who is there or what they promise before elections, or how one politician is better than another. You simply need to be in the state’s good graces and do what is approved by the current authorities.

Here, it makes sense to encourage such “entrepreneurship,” but remind them that when everything collapses, it’s important to know how to pivot. In the Soviet Union, trade workers were in favor, but in the early nineties, most of them turned out to be professionally unfit for the new conditions. Today’s trade workers slave away and don’t look anything like the former privileged stratum. So, when social welfare ends, it’s important not to end up on the street as a useless specialist in obtaining benefits; it would be good to have other competencies.

Fortunately, such people usually don’t need long convincing that social welfare will sooner or later collapse. Since he is consistently in the black, he knows deep down that no free ride lasts forever.

Of course, there are many other varieties of statists, but I have listed specifically those who are apolitical. If you encounter statist political activists, that’s a completely separate conversation, but that’s a whole other story.

There is a certain charm to kitchen conversations, since they successfully survived the USSR

And as a postscript, I’ll briefly share my impressions of the channel Right Argument. I would say that this young resource is still forming its own style, so the channel looks somewhat eclectic. Initially, the authors apparently assumed they would ask themselves questions, answer them, and result in a fairly concise catechism for communicating with leftists. But now the channel has expanded beyond the original intent and has begun to intersperse arguments with reactions to the current agenda. So now it can also be used as a source of those very life anecdotes that are so useful for kitchen conversations.

Libertarianism ex machina

Bitarch, Ancap-tyan

In many plays staged in ancient theater, an unusual technique for resolving character conflicts was often used — “Deus ex machina” (“God from the machine”). It consisted of the sudden appearance of a new god-like character on stage at the end of the work, who had not been mentioned previously in the performance and had the ability to quickly resolve the heroes’ problems. Simply put, external forces solved the heroes’ problems without delving into the essence of the conflict. This technique is suitable not only for works of art, but can also be useful for political transformations aimed at the destatization of society.

Let’s look at any libertarian public page on social media, chat, website, stream, podcast, or channel. What will we see? Most likely, an endless discussion of the same topics — how libertarian courts work, who will build roads under ancap, contractual slavery, abortions, the agency of children, nuclear weapons, drugs, the Austrian School of Economics versus Keynesianism and state planning, minarchism versus ancap, ancap versus panarchy, territorial communities versus ECUs. Often, this boils over into an endless holy war, where people spend many days in a row defending their point of view.

But the thing is, if you argue endlessly among yourselves and spend all your resources on it, you won’t achieve much! And is it even necessary? Perhaps there exists a single universal recipe for how to resolve all these problems at once and spend our scarce resources for the benefit of the movement?!

Yes, it exists and is found in the very nature of the state — a stationary bandit can conquer a society only when the balance of violence potential (BVP) is disrupted, while when this balance is maintained, a stateless society exists quite stably, as proven within the methodology of neo-institutionalism. You can hear about this briefly and clearly in the first part of Alexander Auzan’s lecture “Evolution of the Stationary Bandit.” After the formation of centralized coercive structures (the state), movement in the opposite direction toward a decentralized society becomes impossible without applying external effort to the system (this pattern is analogous to the second law of thermodynamics: heat will not spontaneously transfer from a colder body to a warmer one).

If we restore the BVP, the costs of initiating violence become higher than the costs of defense, and the territorial monopoly of the state simply disappears. Beyond that, everything else simply doesn’t matter! Of course, it is better to know the answer in advance as to who will build roads or how to determine the agency of children, but even without that, people will have no choice but to solve this without the state. It simply cannot exist when the BVP is maintained. If you are a programmer or simply know Boolean logic, you understand well: after calculating the value of the first operand in a conjunction (&&), you don’t need to calculate all the other operands if it is FALSE, as the result of the conjunction will be FALSE anyway. Or for a disjunction (||), you can skip calculating the other operands if the first is TRUE, because the result will be TRUE anyway.

It follows that a sufficient condition for the transition to libertarianism is merely bringing the violence potential in society to a more uniform distribution. As you have probably already guessed, this can be achieved by creating and spreading tools for the doctrine of deterrence (DD).

