Автор: Анкап-тян

If new children are held by force in the community and outsiders are not allowed in as a rule, how to ensure the children’s right to get the hell out of there?

What actions can the bad side take to keep them, acting according to ancap, and what can the good side do?

анонимный вопрос

I’ll start by saying that, of course, any group of people can already go into the wilderness and live there, without any contact with outsiders. Amazonia, the Andaman Islands, Papua — there are enough places, in general. If society in some part of the world evolves into ancap, such isolated communities will be left alone even more so, on the rights of exotic fauna that can be filmed with a drone, but it’s better not to venture toward them personally.

It’s a different matter when your community has regular trade relations with the outside world. Here, you can’t pass off as exotic fauna, because let’s recall East Berlin: even very complex fortifications did not allow for the complete elimination of emigration. If there is any communication with the outside world, the isolation regime is already broken, and the more thoroughly one tries to observe it, the sweeter the forbidden fruit. People will flee your isolated community by any means necessary, and gradually the whole world will learn about the customs that prevail inside. Then, the depressurization of the community is simply a matter of time. More and more companies will refuse to deal with you as long as you restrict emigration, and you will have to make compromises, like the USSR did regarding the Jewish question. Gradually, there will be no one left to maintain your sanctuary, and it will collapse from within — too many of its residents will want access to the outside.

Of course, I do not exclude that there will be individual special operations, where in response to a plea for help from the sanctuary, a group of volunteers from the Mainland will pinpointedly rescue a couple of children. This will certainly have a PR effect, but I believe that the main mechanism for the collapse of a community with closed borders involved in trade with the outside world will still be the increase of internal contradictions.

You get the idea…

The Efficiency of Violence

What do you say about the idea that the costs of ensuring security and protecting property rights are higher for private companies than for the state, and that the state, by virtue of its exceptional efficiency in applying force and maintaining order, can better provide the protection and guardianship of law and order, as well as courts, than private companies, and therefore it is necessary in this regard?

анонимный вопрос

How can the state’s costs for protecting property rights be lower than those of a private company? Only through games with budget line items. Yes, for a police officer, it is enough to hang a sign saying “forbidden, fine is so-and-so” and carry out a couple of exemplary fines—whereas a private entity would have to constantly hover and be vigilant to ensure the prohibition is not violated. But this does not mean the police officer is mega-efficient. It means that he himself might receive pennies, or even feed entirely on bribes, while the state must bear the primary costs of ensuring that people are afraid to contradict this police officer. And the costs of maintaining this fear are spread across a heap of budget items, from education to the maintenance of prisons.

A private entity, on the other hand, often has to compete with the state under completely unequal conditions. Where the state provides a service already paid for via taxes and requiring no additional money, the private entity is forced to charge the client additional money, since the state does not share taxes with them.

The state introduces distortions, often quite unpredictable ones, into the market picture, and as long as these distortions persist, judging market efficiency becomes more difficult. One might start a business relying on the current market conditions, only to encounter a completely new regulatory framework in the middle of the project, and that’s it—the project must be shut down and the losses written off. State institutions can usually count on their interests being considered during legislative innovations, so planning is a bit easier there. But it is somehow strange to conclude based on this that the state is necessary. This is simply an example of unfair competition, which is created by the state itself.

To summarize. Indeed, the state can impose arbitrarily high costs on private companies for anything by using force or the threat of force. But who needs such a state? Certainly not the consumer, onto whom all these costs will eventually be shifted.

Distortion of the market efficiency picture

Rally for Internet Freedom

I am currently watching the broadcast of the Moscow rally. And simultaneously, news is coming in like “in St. Petersburg
activists have blocked the Roskomnadzor building”.

This is the main entrance; Roskomnadzor is blocking its own anus

Everyone, as usual, considers themselves a strategist when viewing the battle from the sidelines, but it seems to me that it is wrong to organize simultaneous actions in different cities. I mean, who will be closely following St. Petersburg today when there is Moscow? On the other hand, imagine how cool it would be if every day one large, awesome, well-prepared action took place in a new city! Let the actions be different in style, in format; let people try to outdo one another. Let them say: well, in St. Petersburg it was okay, but then in Krasnodar it was absolutely mind-blowing! Meanwhile, people in each specific city, by the time it is their turn again, will have had time to rest, save money, gather enthusiasm, see others’ creative ideas, and come up with their own.

Thus, by shifting the focus from place to place, one could set up a truly indefinite nationwide public campaign, rather than another “shouted and dispersed” event.

This is not a rally, this is a queue for a rally

How will phone pranks and IRL pranks work in Ancapistan?

Will everyone really be on edge and ready to defend themselves immediately (with weapons), ruining all the fun?

