Автор: Анкап-тян

And how will things stand with the quality and safety of food products under ancap?

анонимный вопрос

This question complements my yesterday’s post about the movement for the free distribution of discounted food very well, so I chose this specific one from the queue.

Either at the very end of the 19th or the very beginning of the 20th century in the USA, there was a craze for exposé publications in the press. Journalists specializing in this were called “muckrakers,” and they ruined more than a few careers back then. For the most part, “muck” was to be interpreted figuratively as political dishonesty, but today we are interested in a case where muck appeared in a publication in its literal sense. We are talking about a series of publications regarding the terrible unsanitary conditions in slaughterhouses, sausage production, and so on. The extensive press campaign led to the federal government introducing sanitary standards for food production, and indeed, US citizens today are a society that pays enormous attention to the quality and safety of products.

In the United States at the beginning of the last century, a country with a huge proportion of poor immigrants arriving in pursuit of their American dream, the vast majority of the population had a simple requirement for food: it had to be cheap and available in abundance. The state first began to regulate food quality, and by the turn of the thirties, it moved on to regulating both price and quantity, as a result of which during the Great Depression, government agents engaged in destroying food on a massive scale to prevent its price from dropping. Thus, as usual, the road to serfdom was paved with good intentions.

But how could the free market have worked instead to improve food quality? Of course, through the exploitation of such base human traits as vanity and greed. Muckrakers publish reports about unsanitary conditions in slaughterhouses. An enterprising, greedy meat packer opens a slaughterhouse maintained in such cleanliness and order that even the rats tie napkins before eating, invites journalists there, and pays for a series of promotional reports: buy meat only from Butcher & Co, owners of the cleanest slaughterhouse in both Americas! The meat is sold in a branded store at triple the price, vain nouveau riche (America is a land of opportunity!) shop only there, Mr. Butcher gradually expands production, competitors begin to press him, and after some five years, the thought that slaughterhouses could be filthy already seems completely unthinkable.

I am exaggerating, of course, but agree that one can provide many examples of when free competition led to increased quality, and the desire to maintain low costs led to the development of technology, and there is certainly no reason for food production to be some strange exception. First, a certain product or service appears as a luxury item, but after some time, thanks to competition and market expansion, it becomes a complete commonplace and an essential attribute of civilization.

Beauty!

Your attitude towards FNB (Food Not Bombs)? Is it not shameful for a libertarian to participate in such a movement, given that it is anti-capitalist, yet the members of this movement engage in charity?

анонимный вопрос

As I understand it, the movement’s activity consists of volunteers recovering food from supermarkets, wholesale warehouses, and establishments—food that ended up there due to capitalism and is about to be thrown away because otherwise it would not comply with state-established shelf-life regulations—then they cook it and distribute it to the hungry, thereby expressing their disapproval of the government’s budget spending priorities.

At the same time, it ignores the fact that under socialism, the food that in this case rots in trash bins would have rotted back in the fields or at vegetable depots, as well as the fact that socialist regimes usually spent a much higher percentage of their money on bombs than on social welfare, compared to more or less democratic capitalist states.

This behavior is somewhat similar to that of a lady who, preparing to accompany a gentleman through a disadvantaged neighborhood, persuades him to leave his weapon at home and bring some food along to feed the poor. But, for the sake of fairness, let us note that, within our analogy, the neighborhood became disadvantaged largely due to the gentleman’s activities. So, on one hand, the lady’s reproaches are justified, but on the other, the behavior appears quite infantile.

But, however incorrect the rhetoric of the movement’s activists may seem to me, it is completely non-violent and is a form of moral pressure. Moreover, I suspect many participate in it not because of their anti-capitalist beliefs, but solely out of philanthropy, or to promote veganism, or because they went hungry in childhood and find it unbearable to see food thrown into the garbage—there could be many reasons to organize a distribution of homemade food on the street!

How would I personally react to finding some libertarian acquaintance in the ranks of FNB? I would be interested and ask about the people surrounding them there, the people who come for free food, how they manage to find a common language with food suppliers, whether there are problems with the state, and so on. This is an excellent practical exercise in private charity, without which pure ancap would be a rather harsh living environment, so at the current stage, familiarity with it would be useful for anyone. And switching a thinking person from anti-capitalist rhetoric to anti-statist rhetoric is not such a difficult task.

