But how then should we view Google, Facebook, and YouTube, which are monopolists in their respective spheres: search engines, social networks, and video platforms? Yes, there are Russian analogues like VK or Yandex, but that is all local, and overall, the world still uses these three monopolists, and their imminent decline is not yet expected.
Howard Roark
Indeed, there are tools that have a massive network effect; in other words, the more people who use them, the more beneficial it is for them to use them. This applies to money, language, as well as other communication tools such as social networks.
Many entrepreneurs try to guess exactly which offer will be so in demand by users that they will be willing to pay for it. Some guess better than others. The creators of Facebook guessed that some people are willing to pay to show their own content to a crowd, while others will gladly pay for information on user preferences. The creators of YouTube guessed that some people are willing to pay to show commercials in other people’s videos, and others — to watch videos without ads. The creators of Google guessed that people would more readily buy targeted advertising rather than the kind that blasts areas indiscriminately.
We do not know which consumer needs people will be willing to pay for tomorrow. Neither do the owners of the internet giants. Today, the YouTube administration assumes that blocking accounts with information unpleasant to advertisers is a good idea, but tomorrow it may turn out that people are more willing to pay for freedom of expression. Today, Facebook is developing the trade of big data, and tomorrow it will find that people pay more for privacy. Today, Google is satisfied with its ad targeting algorithms, and tomorrow it will turn out that an outsider has come up with something better, and for some reason, this startup does not wish to be bought out.
In a free market, there can be the dominance of certain standards, and for us consumers, this is very convenient. And when it starts to feel restrictive, some Durov inevitably appears and whispers: why do you need these social networks, switch from the needle of publicity to an anonymous messenger. Come on, you answer Durov, how can one live without VK? And a year later, it turns out that you even brush your teeth via Telegram. That is how it works; this is creative destruction.
I have already posted an article here dedicated to the practical application of the trendy Lightning technology for sending me micro-donations — small amounts, but frequently, or for using this wonderful tool for other purposes. Some inaccuracies were found in the article, and someday I will get around to fixing them, but today I want to talk about something else.
I was contacted by Anton Kovalenko, who informed me that he has launched a Telegram bot that can do one single thing — cash out your bitcoins into Qiwi rubles. However, it does this flawlessly, in full accordance with the detailed instructions prepared by Anton. I tested the bot myself, and withdrawing bitcoins into fiat took only a few seconds.
And while I’m at it, I recommend checking out his Lightning manual of a more general nature. Perhaps you will be able to understand more from it than I did. The technology is developing very rapidly, but the interfaces are only just beginning to show any hints of possible user-friendliness. We shall see, as one popular Telegram blogger puts it.
Yesterday I published an article by Bitarch “Minarchism is a Marginal Ideology”. In it, the author criticizes the minarchist approach, arguing that minarchists are unable to come to power through democratic means if they run openly on a minarchist platform.
Indeed, this thesis does not contradict history. The USA was formed as a result of a revolution, Georgian reforms happened after a revolution, Chilean reforms after a coup; in Singapore and New Zealand, minarchist reformers came to power through deception, broadcasting a social-democratic agenda before the elections. Only Margaret Thatcher was honestly elected under the banner of shrinking the state, and indeed honestly pursued it, but she failed to achieve stable success in this matter, and today statist reaction reigns supreme in Great Britain.
Bitarch concludes that minarchists, understanding their marginality, will gravitate toward violent methods of imposing their ideology, which gives him reason to state that from the perspective of the average person, minarchist politicians are liberal fascists. Naturally, such a loud thesis could not fail to provoke a sharp reaction.
Alex Kotov, host of the Crypto-Libertarian channel, published an article with objections today. Due to the somewhat disjointed nature of the article, it is difficult to comment on, so I will touch upon just a couple of theses.
Bitarch writes that a minarchist state assumes the unity of laws throughout the entire territory, meaning that conditional leftists will miss their leftist laws. Thus, they will simply vote against the minarchist party and keep their labor code, minimum wage, veteran benefits, and other achievements of the welfare state. Panarchy, however, assumes a peaceful separation, where each interest club has its own rules, including those regarding the organization of social security and the resolution of labor disputes.
Alex responds that the forced redistribution of income contradicts libertarianism, and therefore panarchy is not a variety of libertarianism, and accordingly, the article criticizes not only minarchism but libertarianism as a whole.