The advantage of this approach is that the development, production, and implementation of DD tools into wide use can be carried out by a much broader circle of people than those currently involved in political campaigning and protest actions. Co-opting techies who can assemble a drone, a blinding laser, or other interesting tools from freely available parts to fight the regime is far more promising in terms of expanding the protest base than limiting recruitment to humanities scholars and economists who are well-versed in the nuances of ideology. Even more useful is the involvement of engineers and managers capable of organizing the mass production of such items, which is also a very numerous category. It should also be noted that semi-cottage production or writing a software product is easily hidden from the state and is therefore safer than attending rallies, which serves as an additional stimulating factor.

When reliable, mass-produced, and inexpensive tools for deterring aggressors are available even to a grandmother, it won’t be long before the “market decides” the fate of the state. After the deus ex machina does its work, all of today’s theoretical disputes about how to organize under ancap will abruptly move into the practical plane. We observed something similar relatively recently, when economists argued about whether it was possible to return to the gold standard in the era of fiat money, and then Satoshi arrived, and now instead of the gold standard we have the bitcoin standard. That’s it, the subject of the dispute has vanished; the agenda is now the widespread practical implementation of private hard money.

What is the difference between natural law and positive law?

Libertarianism is based on natural rights; why is Svetov against them?

анонимный вопрос

In a recent video by Mikhail Svetov, which your question is about, much seemed strange to me. Since that is the case, I will first go through the entire video and then move on to the topic of the question, so as not to make two posts about one video.

To begin with, Svetov uses a definition of anarchy as a Hobbesian war of all against all. I don’t remember if Hobbes used the exact word anarchy; I recall the term state of nature more. However, in our video on the deterrence doctrine, I tried to show that a war of all against all is not the natural state of society, meaning that Hobbesian (and Svetovian) rhetoric is based on a dubious foundation.

Svetov also uses the word rights as a synonym for the word privileges, thereby limiting himself to so-called positive rights. This is indicated by his phrase “fear people who want to grant you rights.” Libertarian discourse, however, usually concerns negative rights, which are freedoms. One is not “granted” such rights, because their realization does not require the actions of others; non-interference is entirely sufficient.

In attacking liberals, Svetov implies progressives of the American type, given that he uses headlines about minority quotas and affirmative action as illustrations. In Europe, they more often call themselves social democrats, and it is unclear to me why Svetov separates them from socialists at all, saying that from one side we are pressed by a socialist boot and from the other by a liberal one, while in fact he is speaking of the same socialist boot.

Another interesting point: Svetov opposes morality and conscience, claiming that evil liberals removed conscience from man and replaced it with morality. However, Svetov does not define what conscience is and where it comes from, if not from the experience of interacting with other people and the memory of their moral evaluations. Or does he want to say that conscience is the voice of God? Well, in that case, it is unclear what he has against natural rights, understood as divine decrees.

Another phrase that Svetov uses in his video: “where there is no law, there is no crime.” Yes, that is correct; crime is a term from positive law, which is a system of commands. There is a command, someone violates the command, they have committed a crime. In private law, there are no crimes; there is property damage, breach of contractual obligations, and so on, and the person who suffered the damage is free to oppose this and demand compensation—or not oppose it and not demand it.

Thus, I would say that Svetov’s video is simply a juggling of terms. We define anarchy in a way that no anarchist defines it, after which we prove as simply as two plus two that anarchy is bad, and even that the state is anarchy. Everything is logical, but we get nothing but confusion in the end.

Now let’s return to the question of whether libertarianism grows out of natural law. Historically, yes, but today that is not important because human thought has not stood still. We can derive libertarian principles deductively based on the laws of logic: here is an apodictically true statement that a person belongs to themselves; now we show that any attempt to refute this statement implicitly relies on the very premise we are trying to refute. Those whose brains haven’t melted have grasped the Tao and discovered natural law. Or we can examine human interactions and show which behavioral strategies prove more advantageous and therefore survive through natural selection. This utilitarian approach gives us the same libertarian principles, but in this case, the laws of logic do not stick out as if they were god-given and people were merely objects under them. Therefore, such an approach is less irritating to people like the hypothetical Mikhail Svetov with their obsession with ethics, but more so to connoisseurs of mathematical rigor.

Personally, I first became acquainted with Rothbard and the Hoppean derivation of the principle of self-ownership, and then with Hayek and the Friedmanite utilitarian justification of property, and I suggest not arguing over whom to love more—father or mother. Both praxeology and spontaneous orders are two equally useful methodological principles; let us use both, depending on the situation, rather than imitating Svetov, who is so right-wing that he tries to bite off libertarianism’s left leg.