Also, they have a mischievous emblem, although for Russia I would suggest drawing a horseradish root instead of a carrot

Readiness for ancap

1. What qualities does a person need to live in ancap? And to build it?
2. Given that full freedom will be provided — are there any customs or traditions that could more or less objectively negate such qualities in some perspective (and which should be avoided for practical reasons)? For some reason, as an illustration of this, Svetov’s favorite Amish, who reject technical progress and are quite isolated, come to mind.

Atomic Tram

It seems that in the dispute between Marx and McCloskey, you are on the girl’s side, and like her, you believe that having a certain technological framework is not enough to transition to a certain type of society, but a certain ideology is also needed. I also think this is the case; otherwise, my activity in instilling ancap values in people would be pointless.

I see two such key human qualities. First, a strive for freedom, otherwise where would anarchy come from? Second, a strive for wealth, otherwise where would capitalism come from?

Without the first, we easily get a classic pyramidal society where it is normal to be humiliated and to humiliate others — for the sake of grabbing a piece for oneself. Without the second, we will have an excess of conservatism, where anyone who achieves slightly more success than others would rather throw a party for the neighbors, where all the surplus is eaten up, than invest these funds to achieve even greater success in the future. Google what a potlatch is, and you will get a good illustration of what I mean.

And from here we smoothly transition to the second part of the question.

We have a society of people who value their freedom, strive for wealth, and therefore built an ancap around themselves, meaning a free market, which is then supposedly meant to resolve anything. What human quality, not contradicting the two basic ones for ancap, could gradually undermine them and lead to the destruction of a free market society?

Perhaps I can call such a quality oversensitivity. If a person is too bothered by too many things in other people, it will hinder cooperation. Yes, he may still be freedom-loving, yes, he may still strive for wealth, but he’s surrounded by such assholes! One person’s child tortures a cat; how can you buy groceries from him? Another has disgusting musical tastes, so he shouldn’t even hope for interior design. The third is a sexist; it’s a disgrace to even shit on the same hectare as him. And so the person begins to rush around, wondering where to run and where these wretched little humans will finally stop irritating him.

So ancap also cannot do without a certain healthy thick-skinnedness. The institution of reputation, so loved by ancaps, is the Trojan horse capable of “resolving” even the market!

Look what a cute institution!

The Inviability of Ancap

Grigory Bazhenov, an economist better known to the wider community as the initiator of the project No to Excise (by the way, an interesting example of a fairly competent public campaign, do join), has published an article on the insolvency of the ancap concept.

The language of the article is not the simplest, but as I understood, after scrolling through Grigory’s channel (also recommended, by the way), he is a mainstream economist who believes that non-mainstream things should be communicated in the language of the mainstream and based upon it, otherwise one remains on the sidelines. For an economist, this is logical. For a popularizer, this is walking on thin ice.

But let’s return to the article on ancap. Grigory summarizes that the insolvency of the ancap concept lies in the fact that “anarcho-capitalism proceeds from an economic interpretation of the concepts of competition and monopoly, but at the same time transfers these concepts into spheres where they are simply inappropriate”. I am very sorry, but this is a fight in the wrong place.

The doctrine of anarcho-capitalism does not imply free competition between organizations exercising aggressive violence for the right to rob those who are less efficient in this area. This is closer to the doctrine of extraterritorial insurance rackets advocated by Oleg Tarakanov, which he considers an intermediate option between minarchism and ancap.

Anarcho-capitalism is primarily a legal, not an economic, doctrine, and it asserts that no one has the right to rob, and that any imposed contracts are null and void, regardless of the status of the person imposing the contract.

This legal doctrine is merely supported by economic theory, as it proves that purely economically, a free market is better than an unfree one from the perspective of economic agents. And then Mises says that this conclusion is enough for a smart person to choose the free market, and Rothbard adds that even if it were proven that a certain form of unfreedom were economically more profitable, “proper guys” would still be for freedom. One can treat Rothbard as a freak for such bias, but fortunately, thanks to Mises, this is indeed immaterial.

So ancap is simply a critical hum, whether addressed to a minarchist state structure or to a world of competing insurance rackets: not bad, it says, but it could be better.

Are classical liberalism and libertarianism the same thing?

