Pro-lifers advocating for the ban of abortions, pedo-hysterics advocating for the ban of consensual intercourse with minors, and there are even freaks pushing for a “new Russian Pinochet.” The second class is the most delusional, of course. And it is the most numerous. While the first and third can be dealt with by simply distancing oneself from them, here we have a situation where the hydra of pedo-hysteria has embedded itself so deeply into the womb of the libertarian movement that it is practically impossible to extract. What are your options for action?
Inglikament Artzebantovsky-Bukht
You have listed three categories of people, of which the first and third would like to change the status quo (currently abortions are legal, and communists are not being thrown from helicopters into the ocean), while the second would wish to maintain it (voluntary intercourse with minors is already restricted). Libertarians are conducting a public campaign to change many things in society, and therefore need very broad public support. But the preferences of different people will inevitably differ, and the more actively you fight for the purity of the ranks, the less support you will have.
In this regard, I would like to recommend reading a post in an interesting channel run by anarchists who clearly have leftism in their history but have somewhat outgrown it (subscribe, by the way, the channel is good). The post analyzes behavioral strategies in conflict for a broad expansive social movement versus a hermetic sect. It notes a curious feature: expansive expansion is usually accompanied by fairly peaceful rhetoric, whereas sectarians are extremely aggressive in their rhetoric, even though their composition and numbers remain stagnant.
The libertarian movement is currently on the rise, so it will inevitably attract various freaks. There is no need to waste energy on internal sectarianism; it is more useful to focus on the unifying traits of your worldview. As for the pedo-hysteria, you can shrug your shoulders and say that personally you do not understand how one can distrust the personal preferences of teenagers so much and approve of state violence for victimless crimes, yet you are ready to cooperate with conservatives on the topic of lowering taxes and many other issues. This is a callback to my recent post, where I fantasized about how hypothetical American libertarians, without having a majority in Congress, nevertheless set the agenda and pass their laws by exploiting the contradictions between socialists and conservatives.
In short, if you have signed up for politics, be more flexible; unite around common interests, and you will have plenty of time to fight once you are in the parliament of the Beautiful Russia of the Future discussing a bill to abolish the age of consent. If you manage to gain broad enough support on this issue, you won’t need a helicopter.
In May, Bitarch and I on one side, and Ved Neumann on the other, debated the applicability of the deterrence doctrine to ensure the secession of individuals from the state. Here is a description of the doctrine, and here is a summary article, which also briefly recounts the course of the discussion.
A frequent criticism of the described doctrine was that it remains unknown whether the threat against the key functionaries of the aggressor state will actually be carried out, while the death of a citizen seeking secession could be very swift, leaving them no time to organize retribution. Moreover, if they openly insure themselves somewhere, a sad fate might await the insurance company as well, as a warning against fulfilling various anti-state contracts.
Therefore, today we will talk a bit about how a citizen can ensure the implementation of individual deterrence without putting any outsiders at risk.
The dead hand principle is a kind of threat against a potential aggressor that will be executed only if the potential victim perishes. The most vivid embodiment is a grenade with the pin pulled, held in the very much living hand of the potential victim. Their death will lead to the dead hand relaxing and an explosion occurring. Clearly, a threat based on this principle can be scaled quite arbitrarily, up to a system implementing the automatic launch of intercontinental nuclear missiles in the event of an attack by a potential adversary, without waiting for special commands from a potentially already destroyed command post.
One could fantasize about purely engineering solutions in the spirit of the 20th century that would provide such a threat scheme for a person against the state leadership—for example, by pre-mining residences, deploying rocket launchers, or programmed combat drones, but all this looks disproportionately expensive, clumsy, and unreliable. Our information age implies a slightly different style.
For example, with the appearance of bitcoins, decentralized death betting markets became quite feasible, which is a veiled form of a contract killing. The mechanism is roughly as follows.