This is a slightly strange thesis, since within the framework of contractual relations, a subscription fee for an agreed package of services can be stipulated. Another matter is that any contract can be terminated at any moment; otherwise, it is already slavery. So it is not surprising that another of Alex’s theses — “minarchists leave only the function of ensuring the fulfillment of contracts to the state, regardless of the content of the contract” — will logically be perceived by any anarchist (and even a supporter of panarchy) as a very bad sign. It happens that people sign oppressive contracts because at that moment they see no other way to make ends meet. When circumstances change, they leave these oppressive relationships with a sense of deep satisfaction, and, of course, a court of a minarchist state that decides to demand compliance with the original terms of the contract at that moment will be perceived as a violation of justice. A well-known ancap like Mikhail Svetov speaks quite extensively and in detail about the importance of the fact that any contract can be refused.
Now, another argument against panarchy seemed quite interesting to me. Supporters of panarchy claim that free competition between contractual jurisdictions will lead to the victory of the most free in the competitive race, so that leftists will gradually dissipate on their own. However, in the real world, the opposite is observed. Free competition between states with different laws leads to the fact that freedoms are curtailed everywhere, and governments are happy to adopt each other’s experience specifically in curtailing freedoms. Thus, competition alone is not enough; a moral compass is needed. Therefore, natural law rules, and contractual law sucks.
Overall, this is a fairly strong argument, but I want to draw attention to a very important difference between territorial and extraterritorial jurisdictions. It is much easier for extraterritorial ones to expand. Take such a wonderful liberal territorial jurisdiction as Hong Kong. People are practically climbing over each other there, so great is the desire of residents of neighboring China to live under liberalism. If this jurisdiction were extraterritorial, there would be no need to go huddle on an island; you simply sign a contract and live under Hong Kong law, pay Hong Kong taxes, and receive Hong Kong social services. And if you want handouts in your old age, you enter into a contract with some leftist jurisdiction where you are entitled to a basic income. What will the competition between such jurisdictions lead to? Either leftist jurisdictions will begin to impose entry restrictions, admitting only the young and healthy, or they will break under the weight of the social burden.
So, progress in social mores occurs not by ethics alone, but also by the competition of economic systems.
In conclusion, I want to announce an article where I intend to bring ancap, minarchism, panarchy, and agorism into a more or less coherent picture. I hope to release it within a week and count on the fact that there will be fewer such disputes after that.
While reading Aleksei Shustov’s book “After the State”, I came across an interesting thought:
“Such ‘choices’ [the choice of ECU], obviously, provide a fundamentally different level of freedom and ensure real justice compared to choices in a majority democracy. The latter does not take into account individual differences and forces everyone to live by the rules of the majority. After all, if one person feels great in a system with broad independence and high responsibility, while another prefers social security and is ready for high taxes, then either one or the other will inevitably be oppressed in their self-realization.”
The author of this book cannot be called a libertarian in any way. Perhaps he had not even heard the word when he wrote his book. He arrived at the idea of panarchy purely from an understanding of the destructiveness of the “majority democracy” model, which has now become synonymous with the word “state.” Accordingly, he looks at the world impartially. Unlike many libertarian authors, Shustov takes into account the demands of broad layers of the population, whom some ideological libertarians contemptuously call “lefties.”
Be realistic — such people are the majority even in Switzerland, which is “ideal” for many libertarians. Active attempts to promote minarchist ideas did not yield tangible results even with full freedom of choice and huge funding. Let alone Russia, with its paternalistic mentality and impoverished population.
As can be seen from the quote from the book, a “lefty” will feel oppressed under minarchism and will offer the maximum possible resistance to the ruling party (most likely, simply not allowing the libertarian party to come to power). From the perspective of a conditional “average Joe,” minarchism is a certain form of “liberal fascism” — where liberal values are forcibly imposed on people who wish to live under paternalism (since under minarchism, courts hold a territorial monopoly, and laws are mandatory throughout the state’s territory).
It turns out that in the eyes of voters, minarchists will look exactly as “lefties” look in the eyes of libertarians. As a libertarian, would you vote for a “lefty” proposing to impose ideas of social justice on the whole society? I don’t think so. And will a “lefty,” seeing that you propose to impose the exact opposite on the whole society, vote for you? I don’t think so either. Given that the majority of society supports at least some form of social support, the electoral chances of minarchists tend toward zero. Many of them do not want to acknowledge this fact and begin to hint at the usefulness of applying physical violence against their opponents (“Pinochet’s helicopter tours”), showing that in their methods of struggling for power, they will not be inferior even to their extreme ideological opponents — the Stalinists.