Guide to Panarchism

The rise of the Russian libertarian movement over the last few years has not only led to the word “libertarianism” being frequently mentioned outside the libertarian circle itself, but also to the fact that the exposition of libertarian ideology in Russian, adapted for the Russian-speaking reader, is beginning to consolidate. Mikhail Svetov moved from five-minute videos to hour-long lectures, and is now writing a book. I started with answers to scattered questions, but for six months now I have been working with the Libertarian Band team to prepare a systematic video course presenting my understanding of libertarianism. And just yesterday, Ved Neuman also announced the start of work on a full-fledged panarchic manifesto, but first constructed a guide to panarchism, in which he collected and grouped by topic most of the materials published on this subject by the developers of the panarchism doctrine itself.

I hope you have already read or watched most of the materials provided in the guide — its value lies precisely in the systematization.

NAP

Check out the new video on the Libertarian Band channel! As part of the second series of stories about libertarianism, we have reached such an important term as the NAP, or the Non-Aggression Principle. We analyze how it emerged from the doctrine of deterrence, how it evolved, where it is presumed to evolve, and what its limitations are (since there are many in the libertarian community who want to build absolutely everything based on the NAP).

Of course, a full and thorough analysis cannot fit into six minutes, but we tried not to take up your precious attention for too long. We will talk about other aspects of living in society in the following videos. Work on a new video — about the institution of reputation — has already begun.

Series of videos about panarchy

This summer, another small channel called LibertyUKR appeared on the vastness of YouTube; although foreign, it is Russian-speaking. It is interesting because it consistently posts videos analyzing libertarianism within the framework of panarchism. The presentation of the material still needs a lot of work, but the pace of content creation is somewhat higher than on the one I personally collaborate with.

Recently, a video about copyright and patent law appeared on the channel, the seventh video in the general cycle. Before filming, they sent me its text to polish a little. I tried. As a result, a completely independent work emerged, which I will either post as a separate article sometime or we will make our own video out of it. So, the collaboration with the channel didn’t quite work out, but they will manage on their own.

https://youtu.be/GwyHEMwzmp0

Rule-making without the state

Everything is clear with the economy — it’s based on blockchain. But what about the ideology? Not in terms of party differences, but how to self-organize? Who produces politics?

Gastello

If there is no state, by what laws will criminals be judged? And who will issue the laws?

Bvl72

From the perspective of the state’s creators, it must be a monopoly on legitimate violence and a monopoly on making final decisions. This is required to perform the two key functions of the state: robbery and arbitrary rule, namely taxation and rule-making. And while in the economic sphere it is generally clear that it is better without robbery than with it, and that any economic benefits the state strives to provide would be provided better and cheaper by a private individual in a free market, many reach a deadlock regarding rule-making: who will ensure that everyone follows a single set of rules?

Fortunately, this problem does not need to be solved. Rules do not have to be uniform; they have to be convenient. The concept of rules is embedded in humans literally at a biological level. Even young children develop rules for playing in a sandbox. The more established a company becomes, the clearer and more developed its rules are. Rules appear in any chat or other club, and people actually appeal to them with even greater seriousness than to state laws, because state laws are for lawyers to study, while people need the rules themselves.

Rules can exist as text or simply as a set of assumptions. Compliance with rules can be monitored by a specially appointed moderator, or simply by everyone. Rules can be immutable, or they can be regularly revised. For breaking the rules, one might be expelled from the collective, hit on the forehead with a candelabra, or have an eleven-meter penalty kick taken against them. But what would definitely not occur to anyone without a state is to collect absolutely all rules into a single code, from football and preferance to the order of taking out the trash and washing dishes in the family.

Nevertheless, for greater efficiency in creating rules, certain general principles are usually laid as the foundation for their composition. For example, if there are different roles in a collective, different standard powers may be provided for them, but within a single function, it is more convenient for its holders to be subject to the same norms, whether it be football or organizing production. When organizing a competition, it is appropriate to ensure equality of conditions for the competitors, whether it be preferance or an auction. It is appropriate to explain existing norms to a newcomer, and until they have mastered them, it is appropriate not to hold them to the full severity of the rules, whether it be an internship in production or mitigated criminal penalties for teenagers. If a judge is appointed to monitor compliance with rules, they must not have an interest in the process they are judging, or they must not have the right to judge themselves.