The Liberal Boot

Liberalism and libertarianism are two terms with very similar, yet mirrored, fates. In the middle of the 20th century, statists snatched the term “liberalism” away from the proponents of economic freedom. And around the same time, the term “libertarianism” was snatched by proponents of economic freedom from the socialists. Mind you, I have not heard of libertarian socialists calling themselves classical libertarians after that.

Classical liberalism in the 20th century is primarily Mises and Hayek. Both are convinced supporters of the free market, both are convinced opponents of collectivism, but both consider the existence of the state entirely acceptable and see some benefit in it, namely the protection of private property. For this purpose, the state is granted a monopoly on violence, and to ensure it does not use it against citizens, citizens must have the right to bear arms and to self-organize, up to the point of armed resistance to the government.

Libertarianism is, in effect, classical liberalism in economics plus the application of those same principles to all other spheres of life, primarily in ethics and law. Rothbard argued that a monopoly on violence contradicts the principles of a free market and must therefore be rejected along with the state; subsequently, Nozick clarified that if a state were to emerge again on a free market as part of a voluntary process, then libertarians should, in theory, have no complaints about it.

As a result, in addition to classical liberals, who simply say that the state must be limited and that political activity should be pursued for this purpose, we also have anarcho-capitalists, who claim that all services, including the protection of private property, are perfectly provided on the free market, and “we are not buying the state, take it away”—and minarchists, who do not mind the state remaining, but only on the condition that it behaves itself, does not extort taxes, but politely asks for donations.

This is how the differences between classlib and libertarianism appear to me

How are you going to build anarcho-capitalism? What is the plan of action?

Militiaman

I would rather speak not of a plan, but of a strategy of action. A plan is good when there is certainty: a specific achievable measurable goal, the ability to clearly specify means, break actions into stages, and so on. For example, Navalny’s campaign headquarters acted according to a plan when starting his presidential campaign: open so many headquarters by such-and-such date, distribute so many newspapers, collect so much money. Strategy differs in that only the goal is known, along with certain characteristics of the environment and some restrictions on the means used—and one must understand how the goal can be achieved at all under these conditions. An example of a strategy is “smart voting,” a recent initiative from the same Navalny headquarters. The goal is to bring down the Putin regime. The strategy at this stage is to break the monopoly of United Russia in elections. And to this are added various justifications and explanations of details.

So, the goal is anarcho-capitalism, that is, a society based on voluntary market relations, respect for private property, decentralized contract law, recognizing the value of cooperation and the disadvantage of aggressive violence.

The starting position is the state, meaning a situation in which there are categories of persons capable of committing aggressive violence with impunity through the silent acquiescence of the majority, and although it is assumed that the boundaries of this violence are defined, they are quite vague and volatile.

The strategy consists in undermining the legitimacy of the state as an institution. In relatively prosperous countries, people have to start by justifying why the state is a bandit rather than a provider of benefits. In Russia, this is already obvious to many, but it is still important to make the idea a commonplace that trying to replace a bad state with a good one is either a dead end or, at the very least, cannot be the ultimate goal.

In order for the perception of the state as a desirable or, at least, inevitable state of civilized society to cease being mainstream, one can work in several directions, according to one’s tastes and competencies:

  • developing and popularizing tools that allow one to get by without the state in spheres where it claims dominance;
  • constantly demonstrating the failures of the state and the victories of private initiative—the state must look like a total loser;
  • mass discredit of the main myths of state propaganda—from the efficiency of democracy to the efficiency of propaganda itself;
  • demonstrating the invulnerability of society before the state, or, at least, the extremely low efficiency of the state’s struggle against ancap ideologues;
  • undermining the resource base of the state by evading plunder and through the direct privatization of state property;
  • demonstrating the moral unacceptability of working for the state, from “don’t get ahead of the locomotive” to universal condemnation.
It seems Tommy does not approve

Animal rights

And what about animal rights? If a dog eats me, will it be acquitted?

анонимный вопрос

What will happen to animal abusers in a Free Society (stray dogs and cats)?

Roman

Hi. Regarding Varlamov’s recently released video, a question: how does ancap view circuses and animal abuse? Is it possible to limit torture and abuse through the court if animals are not subjects?

Vadim

Three questions about animal rights arrived almost one after another, which gave me a reason to talk about this topic out of turn. True, I have already answered a question quite close in meaning, it’s a pity that you are not very keen on watching old answers and instead ask as if nothing happened. So, mostly, read the answer in the old post.