анонимный вопрос

Alexander Rozov, in his recent books from the endless Meganesian cycle, painted a rather vivid picture of what unfortunate pranksters face in a society where everyone is on edge and ready to defend themselves immediately. In those stories, the pranksters took a severe beating, but since the footage of them getting beaten was broadcast live, their ratings only grew, along with their monetization. It’s a strange way to make a living, but people commit to even more serious eccentricities just for the sake of a joke.

Generally, a sense of humor is the ability to derive pleasure from the discrepancy between what is observed and what is expected (not my definition; I don’t remember where I read it). In a society where everyone is on edge, it will indeed be difficult to maintain a sense of humor in situations where you have every reason to perceive a subject’s actions as an attack, only for it to turn out to be a prank. However, the already famous prank with Vader and the street toilet is perfectly suitable for replication in any armed society. Even if the girl in the screenshot had a submachine gun instead of a bag, she would hardly have opened fire, but she certainly could have raised her weapon to see how these guys liked a counter-prank, and whether Lord Vader would wet his pants.

March 8

Congratulations for March 8th are already starting to arrive, which is a great occasion to say a few words about gender equality.

Law is a spontaneous order. Here in our cozy chat, we decided to analyze one article per day by Vladimir Zolotorev from the series “What is the State and Where Does it Come From”. Today we happened to reach the article “Morality and Law”, which worked out perfectly.

I have repeatedly defined law as a complex of approaches to conflict resolution. Zolotorev goes further and describes it as a language of human interaction, meaning all spontaneously emerging rules that people follow when interacting with one another.

Within both my definition and Zolotorev’s, there is no such thing as gender equality. It simply does not emerge spontaneously, due to clear differences in approaches to human interaction, or even at least to conflict resolution, if we narrow the topic to my definition of law.

A sufficiently obvious reason why representatives of different biological sexes tend to use different approaches to interaction is that human behavior is largely hormonally determined, and hormone levels differ between the sexes. However, the higher the level of abstraction of the rules, the smaller the role these differences play, and that is normal. Therefore, demanding gender equality at the family level is damn strange, while at the level of large communities, it is damn natural. There is no contradiction here; one simply should not force absolutes everywhere and engage in Procrusteanism (damn, I’m starting to self-cite and invent my own language; soon I’ll become completely incomprehensible to the reader).

Happy holiday, everyone! I want to go to the sea!

How the Moscow Metro would work under ancap, and what would happen if someone bought all the stations? After all, competition would become impossible

анонимный вопрос

I’ll start from a distance and first recommend a recent video by Grigory Bazhenov, where he opposes authoritarian urbanists and, in particular, explains the main purpose of a city — the opportunity to earn money.

Of course, historically, the city often served as a fortress as well. But the ability to protect wealth from an external plunderer largely echoes the ability to become wealthy in the first place. If people didn’t gather in one place and accumulate assets, they wouldn’t be able to afford the construction of such convenient urban infrastructure as protective structures, nor would there be a great need for it — individual caches in the forest or migrating with herds to secluded areas would have prevailed. So, the ability to accumulate wealth by gathering in a compact, large crowd is primary.

All the conveniences that the city provides for people adapt to its main function. And if this is done poorly (for example, if the city is managed centrally and hinders people from earning), the city withers, losing the competitive race to alternatives. This also applies to the organization of urban transport.

The more mobile a city resident is, the more choices of workplaces they have, the better the place they find on average, and the wealthier they become. As a result, they gain the ability to create solvent demand for various conveniences, including even greater mobility. For the most part, it doesn’t matter what the ownership structure is in different companies providing transport services, as long as they don’t have the power to forcibly dictate their rules to competitors or consumers. In other words, properly organized transport can belong to anyone, except for the institution that creates the rules.

So in the Moscow metro, each line could have its own owner, or each station, or separate owners for stations, tunnels, and depots, and separate owners for the trains. In principle, the metro as a whole could have a single owner, and even in this case, it would continue to operate in a competitive market; its competition consists of all alternative ways to get from point to point within the city. But even if the entire city with all its streets, houses, and transport belongs to a single owner, the alternative to using urban transport becomes video communication or moving elsewhere. After all, a city is first and foremost a place where one can earn more money than outside the city, and only then is there all sorts of infrastructure for spending leisure time together in large crowds. If you can earn enough money for your needs elsewhere, the city no longer holds you as strongly.

Why not defenestrations?

I am quite concerned about the emerging tacit consensus among the diverse unrecognized opposition in Russia, which suggests that the top leadership (yes, the very top) of the current Russian authorities and their friends from the “Ozero” cooperative, etc., cannot be publicly condemned, dekulakized, stripped of everything, left to rot in mines, or at least given a public, brutal death. Why should these “people” remain unpunished and even continue to live after what they have done to our country? I am concerned.

armchair hater

I have already had to answer a similar question, explaining the impracticality of terror against the security forces. In general, all these arguments, and even to a greater extent, apply to the state leadership as well. There is a well-known political observation that the less blood is shed during a transition of power, the more democratic and “herbivorous” the new government will be.