To achieve electoral success, any libertarian party must either become a kind of “people’s party,” attracting people from as wide a spectrum of views as possible, or form a bloc with a left-wing party based on a shared agenda, which is somewhat harder to imagine. Perhaps the LPR should discard the idea of imposing liberal values and change its program from minarchist to panarchist? As history shows, the chances of success for such a program are very high (with it, Abraham Kuyper won the elections in the Netherlands — read the article on pillarization).
NAP is not a non-aggression pact, as the well-known video blogger Mikhail Svetov likes to point out. It is not a norm handed down from above, like a single commandment from a libertarian deity. It is a purely analytically derived principle. If the principle “no one has the right to initiate violence with impunity” is generally observed in a given society, it means that there is—as engineers would put it—negative feedback operating there, which dampens manifestations of violence. Society becomes free from institutionalized coercion, which always leads to an explosive growth in prosperity.
Since the non-aggression principle is not established from above, naturally, no one imposes specific boundaries on everyone—for instance, claiming that a dirty look does not violate the NAP, but stepping on a foot already does. Such specifics are derived from practice, and this boundary can certainly change as customs evolve. The only thing clearly defined in the non-aggression principle is the absence of certain privileged groups who, for some reason, have the right to initiate violence with impunity.
The feedback loop works because the use of violence against an aggressor, whoever they may be, is precisely legitimate. In general, anyone can apply such retaliatory violence; the limitations here are purely technical: first, there must be the physical capability to do so, and second, reliable information about who applied what violence to whom.
The idea of limited government is to delegate the identification of aggressors and the application of counter-violence against them to one specific organization. This relieves the majority of society from such a burdensome duty. However, first, we have no right to forbid people from exercising counter-violence directly, without delegating it to anyone. And second, we have no right to forbid people from delegating rights to counter-violence to any other organization besides the one called the government. The attempt to forbid this is itself a violation of the NAP, which should entail counter-violence against whoever attempted to impose such a ban on people using force.
Thus, the only way for a limited government not to violate the NAP is to be a market monopoly—that is, to serve its clients based on voluntary contracts, and to do so so cheaply and qualitatively that it is simply unprofitable for competitors to enter this market, and the vast majority of people prefer to entrust counter-violence to the government rather than practice it themselves. Robert Nozick advocates approximately this point of view in his book “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”.
As I understand it, the point is that in the article about the targeted offer of libertarianism, 14 groups were listed, including conservatives, who were told that the state is a poor ally against evil homosexuals, but homosexuals were not included, so it is unclear how to reach their hearts, and this point should be clarified. Very well, here it comes.
1. Any private discrimination pales in comparison to the horrors of state discrimination, not to mention such madness as court-ordered stoning or extrajudicial family executions to wash away the shame of the lineage.
2. Private attempts to use violence against you because of your non-violent sexual habits in a libertarian society can be resisted with weapons in hand, and most people will support you.
3. It is the conservatives in a libertarian society who will have to move to some separate territorial community if your very sight irritates them. You, however, will have every right to live wherever is most convenient and behave as you please, as long as you do not initiate violence.
4. But you will still have to tolerate all that “you just haven’t had a normal man/woman,” depending on whatever your gender is. So in that regard, it won’t get better, but it won’t get worse either.
If you have followed Donald Trump’s election campaign, you have likely heard of his method of tailoring the political program to each group of voters. Every person has points of vulnerability in their position, and by pressing them, one can win them over. Mikhail Svetov also advises using this approach in his lecture Propaganda Tools in the 21st Century.
Let us attempt to identify large electoral groups and work with their primary fears regarding the state. Our goal is to evoke in these people a hatred for the institution of the state as a territorial monopoly on violence and to interest them in the ideas of libertarianism.
Many people belong to several categories at once; accordingly, libertarianism can be promoted to them from multiple positions simultaneously (for example, parents with children who are also entrepreneurs).