I read Varlamov’s post about the Zapashny animal abusers with great respect. Varlamov is not calling for the Zapashnys to be banned; he condemns the ban on Cirque du Soleil. Against animal abusers, he calls for voting with your feet, as the institution of reputation works much more reliably than state bans. Today they will be banned, and tomorrow they will start organizing underground performances that crowds will attend. No, let the market decide on humanism, not the tsar.

I first read that circuses with animals are disgusting at a rather tender age from one of my favorite writers (even though he was a communist) — Jack London. I don’t know if the original authorship of this thought belongs to him, but at least he did a very good job for the moral condemnation of such things, and I thank him for that. I hope Russia will not need hundreds of years for the rooting of corresponding ideas. To be honest, I even find it unpleasant to watch clowns in a circus (too many jokes about violence and humiliation), but aerial gymnasts, for example, are a different story!

And in conclusion, I will briefly answer the first question, which stands out a bit from the general row. A dog that has mauled a person will neither be tried nor acquitted. If the dog was not someone’s property, and no one had undertaken to protect the residents of that territory from wild animals, then there is no one to hold accountable for the fact that the dog mauled someone. How the next person who encounters it deals with it is their personal business. If the humanism toward animals that I raved about in the previous paragraph forces someone to start protecting it from people, it will be equivalent to turning the dog into property and taking responsibility for its further behavior.

I don’t want pictures of animal abusers, I want the cute John Griffith Chaney!

Is it possible to sell libertarianism to people who fear that robots will take their jobs and hope for UBI? How can ancap improve a society in which 75-90% are unemployed?

…And Justice For All

answered by Alexey Nefedov

The majority of libertarian arguments regarding UBI were presented in his 2016 article by economist and LPR member Yuri Kuznetsov. In it, he shows that replacing the system of conditional benefits with an unconditional income eliminates the stagnation poverty trap and increases the overall efficiency of the redistributive system by reducing bureaucracy.

Ekaterina Schulmann also touched upon UBI and the fears of neo-Luddites in one of her programs on Echo of Moscow. She pointed out that those countries with poor institutions should be more concerned about mass unemployment due to robotization. They won’t get any UBI; instead, they will face a transition to subsistence living. Thus, Ekaterina Mikhailovna gives citizens a simple recipe: engage more in politics so that they are perceived as political subjects.

In Russia, on the one hand, there are poor institutions, and on the other—a strong demand for social welfare. If global robotization suddenly begins, it is more likely that several million more public sector jobs will be created here than UBI will be introduced. Public employees are too valuable for securing administrative resources during elections and similar matters.

And here are arguments for UBI from another LPR member, Mikhail Pozharsky. UBI means not only less bureaucracy but also a common set of rules for everyone, which is a crucial part of liberal doctrine.

However, both Kuznetsov and Pozharsky still remain within the framework of minarchism. Uniform rules are imposed on everyone, and we shall see how long this model can last. Furthermore, the so-called unconditional income still remains conditional, since the condition for its payment is citizenship of the country that established UBI for its citizens.

Can ancap improve a society where unemployment is at 90%? Yes, if unemployment is caused by state regulation, and otherwise people are offered work and are willing to take it. No, if work is not needed by ninety percent of people because they already have enough to live on.

Will there be UBI under ancap? Yes, if during the dismantling of the state, those who contributed to the UBI fund decide to continue doing so on a voluntary basis. Is this likely? Yes, if it is not burdensome and brings respect and prestige. What should be done to bring this bright future closer? Either increase the productivity of one’s labor or improve one’s ability to show respect and prestige. One can combine these strategies.

Was there capitalism in Russia in the nineties?

анонимный вопрос

I remember defining capitalism as a social arrangement in which the dominant form of relations between people is commodity-money relations. A more classical definition, which was common in the Soviet Union, states that capitalism is a social arrangement in which the means of production are privately owned. It is quite obvious that in the nineties in Russia, there was no pure capitalism according to either of these definitions, but rather a transitional form of society, where old socialist (or despotic, in my understanding) relations were dying out, and capitalist ones were replacing them (as for the features of feudalism in the “sovok,” they did not disappear under the new order and have persisted to this day).