On a website that accepts bets on certain events that may or may not happen in real life (for instance, implemented on the Augur protocol), a potential victim of state aggression can place a bet on the death of a certain government official. The size of the bet must be large enough to tempt someone to ensure that very death. The money is bet on the fact that this official already died on some day in the past, which is obviously untrue; therefore, when the official actually dies, this bet will lose, and the winner of the wager will receive it. After the bet is placed, a potential hitman only needs to choose a day to execute the order, bet that the target will die on that specific day, then commit the murder, wait for the oracles to notify the system, receive their winnings, and carefully cash them out. This wager is our grenade, but a dead hand mechanism must still be organized.
One could take a more sophisticated route and place another bet on the same market, this time on one’s own death. If this bet wins, it triggers a smart contract that then places the bet on the official’s death. But it could be simpler: a smart contract that places a bet on the official’s death is given a delayed launch and triggers if it does not receive a cancellation code in time. That’s it; now you can notify the official that, unfortunately, if I accidentally die, your precious life is in great danger, so you had better treat me with the utmost care.
Of course, the more complex the predictions the service allows, the more carefully and moderately the impact can be planned. For example, the trigger could be not only death, but also arrest, and the threat not only death, but the burning of a house, or some other non-lethal nuisance (the most elegant thing I’ve come across was an order to spray a powerful odorant in an official’s residence; a house thoroughly stinking of mercaptans is no longer fit for habitation or sale, yet no one dies even accidentally).
Naturally, to undertake these non-trivial measures, a person must be sufficiently wealthy, but this does not require exorbitant riches, so the task is quite manageable.
The “Daily Friedman” column is back with you! I am publishing the final tenth chapter of The Machinery of Freedom “I Want for Nothing”. In it, David Friedman discusses the harmful idea of designating a special class of needs that have infinite value, as this invalidates the entire concept of freedom.
A compiled file of the first part of the book in epub format will be ready in a while, but for now, the most impatient can read the text on the website.
I am posting the ninth chapter of The Machinery of Freedom, “Exploitation and Interest”. Here, David Friedman briefly explains what is wrong with the Marxist teaching about the exploitation of workers’ labor by capitalists, why charging interest is legitimate, and why an inheritance should go to the heir rather than being distributed equally to everyone.
Only one chapter remains until the end of the first part; its translation has already been sent and only needs to be edited. Then, the first part will be posted as a single file for download, and we will move forward. The process is moving briskly; send your money to the wallet 1AFkD2bazCs5YZBBrSD7HsRMWLmRbg6QBo so that it continues cheerfully as well.
If anyone has a publishing house in mind to release a small print run of The Machinery of Freedom on paper, you can start making inquiries in advance to discuss the details, so that upon completion of the translation, no time is wasted on negotiations about publication.
I present for your consideration the translation of the eighth chapter of David Friedman’s treatise “The Machinery of Freedom”: “Monopoly II: State Monopoly for Fun and Profit”. While the previous chapter provided an overview of the types of monopolies, this one describes in more detail some of the mechanisms by which state monopolies are formed and maintained. The illustrative material, naturally, refers to the USA, but the mechanisms are universal enough.
Also, unexpectedly for myself, I have entered a social network as alien to me as VKontakte. One of the readers decided to open a mirror of my channel there. So, if you feel most comfortable exactly there (it’s convenient to comment, share, and all the things for which fines are later imposed and criminal cases are opened) — you are welcome.
Why be modest? Let’s take not just a rich country, but the richest one, after all, it’s so pleasant to talk about other people’s money—any socialist would appreciate that.
So, the USA. The fantastic premise is that socialists left the Democratic Party and conservatives left the Republicans, founding their own parties. The remnants of the two parties merged into the United America party, colloquially known as unionists, while many people defected to the libertarians. In 2032, each of the four parties puts forward its own candidate for president, and a libertarian wins by a tiny margin. Seats in Congress and the Senate are distributed roughly equally among the four parties; the Supreme Court, due to the greater rigidity of its formation mechanism, is represented primarily by unionists diluted with conservatives.