Some regulations described in the article may be absent in the country of residence of our “libertarian candidate.” For example, Russian legislation lacks liability for criticizing LGBT, which exists in Switzerland, while it conversely imposes liability for the propaganda of non-traditional sex. Here, one should explain to the person that any state regulation has a property of “position inversion.” It does not matter which side the state is currently on regarding a specific issue; the very fact that this area is regulated means that tomorrow the regulation may change to the opposite, because for currently oppressed groups, the state may seem like a natural tool for fighting for their interests, and they will use it. In the middle of the 20th century, the state repressed Alan Turing for homosexuality, but a few decades pass, and in the same country, they repress critics of LGBT. In West Germany, until 1977, the state prohibited women from working without their husband’s permission, and now it punishes men even for complimenting a girl within the framework of anti-harassment legislation. Thus, it is important to make people understand: the complete absence of state regulation is better than state regulation in your favor.
Now, let’s go through the groups
Entrepreneurs
1. State regulation prevents entry into the market or creates severe obstacles to doing business. You have an idea, but you cannot implement it due to prohibitions from the state. The state forces you to obtain licenses for many types of business, which consumes a lot of time and resources. Constant inspections (fire, sanitary, labor inspectorate) interfere with business operations. Infrastructure monopolies (electricity, gas, etc.) make business uncompetitive. Even if the building is your property, you often have no right to install a suitable sign or paint the building the color you want without permission from the local authorities.
2. High taxes prevent the ability to develop the business. Everything goes to the state rather than to the development of your enterprise. This is especially relevant in Russia for businesses where the primary share of costs consists of salaries.
3. The labor code significantly complicates the hiring and firing of employees. If an employee does not bring you profit, you cannot simply fire them; they can force you to reinstate them in the position through the court. You have to find various workaround maneuvers, which also increases your costs. You have no right to allow an employee to work more than a certain number of hours, even if they want to. The ability to hire for a probationary period is limited.
4. As soon as your asset seems interesting to some enterprising security officer, they can initiate criminal prosecution against you and seize the business. To prevent such an outcome, funds must also be spent, and this cannot provide a full guarantee of safety.
5. Bribes, kickbacks, and other non-tax costs increase the cost of doing business, complicate accounting, and carry risks of criminal prosecution.
6. Copyright and patent laws prevent you from conducting business normally (patent trolls, channel blocking of video bloggers for quoting or using music and video without complex procedures for acquiring rights to them).
7. If a new breakthrough industry appears that is not yet regulated, by default, many government officials consider such activity prohibited, so the business community has to ask for the introduction of regulations just to be allowed to work somehow. This applies, for example, to the use of cryptocurrencies or the sharing economy (Uber, AirBnB, energy).
Youth
1. Due to the obstacles faced by business, youth experience difficulties finding employment, let alone starting their own business.
2. For guys, conscription slavery is relevant, which has no practical sense in conditions where large conscript armies are completely ineffective.
3. State regulation of education means that one must study according to unified programs that took a long time to coordinate and have since become obsolete. Many subjects serve the function of indoctrination instead of transmitting current knowledge and skills. The humiliated position of teachers prompts them to vent aggression on equally powerless students. Schooling is paid for through taxes; parents who wish to homeschool their children do not receive tax deductions for this, so very few can afford an alternative to school. As a result, classes are formed by compulsion, and people forcibly driven into a collective are always in a prison, with corresponding rules.
4. A number of professions imply the mandatory presence of a state-standard higher education diploma, so even after school, the choice of further education methods is artificially hindered by the state.
Users of medical services
1. State clinics and hospitals have no interest in providing quality services, as their existence is already paid for by taxes, and customer reviews have no influence on funding. Those who wish to receive paid treatment pay twice — for compulsory health insurance and for paid services.
2. The cost of medicines is greatly inflated due to state regulation of their market entry, patent privileges, import restrictions, and customs duties.
3. An unjustifiably high entry threshold into the profession due to requirements handed down from above creates a shortage of specialists.
Public sector employees
1. The state, acting as an employer, often imposes restrictions on workers that are not written in any employment contracts. Forced participation in pro-government rallies and election falsifications, self-censorship in expressing one’s political position — all of this is quite humiliating.
2. The state hinders private business from developing, which is exactly why a person has to seek a safe harbor in public sector positions, although the pay is low and the worker is not respected.
3. In public sector professions, one spends more time filling out papers than actually working: the utility of the work for society becomes near-zero, and one works only for the approval of the superiors.
Communists
1. The state, according to Marx, is an instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling class. It is impossible to get rid of class oppression without getting rid of the state. Any ideas of nationalization are the transfer of the means of production from the people into the hands of the state, i.e., the ruling class of bureaucrats; therefore, on the contrary, one must demand the transfer of all means of production to the people.