So, revenge is indeed best served cold. First, a peaceful transition of power instead of a bloody revolution. Then, a peaceful reduction in staff instead of lustration. And only after the deregulation of law has been carried out and confidence in the possibility of a fair trial has been restored, will the citizens themselves gradually begin to file lawsuits against the elderly former tyrants and their elderly former henchmen. Their dirty laundry will be aired in public, their crimes will be impartially and publicly examined, and billions will vanish to settle claims. The remainder of their lives will be spent in continuous, exhausting litigation. But at the moment of transition, nothing will foreshadow anything of the sort. They will even receive guarantees from a transitional government of public trust that it, the government, will not persecute them. And indeed, such important matters should not be entrusted to a government; this is a matter for private, legally equal individuals.

Just property claims, nothing more

Insurance State

Bitarch’s Column

This book is a structured collection of the most significant articles from the LiveJournal blog of the well-known libertarian philosopher Oleg Tarakanov (“Laxy Catal”). The articles are presented in full and unaltered, without edits from the compiler.

In the opinion of the compiler, Tarakanov’s work examines the most realistic model of social organization in terms of current implementation possibilities. It is designed to solve the ever-multiplying problems of people in nearly all modern states based on territorial monopoly and the “tyranny of the majority.”

Oleg Tarakanov himself uses the term he coined, “insurance roofs,” instead of the word “panarchy,” but the compiler found it possible to use the more commonly accepted concept. Panarchy does not aim for the complete destruction of the state, but advocates for the abolition of its territorial monopoly and for voluntary participation in it. It is a system of extraterritorial contractual (and/or competing) jurisdictions (ECJs), in which different people can choose their own “virtual state” while residing in the same territory.

Such an approach ensures competition between jurisdictions, forcing them to spend budgets more efficiently and not infringe upon the personal and economic freedoms of citizens. But more importantly, people gain the opportunity to live by the rules that are closest to them personally, rather than those that were imposed by the will of the majority living in a particular territory. After all, in an ordinary territorial state, only a small portion are actually able to emigrate, while others are forced to endure anything, which is precisely what governments exploit, ignoring their interests.

I can assume that some convinced followers of Rothbard will not consider panarchy to be true libertarianism. Nevertheless, compared to unstable minarchism and difficult-to-implement anarcho-capitalism (ancap), panarchy is the most realistic and easily “sellable to people” option for moving away from the current sad state of affairs. In a mode of panarchy, diplomats already live according to international agreements, so we are talking merely about the large-scale implementation of a ready-made mechanism that has already proven itself.

If you did not like the potestatic (“force-based”) approach to bringing under jurisdiction and the enforcement of court decisions in Oleg Tarakanov’s model, do not turn away from the idea of panarchy entirely. Consider the Bitnation project, where all of this is carried out absolutely without any coercion based on a blockchain reputation system.

You can ask your question regarding panarchy and libertarianism on the Ancap-tyan website, in the VK public “Anti-state”, and on my page.

Bitarch

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Book in epub format (had to be packed in 7zip so that security scripts wouldn’t go crazy)Download

How does Libertarianism relate to the Effective Altruism movement?

Howard Roark

A small introduction for the readers. Effective altruism is a family of approaches to the task of changing the world for the better. Within this doctrine, it is considered how to achieve maximum effect with minimum means, what considerations to follow when setting goals, and how to motivate oneself toward altruism. Howard Roark is a character from Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead,” who advocates egoism as the highest moral value.

Of course, both of these concepts coexist quite well, and I won’t have to write tons of text about it, because Mikhail Pozharsky was recently so altruistic that he released a video about it. The engine of altruistic behavior is egoism. And the effective altruism movement is a pretty good confirmation of this. First, a person finds it insufficient to show off with luxury yachts and begins to spend on charity. Then it becomes crowded in this area, and he begins to show off that he spends on charity more effectively than others. You, allegedly, throw in mega-bucks without much point—you might as well have used them to light cigarettes—but I, spending ten times less, have actually helped a bunch of people with real problems; here is the proof, here is the methodological analysis, and here is where to send donations.

What else links effective altruism and Ayn Rand’s egoism is the conviction of many effective altruism adepts that for a successful person, for example, it is more effective not to volunteer personally, but to pay for the work of professionals, because he is more useful in his own position, where he earns the money to pay those very professionals. From here, it is literally one step to the idea that the best way to help people overall is the construction of a maximally free society, where everyone engages in what brings maximum benefit to others—simply because such behavior is best rewarded in a free market.

Effective altruists