Disagreements between socialists and conservatives reach such a scale that conservatives are ready to vote blindly for any libertarian bill on cutting government spending and deregulation just to spite the socialists, while socialists just as zealously support any libertarian bill regarding the expansion of personal rights to spite the conservatives. Everyone except the conservatives supports measures to expand free trade. Pairs of parties barely manage to push through cuts in defense spending and the abolition of the minimum wage, and so on. In short, thanks to such a fortunate layout and the talent of their party organizer, the libertarians steer the agenda, even though they lack an actual majority.
So where will the budget funds go amidst such active spending cuts, booming economic growth, and the sale of federal property, which, although not massive, is still not insignificant? First and foremost, of course, toward paying off the enormous thirty-trillion national debt. Once the national debt is paid off, a constitutional amendment is adopted prohibiting the creation of new debt, and the Federal Reserve is abolished. After that, since the debts are paid, federal taxes are abolished in full accordance with the constitution: each state supports its own senators and jointly rents the office where the senate meets; each party supports its own congressmen and jointly rents the congress office; the places of embassies are taken by the offices of insurance companies serving the interests of their clients abroad; the armed forces work as hires for logistics companies, protecting maritime trade, as well as for oil companies, protecting rigs in Venezuela and other Sudans, and so on. States keep their own taxes, using them as they please: Commifornium goes wild with social welfare, Alaska with national parks, Vermont subsidizes schools, and New Hampshire simply places a huge porcupine-shaped piggy bank in the center of the state capital, and anyone who wishes drops in as much as they like, taking a selfie and posting it to Instagram—and once a year, the state government breaks the piggy bank, counts the money on camera, and based on the amount collected, adopts the budget for the following year.
In short, once you break it, you build it. If it’s possible to cut spending, then cutting income is no problem at all; you don’t have to worry about that.
I’m back from my trip to the mountains, so there will be plenty of fresh material soon. Today, to get back into the swing of things, I’ll answer some simple question, and here’s the rough plan for what comes next:
I will break down the trip into cases illustrating different aspects of libertarianism and economic theory and release a fairly extensive article on the subject
I’ll edit and post the Friedman translations that my wonderful assistants managed to put together while I was away
I’ll put out a couple of articles for Bitarch and a new text for the Novosibirsk YouTube channel Libertarian Band (by the way, if anyone hasn’t checked out their latest video on libertarianism for grandmothers, definitely take a look; they have a new sexy host, and I like how he presented my text—the previous one, about lifelong tenure, turned out less lively).
I liked the idea of writing a few fairy tales in the style of Gorky’s Luka.
And we’ll see where it goes from there.
Oh, right, about Friedman. Shortly before leaving, I managed to edit the translation of one of the chapters of the third edition of the Mechanics of Liberty: Problems with deriving the ought from the is in Ayn Rand—enjoy this exclusive, as this text is hardly found anywhere, even in English. I’ve estimated the progress of the translation and think I can set a deadline for the project: February 12, 2020. Grandpa Friedman will turn 75 then, and we’ll have something to congratulate him with. I also remind you that donations for the translation are best sent to a separate wallet 1AFkD2bazCs5YZBBrSD7HsRMWLmRbg6QBo—it will be easier for me to estimate how much I can spend on rewarding my assistants. Please bear with me, but I will bother you with this reminder with every new chapter publication.
It is believed that the state is something absolutely necessary for people, without which there would be chaos, banditry, and ruin. Yet, in different eras, the perception of what the state is and what it should be has differed radically. No matter which government textbook you look at, it always says that in the past, the state was very bad, oppressed people, and they rebelled. But now, the state is good, it does not oppress people, and stability is very important to us all. At the same time, the structure of the state in different countries also differs greatly, and the greater the difference between what is there and what is here, the more “incorrect” the model there is, and the better it would be for those unwise people to do as we do here. Meanwhile, we need to defend ourselves so they don’t do here what they do there.