2. In the nineties, there was a correct people’s privatization when members of labor collectives received shares, but the state retained control over the courts, police, and monetary emission, and over time either took property away from the people or depreciated it.
3. Bitcoin is the correct communist money. State slips of paper are issued in any quantity the state desires, while cryptocurrency is honestly backed by kilowatt-hours, in full accordance with the labor theory of value.
1. The state forces you to pay for abortions through taxes (thus taking indirect part in them), and in wealthier countries — for hormone therapy during gender reassignment surgeries for transgenders.
2. You are forbidden from refusing service to people (homosexuals, migrants, representatives of certain ethnicities and religions) with whom you do not wish to have any dealings (employment, renting housing, providing services), as your right to private discrimination is not recognized.
3. LGBT have already achieved a ban on their criticism in many Western states and will strive for this in Russia. Attempting to preserve existing state norms regarding the curtailment of their rights means waging a fruitless war; it is better to exclude such an unreliable ally as the state from the conflict before it stabs you in the back. Moreover, the conflict will resolve itself afterward.
4. In the nineties, there were sexual education lessons in school. Now — basics of religious cultures and secular ethics. Tomorrow they will invent some other mandatory requirement. You can never guess which lobbyist will be stronger; it would be more reliable to simply deregulate education so that everyone can choose which cultural norms their child will assimilate. Otherwise, we will reach a point where children undergo gender reassignment surgeries without your consent, as in Canada.
5. The state prohibits the possession of effective means of self-defense, and even on the path to acquiring permitted, low-effectiveness means, it has placed a heap of administrative hurdles. This not only deprives you of the right to self-defense but also undermines the defense capability of the entire country.
6. You are forbidden from killing an attacker, even if your life is in danger. Despite clarifications from the supreme court, real law enforcement practice is such that successful self-defense usually leads to a criminal case for exceeding the limits of necessary self-defense, which ends in long sentences. The state refused to adopt the Castle Doctrine, although the petition for its adoption gathered the necessary 100 thousand signatures on ROI.
7. Due to the peculiarities of how democracy functions, the state often gives in to various well-organized radical currents and groups. For example, under the influence of radical feminists, tomorrow you may be held accountable for harassment if you simply pay the bill for a woman at a restaurant. And under the influence of radical Islamists, you can already today be forced to apologize to Ramzan Akhmatovich.
Left-liberals, social democrats, supporters of social justice
1. The problem of corruption exists worldwide. Even in advanced countries like Sweden and Finland, corruption exists in large volumes; it is simply on a different level (large business) and very rarely becomes known. Soil for corruption arises wherever an official has the right to make a decision at their own discretion.
2. The state destroys “sanctioned” food products and prohibits entrepreneurs from distributing expired products for free (although they may be perfectly fit for human consumption). This is lobbying for the interests of owners of agro-holdings and food industry enterprises.
3. You hope in vain that a progressive income tax will help establish social justice: in countries with a progressive tax, wealth inequality remains very high. This happens because large business has many tricks to reduce the tax burden, and the primary weight of taxation still falls on the middle class. You do not have the opportunity to move your business offshore, classify restaurant dinners and business jet flights as representative or travel expenses, or secure state subsidies and benefits. You will be assured that robbery is useful because the rich will be robbed more, but no, it is you who will be robbed more.
4. The state spreads unscientific nonsense about the harm of marijuana, resulting in many harmless consumers sitting in prison and research on its medical use being stalled.
5. The minimum wage, the ban on discrimination during hiring, and other labor market regulations only increase unemployment, as they complicate obtaining a job for those whose labor would bring the employer less benefit at the same pay. People with disabilities, women with children, pre-retirees, and people without work experience simply will not be able to find employment, although they could do so if they had the opportunity to dump their prices on the labor market.
Pirates
Intellectual property protection laws hinder the free exchange of information and its accessibility to underprivileged strata of the population. They also limit the possibilities for creativity (due to the ban on creating derivative content) and scientific research (many scientists are unable to pay for access to collections of scientific articles and journals). Patents on medicines make them prohibitively expensive for low-income citizens, and many of them die from diseases that could be cured. So-called intellectual property is simply state privileges. You are trying to forbid the state from establishing such privileges, but why not consider the possibility of removing the state as such?