The question of what happens if different groups have different rules is also contrived. The rules of football and chess do not conflict; each is created for its own game, and if a football player and a chess player go to a bar, they follow the rules of behavior in a bar. If it suddenly turns out that people are in a situation where there are no rules, or everyone is used to following their own, they either try not to bother each other or they develop common norms. For instance, newlyweds quickly set aside what their own parents taught them and form their own norms. For instance, meeting on a mountain path, people look at each other and silently decide who will press against the rock and who will squeeze past them closer to the cliff. For instance, farmers will agree among themselves how long to wait for the owner of an abandoned plot to appear before it is appropriate for a neighbor to claim it, and how to proceed if the previous owner does appear afterward.

But, of course, in a complex and global world, uniform norms can certainly exist for millions of people, or even for the entire population of Earth. For example, popular languages have hundreds of millions of users; very few connector standards for external devices connected to computers have taken hold worldwide, and there is only one markup language for web pages. Global rules can be quite detailed, and their development can be handled by entire consortia involving many companies. Such standards will be followed simply because it is more convenient.

Some sensible norms are also contained in the existing legislations of individual states. Some of them will continue to exist after the state, if using the ready-made ones proves more convenient than developing them from scratch.

Bet you can come up with great rules for the game in this picture in five minutes?

The difference between a minarchist and a liberal

I’ve become a bit obsessed, and I want to resolve this contradiction in my head relatively quickly 😀 What is the difference between a minarchist and a liberal (besides the prohibition of aggressive violence in the case of the former)? After all, not every liberal, for example, is “for” state social support, or views the state itself absolutely positively. In general, I would be glad to hear a coherent answer.

анонимный вопрос

Generally speaking, of course, if you want to get an answer relatively quickly, the most reliable way is to accompany the question with a donation)

Minarchism is the result of the continuous development of classical liberal ideas, so it is difficult to draw a clear line between them that all proponents of liberal discourse would agree upon. I would approach the distinction from the standpoint of which basic values guide the person we are trying to label.

If the focus is primarily on the protection of private property and the social contract, through which a government is created to protect the institution of private property, then we are dealing with a classical liberal. They tend to evaluate the state precisely by the criterion of whether it effectively protects private property or not, and they are willing to pay some minimal, reasonable, and fair taxes (don’t ask!) provided that the work of protecting property is performed conscientiously. Otherwise, if a long series of abuses by the government leads them to assume that it has become a tyranny, they reserve the right to overthrow and reconstitute that government.

However, if a person primarily emphasizes non-aggression and the voluntary nature of forming a complex of government services—where the actions of private individuals may be forcibly regulated, but only on the condition of compensation for inconveniences, and where the government clearly positions itself as a service—then the person is guided not by Locke and the Founding Fathers, but by Robert Nozick, and in that case, they are more likely a minarchist.

Finally, a person may fundamentally deny the state, no matter how minimal it is, but believe that a number of social guarantees are necessary to maintain civil peace, and that reasonable people are quite capable of funding them on a voluntary basis because it is ultimately in their interest. In that case, this is a left-market anarchist; such people exist too.

From left to right: Rawls, Nozick, Locke

Survey about the roads

The Tea Club sent me three books they published: Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” Hoppe’s “Democracy: The God That Failed,” and Sharp’s “From Dictatorship to Democracy.” I plan to write reviews for all three, and you can choose which one I should start with.

There are three roads: to democracy, from democracy, and to serfdom. Which one will you take, and which one will you lead your mother down?
Обзор какой книжки вы бы хотели увидеть первым?
  • Хайек, Дорога к рабству 47%, 58 votes
    58 votes 47%
    58 votes - 47% of all votes
  • Хоппе, Демократия: низвергнутый бог 41%, 51 vote
    51 vote 41%
    51 vote - 41% of all votes
  • Шарп, От диктатуры к демократии 12%, 15 votes
    15 votes 12%
    15 votes - 12% of all votes
Total Votes: 124
08.11.2019 - 07.04.2020
Voting is closed

Есть три книжки: к демократии, от демократии и к рабству. Какую обозреть первой?

You can order the books through the Tea Club Telegram store.