Why the National State is Needed
Strong national states formed as a response to the constant threat of foreign invasion, as well as as a tool for such invasion. But although territorial seizures continue to this day, this is becoming less justified in the eyes of residents of other countries and less popular among their own citizens. The globalization of the economy has made trade wars far less effective. In other words, the unified national state is becoming less in demand—tasks simply cannot be found for this expensive and inconvenient tool.
The main threat to the state today is not external aggression, but the lack of civil consensus. In democratic states, candidates who rely on the people’s dislike of the political establishment are coming to power one after another. This means that people are not dissatisfied with individuals—they are dissatisfied with the system itself.
Problems of Democracy
Why is democracy providing civil consensus worse and worse? Because it is a dictatorship of the majority. If power stably belongs to the same political force, a stable dissatisfied minority forms, convinced that its interests are not being observed by the government, and therefore completely unmotivated to maintain any loyalty to the government. If the government and opposition regularly switch places, it results in an endless tug-of-war where policy becomes a compromise. Regulations are loosened, then tightened; taxes are decreased, then increased. No political program is implemented, and the voter’s frustration grows.
A minority is ready to obey the majority if it sees the need to unite in the face of external danger. But when there is no external danger, people realize there is no reason to tolerate it. And if external danger is fabricated, in our age of informational transparency, this causes even more irritation and distrust toward the establishment. The “make it the same for everyone” approach is rapidly losing popularity also because in all other sectors, a person easily receives individual service according to their requests—and only in those spheres for which the government is responsible must they somehow put up with unification. The future lies in transferring the individual approach into the political sphere.
For now, the individual approach in politics manifests in how the same candidate is tried to be sold to different categories of voters under different sauces before elections. In other words, political technologists already see the demand of the voters, but, unable to satisfy it, they try to at least give the dish different shades of flavor. But such a marketing strategy cannot work for long. More and more people want to somehow unite with those who share similar views and somehow peacefully separate from those to whom these views are offensive.
Separation
The simplest way of separation within the existing legal political tools is spatial separation. Chechens pushed all Russians off their land and now demonstrate a touching national unanimity to the outside world. American libertarians are moving to New Hampshire—and the state is rapidly deregulating its legislation.
However, physical relocation is only one way of changing conditions. If you don’t like the water company, you have to change your place of residence, but if you don’t like the mobile operator, it is enough to change operators without any moving. Government services have more in common with the services of a mobile operator than with utility infrastructure. At least, most government services look quite mobile.
Panarchy
Today’s state, through taxes, provides citizens with benefits such as education, healthcare, pension provision, law enforcement, control over fire, sanitary, ecological and a bunch of other safety measures, courts, and other small trifles—as well as that for which a strong central government was actually established: border protection against foreign invasion and services for seizing other states. Practically all these services can be perfectly provided on a competitive basis. After all, each of you calls your own insurance company when you get into an accident, so why can’t everyone contact their own police when protection is required?
Market solutions have already been invented and have a practice of successful implementation for absolutely all services that people need. Need, in this case, is determined by the willingness to pay for these services. A system of social relations in which all goods and services are supplied on a free competitive market is called anarcho-capitalism, and this is the liberal ideology brought to its logical limit.
However, such fine fragmentation of government service providers may not seem convenient to everyone, otherwise we would have long lived in such a fully competitive society. There is indeed a demand for a paternalistic state that cares for a person from the cradle to the grave, and it is even quite large. The entire twentieth century passed under the banner of armed struggle between socialism and liberalism, and despite the loud fall of odious totalitarian regimes, it must be admitted that both sides lost in this struggle: classical liberal states have also mostly vanished into oblivion. Therefore, the main challenge facing humanity today is the peaceful separation of socialists and liberals without violating the integrity of national entities (clustering by nationality, having one language and similar cultural norms, is also convenient for people). In fact, we are talking about the simultaneous coexistence of one or several socialist and liberal governments on the territory of one country or block of countries. Such a system is called panarchy, and this idea is being actively developed by intellectuals worldwide, in both developed and developing countries.