Copyright-lobbyists
Along with intellectual property protection, you will inevitably receive censorship of your content from the state. Moreover, the lion’s share of funds will still be appropriated by various intermediaries forcibly introduced by the state, such as RAO, while you will get pennies. Or you might even be forced, for example, to publish in a scientific journal at your own expense, but the journal will keep all rights to use the publication, and the state will fully support it. Would it not be better to practice non-violent methods of monetization instead of involving such an inconvenient intermediary as the state? The state will bring you more costs from a ruined reputation than you will gain benefits from how it protects your intellectual property.
Eco-activists
1. Environmental protection is of little concern to the state. An official is more likely to allow an oligarch friend to destroy the environment for a large bribe (or even for the prospect of increasing tax collections as a result of “economic growth”) than to give in to environmental activists.
2. Private ownership of forests, lakes, and hunting grounds will create a powerful incentive to protect the environment and engage in the breeding of endangered species of animals and plants. There is no need to fear that the owner will forbid you from walking in the forest, picking mushrooms, or having a picnic; they will more likely make efforts to ensure that people vacation specifically on their property and will try to provide them with decent service.
3. If a private company causes damage to nature and people suffer because of it, it can at least be sued, but when an ecological catastrophe is caused by the state, there is no one to hold accountable.
Parents with children
1. The state forbids you from choosing the style of upbringing that you consider more correct.
2. There is a mandatory educational program with many subjects that do not provide current knowledge and skills but simply serve as indoctrination. You can only manage additional education, which will finally take away the remnants of your child’s leisure time.
3. If you wish to provide your child with quality home education, no one will reimburse you for the taxes paid for the maintenance of state schools.
4. Child protective services can take your child (even forever, depriving you of parental rights) for quite harmless things — lack of renovation in the apartment, a child’s complaints that parents did not buy them a gift, an untidy appearance of the schoolchild, and so on. The quite sound idea that a child has a right to protection not only from strangers but also, if necessary, from parents, has resulted in the fact that often the family as a whole is repressed.
Unemployed
1. The state has over-regulated the labor market and burdened salaries with huge taxes, so an employer cannot afford to hire you officially, and if they break the law anyway and hire you “under the table,” it is more profitable to take an illegal migrant; they are cheaper and will not go to the labor inspectorate to complain. This corrupts employers and demotivates them from creating humane working conditions.
2. In return, you receive a pittance of a benefit from the state if you register as unemployed. You will be tossed the most illiquid vacancies from the state employment exchange, be slowly trained in courses with no guarantee of employment afterward, and be required to constantly prove that you are still unemployed; thus, if you get a temporary unofficial part-time job, you will have to hide this fact from the state to avoid losing your status.
Victims of repression and victimless crime laws
This is a very broad and diverse group. This includes political prisoners, those held accountable for the use of psychoactive substances, violators of various licensing restrictions, those accused of pedophilia for claiming that maturing happens differently for everyone and the age of consent is a harmful thing — and even those fined for crossing an empty street on a red light.
To them we explain: it is impossible to replace bad repressive laws with good ones; they can only be abolished, otherwise not you, but someone else will become their victim. If no private person suffered or was put in danger, then there is no need for punishment. If you yourself suffered or were put in danger due to your actions (for example, not wearing a seatbelt), then it is even more pointless to punish you additionally — you have already punished yourself. Therefore, one must demand from the state the abolition of all laws implying punishment for a victimless crime, and if it resists, this is an excellent reason to abolish the state: its very existence is already a punishment for innocent people.
Pensioners
This is the most difficult category of people for the promotion of libertarianism. But even pensioners can be interested in the dismantling of the state.
Every working resident of Russia contributes 22% of their earnings to the Pension Fund of Russia (PFR). In 2018, the average salary in Moscow was 80 thousand rubles, and the average pension was 19 thousand rubles. Suppose a person works from age 25 to 60 with some breaks, and as a result, pays contributions to the PFR for 30 years. If they had not paid insurance contributions to the PFR but instead saved them in their own bank account (for simplicity, let’s assume that the deposit interest rate equals inflation, meaning it can be ignored in calculations), they would accumulate 80,000 * 0.22 * 12 * 30 = 6.3 million rubles. As of 2018, the average life expectancy in the Russian Federation is 73 years. The remaining life expectancy after retirement is thus 13 years. Accordingly, if you were not the state, your annuity would be 6,300,000 / (13 * 12) = 40 thousand rubles. This amount represents the state’s real obligations to you.