However, it must be remembered that, generally speaking, the term “capitalism” is more journalistic than scientific; therefore, when speaking about the existence of capitalism in a certain country at a certain time, we are speaking more about the society’s correspondence to certain values at that time. That is, capitalism rather in the sense of Weber (the spirit of capitalism as rationality and the Protestant work ethic) or Schumpeter (the spirit of capitalism as entrepreneurship and creative destruction).

Now, in the Russia of the nineties of the last century, the spirit of capitalism according to Schumpeter was present in abundance. It was a time of enormous opportunities and that very creative destruction. As for the spirit of capitalism according to Weber, it was nowhere to be found. What work ethic? Man is a wolf to man; if you want to survive, you have to know how to hustle. Capital was created primarily by plundering the Soviet legacy, by that same creative destruction, and by the ability to adapt the fragments of the old to new conditions better than others, rather than by the capacity for hard work, painstaking saving, and careful investing.

Consequences of marijuana legalization

According to research, in Colorado, after the legalization of marijuana, “…the black market, contrary to expectations, only grew after legalization; after legalization, the state rose to first place in marijuana use among teenagers, and the school system received no positive changes.

There was a surge in crimes such as robberies and car thefts. The growth in crime rates in 2016 exceeded 11 times the average among the 30 largest US cities. The number of murders increased by 10%”.

Taken from here. Please comment.

анонимный вопрос

To answer the question, I had to familiarize myself with the English-language report on the consequences of legalization provided in the bibliography at the end of the article.

The funniest part turned out to be the black market. Why did it grow? Because entrepreneurs from other states came to Colorado legally to stock up and then tried to move the product into their own states, where it remained illegal. This is obvious, as weed remained significantly more expensive there due to its illegality. Naturally, some of the traffic was intercepted, money was spent on this, and all of it entered the reporting; as a result, we see a paradoxical situation: it seems like legalization, but the volume of illegal operations is growing, and more funds are spent on suppressing them. In other words, federal agency expenditures increased to combat a business that is legalized in the state, and we are told about an increase in expenditures to fight the black market in the state. Just legalize weed in the other states, and these expenses will disappear; until then, suffer in silence.

When analyzing mortality, the report focuses on road deaths. When passing the marijuana legalization law, it was assumed that by increasing the number of people driving high, the number of drunk drivers would decrease, as it is safer to drive high. What came of this? I quote: “But while traffic deaths in general have declined in Colorado, the percentage of marijuana-related fatalities increased, the report said.” In other words, exactly what was wanted happened, but since the report was written by a commission fighting substances, they emphasize that more deaths are now passing through their department, and this, allegedly, is bad. Well, the fact that the state is not monolithic and contains different interest groups is a long-known fact; however, for citizens, the only important thing is that overall road mortality in the state has decreased.

The economic effect of legalization is such that in 2017 alone, marijuana sales volume amounted to one and a half billion dollars. In addition to regular taxes, marijuana is subject to special taxes, and through these alone in 2017, municipalities and the state collected 247 million dollars from citizens, or 2.3% of the state budget’s total revenue.

How did the state dispose of this money? Part of the money turned out to be spent on providing medical care to marijuana users, which can be considered at least somewhat legitimate spending, although this money could simply not have been taken, and people would have paid doctors themselves without the mediation of officials. But the majority went to various crap like funding schools or the police—that is, protectionist measures to develop some industries at the expense of others and direct embezzlement. Well, the efficiency of the state in such matters has been known for a long time and is similarly unsurprising.

Finally, I looked into what’s happening with crime. The source used in the article gives an account from a police sergeant about a “green rush” in the state, where adventurers from all over the country come to grow marijuana and make money from it. And since the state surrounded this business with regulatory hurdles, as it loves to do, people grow weed illegally—for example, they rent a house, tear up the floors, and set up a farm under the roof. Naturally, with full legality of the business, no one would think of bothering with such bullshit when it is cheaper to rent a piece of land than to set up underground farms in houses, while also violating the property rights of the owners of those very houses.

As for the 10% increase in the overall crime rate, I want to note that the influx of tourists and entrepreneurs is unlikely to be accurately accounted for by state authorities, unlike the crime rate, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the rate per 100,000 people remained roughly the same as it was.

Summary. Most of the problems mentioned in the article are either contrived, related to remaining legislative restrictions in this industry, or due to specifics of statistical accounting (some things became more visible, such as doctor visits, and some less, such as the number of state residents). As marijuana is legalized in all states, everything will settle down quite quickly, and people will become richer and happier.

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