Transition Scenarios
Of course, the simplest path to embodying major social transformations is dictatorship. A coup or revolution is not mandatory. It is enough for a populist to come to power, concentrating a constitutional majority in parliament in their hands, subordinating the courts and, most importantly, having broad popularity among the people. A hypothetical Lee Kuan Yew or, conversely, Chavez.
The simplest path, however, also carries the greatest danger. Over time, someone else will replace the dictator and begin to repeal everything that was adopted.
A more complex but more reliable path is a broad public campaign. When very many people demand reforms—loudly, demonstratively and at every convenient opportunity—eventually their inevitability becomes obvious. Once they occur, they are much harder to repeal.
There is also a very simple and familiar path for Russia—catch-up development. Wait until panarchy works in the European Union and the USA, in China and Korea, in South Africa and Brazil—and then finally carry out the necessary transformations, while the lag behind Nigeria still doesn’t look completely hopeless.
And finally, those citizens who require separation can simply present the rest of the state with a fait accompli. Here is your state, here is ours. One territory, different norms. We pay taxes to our government according to the agreement, and we do not pay them to yours. Will you try to use force to return us to your jurisdiction? Guys, a civil war is not budgeted for, and in general, let’s live in harmony, because we have already charged the batteries of our drone. As the famous political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann states, the motto of our time is becoming “What, was that allowed? Yes, it was.”
And if there is no transition?
Well, what will happen if no transition to panarchy occurs?
A couple of inertial scenarios are possible. In the first, Russia sluggishly democratizes, the screws are loosened little by little, and the country gradually turns into something quite decent in Eastern Europe, no worse than some Moldova. In the second, Russia just as sluggishly tightens the screws, pushing particularly active opposition figures abroad, and gradually turns into something bleak in Eastern Europe, like Belarus.
It is also possible that what today exists more in journalistic articles than in regulatory documents will finally take shape. The sovereignization of regions, state corporations, and special services will occur, and the country will slide into clan feudalism. The tendencies for this exist, and as the current president weakens, they may become stronger.
But as long as the state, without reforming in the proper key, continues to somehow degrade, society may simply, by a process of attrition, begin to transition to alternative means of coordination—alongside the state, in spite of the state, and remaining invisible to the state. When people make deals under the table, using private money, resolve their conflicts in a private court, use the services of private security companies and so on, then from a certain moment, the uselessness of the state becomes obvious to literally everyone. In this case, Russia will transition to anarcho-capitalism, bypassing the stage of panarchy.
What to do?
So, you have encountered a fairly long text where unfamiliar terms are introduced, an unusual social structure is described, and strange predictions are made. What to do with this next?
Even if you are a supporter of the status quo, it is still useful for you to know that such a discourse exists and is gaining popularity. You can warily observe the penetration of these ideas into the masses or actively oppose them—but one way or another, it won’t hurt you to familiarize yourself with them, just as it is useful for liberals to know the basics of socialist doctrine, and for atheists—the New Testament.
If you are a convinced democrat, then perhaps you have simply never eaten any fruit sweeter than a carrot. Take a look at what is being proposed to replace modern liberal democracy; it’s possible you will find a grain of truth in these proposals.
Finally, if you like what has been presented, then it is all the more worth studying the texts on this site, discussing them with acquaintances—and from there, it may lead to gradual implementation.
Opponents of the idea of armed struggle against the state often discourage people from it by frightening them with the power of the state’s army. In reality, however, it can be considered that the state has no army at all! And this is not an exaggeration — it is simply unfit for this task. Only the lightly armed police and Rosgvardia will be able to realistically oppose anti-etatist fighters.
Below is an excerpt from a popular book about the decline of the era of territorial states, which every libertarian should certainly read!