How then to ensure the fulfillment of these obligations? It is necessary to demand the total privatization of state property. A program clear to any pensioner: “seize and divide.” Seize from the state, divide among those whom the state has robbed. And, of course, stop the robbery for the future, though that is a concern for the young, which, however, is also close and clear to pensioners. All that remains is to conduct a discussion on the methods: how to seize and divide so that everything is not stolen in the process.
Here I will once again refer to Evgeny Kvasov and his post about roads. In short: the most natural owner for a street is the owner of the real estate that the street passes by, because the value of the real estate directly depends on the quality of the communications.
If there are many real estate owners, they have many reasons to agree on how to maintain the road, and not a single reason to create obstacles to passage — this sharply drops the value of their assets. A situation in which the houses along the street belong to some people, and the street itself to others who have no relation to these houses, is possible, but in that case, the company managing the street must have clearly fixed obligations regarding the operating mode of the street.
Houses always come first, and the street arises later, specifically so that one can move from the house to some other location. Residents may tolerate a temporary closure of the street for some alternative use if this closure is coordinated with them and they are paid for the inconvenience. But normally, they will always demand free passage and access, and strongly oppose any arbitrary action that hinders this very passage and access. Any checkpoint will be a negative externality for them, and that is already grounds for a lawsuit. Maintaining checkpoints will be quite expensive. They won’t pay off.
Now, under a state — that’s a different matter. Here, houses may belong to people, the street to the municipality, and traffic on it be regulated by the central authority. With such an approach, collisions are inevitable, where the interests of the residents are not taken into account.
Can it be called radical anarcho-capitalism? Its combination with crypto-anarchism and counter-economics tactics has a known power, especially at the dawn of cutting-edge technologies like open-source p2p markets. Please write your point of view on this type of ancap. Agora! Anarchy! Action!
Insurgent
Agorism is not a type of ancap. It is a complex of methods for achieving it. In my rather old post about ancap and minarchism, I mentioned two different approaches to building ancap: the political and the countercultural. The countercultural approach is exactly what agorism is. It is a very consistent belief that the state, as an institution, cannot be destroyed using the methods of the state. Reforms can greatly reduce state influence on society in general and on the economy in particular. But the more the state is weakened, the less it interferes, and the less motivation there is to see the matter through to the end; a parasite that hasn’t been fully poisoned will only die if the organism somehow rejects it. Therefore, one way or another, the final stage of outgrowing the state as a complex of institutions will be agoristic.
Those who call agorism some special variety of left-wing anarchism are likely approaching their typology from the other end. There are left-wing anarchists who practice building communes and direct action, and there are agorists who practice informal market communities and direct action—surely these are related currents. But what is related in them is anarchism, not leftism.
Environmentalists love to blame capitalism and businessmen for polluting the environment and advocate for market regulation. But are there any normal pro-market environmentalists? What about the implementation of the sustainable development concept under ancap?
анонимный вопрос
I let this question simmer for quite a while, but then by complete chance I had the opportunity to provide an interesting example of a pro-market approach to ecology. Vladimir Zolotoryov, a well-known Kyiv ancap, published a translation of an article by Joaquin Bukay regarding a market-based approach to reducing risks from climate change.
To generalize, the approach looks roughly like this. There are certain risks that depend on some external factors. If these are systemic risks, then information about the risks can be aggregated, and then the possibility to insure them arises. The wider the insurance market for this type of risk becomes, the more money is invested in ways to reduce them, because any insurance company is interested in paying out less on insurance claims.
And, in general, it doesn’t matter at all whether we are talking about the risk of becoming disabled in old age, or the risk of suffering from a hurricane caused by climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. If the risk is real, people will pay for insurance. If it is contrived, the insurance will sell poorly. Many people are willing to buy insurance against a poverty-stricken old age (many states in the 19th-20th centuries realized this and monopolized the pension industry). Those who fear unsustainable development, climate change, and the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano also have a fairly large community.
Imagine the profit: a bunch of people insured themselves against disasters caused by climate change, and then climatologists go and prove that it was a false theory and there are no risks from carbon emissions—that’s it, the collected money doesn’t have to be paid out, beauty! You can invent a new scary story to sell. But the main thing is that everything is completely voluntary, no taxes. That’s how the magic of ancap works.
See those people? Each and every one of them could be insured against Yellowstone starting to erupt right during their tour!