“Facing armed resistance from the occupied population, the Germans soon discovered that it was the most modern components of their armed forces that were the most useless. Until then, their tanks, artillery, fighters, and bombers had experienced no particular difficulty in smashing the world’s most advanced armies to pieces (including the armies of three leading world powers, whose forces significantly exceeded their own), but, facing small detachments of partisans who were not an army, did not wear military uniforms, did not fight in open battle and tended to dissolve either into the rural landscape or among the surrounding population, the German troops found themselves completely bewildered. Like other conquerors after them, the Germans learned the lesson that when conducting counter-insurgency operations, practically the only forces that could prove useful were lightly armed police, infantry, mountain troops, special forces, signal troops and, above all, intelligence of all kinds. All of them had to move on foot or using light vehicles, preferably those that could move across rugged terrain. Outside of cities, they could be reinforced by reconnaissance aircraft, and in those rare cases when the enemy managed to be caught by surprise and forced into open battle — by a small number of artillery pieces and tanks. And there was no room in these operations for the pride of the Wehrmacht — tank and mechanized divisions, and moreover, since the scale of the operations was very small, for any divisions at all.
The discovery made by the Germans (and to a lesser but significant extent by their Japanese allies) during the Second World War has since been repeated by practically all major armed forces in the world. Some of the first to encounter guerrilla warfare at the very beginning of the postwar period were the French and the English. In terms of brutality, their operations were far from those of the Germans; and yet, especially regarding French actions in Indochina and Algeria, they were ruthless enough. In both countries, the attempt by the French, using the most modern weapons available to them, to re-establish control over their colonies led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction by fire and sword of entire villages and even regions. Although the English did not go so far (the largest number of civilian casualties in their colonial campaigns was approximately 10,000 people during the fighting in Kenya), they also frequently resorted to the death penalty, torture, and destroyed entire villages, whose inhabitants were relocated to concentration camps! Just like the Germans, the English and French armed forces discovered that it was precisely the most powerful weapons and weapon systems that were the most useless, being either too expensive, too fast, too large, too inaccurate, too indiscriminate, or all of the above simultaneously. As for the most powerful weapon, i.e., nuclear, it was simply inapplicable against an enemy whose forces were so dispersed and so elusive”
Martin van Creveld “The Rise and Decline of the State,” p. 485
To be honest, specifically in Russia, it is not particularly easier for people to realize that they won’t be smeared across the asphalt by tanks, but will instead be limited to being smeared across the asphalt by clubs. Meanwhile, there are more carriers of clubs and other light weaponry, specifically hired for war against their own citizens, in Russia than there are those hired or conscripted for war with foreign powers. So I would emphasize not so much how poorly these forces are equipped and how ineffective their tactics are, but how motivated they are — this is precisely the key factor in deterring armed civilian protest.
Today I am pleased to present three new chapters from The Machinery of Freedom all at once. The pool of translators has remained small but very productive, and I am now quite heavily loaded with editing work that can no longer be delegated to anyone.
In the chapter “Robin Hood Will Sell You Out”, Friedman demonstrates some non-obvious mechanisms of how welfare systems, formally created to help the poor, de facto redistribute money in favor of the rich. He also states that such government behavior is not a system error, but the system itself.
In the chapter “The Rich Get Richer, and the Poor Get Richer”, the title is telling enough to understand what it is about. It explains why the impoverishment of the working class, as Marx dreamed, does not occur in a free market, but instead there is a movement toward general prosperity.
Finally, in the chapter “Monopolies I. How to Lose Your Shirt”, Friedman vividly describes how miserable the fate of monopolies is in a free market, and how miserable the fate of those is who are unlucky enough to deal with government monopolies.
On this wonderful holiday, US Independence Day, enjoy the classics of anarcho-capitalist propaganda! By the way, hello to everyone who came via a tip from the Classical Liberal channel; I am very glad to have you, make yourselves comfortable.
