Today’s chapter of Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molinari is, unlike the previous one, long and thorough. Not surprisingly, as it is dedicated to a topic that has inspired many memes — roads under ancap.

First, the author explains that the best way to understand why on earth someone would suddenly want to pay money to build and maintain a road in a free market is to imagine yourself as a developer approaching investors. Then, he analyzes various typical scare tactics. And in conclusion, he delivers a finishing blow from a related field, which also pertains to public goods.

Today, a very short chapter from Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molignu has been translated. The chapter is titled Tank Control and quickly addresses a couple of topics: how the prevention of behavior potentially dangerous to neighbors on one’s own private property will be handled in a stateless society, and how gun control will work, given that people’s opinions on this subject are polar opposites—some believe that widespread gun ownership increases safety, others that it decreases it.

No mega-revelations or grounds for flame wars; the author is simply tying up loose ends, concluding the second part of the book.

The newly translated chapter of Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molinieu is dedicated to the problem of collective folly. If a certain community, from the perspective of an outside observer, decides to go crazy and begin adhering to idiotic rules, who will stop it in an anarchic society?

The author’s argumentation proceeds from two directions.

First, he reasonably asks: why have we decided that this problem must be solved in any way at all? As long as a certain whim is voluntary, people tend to leave those who practice it alone.

Second, what if certain moral attitudes prevent people from leaving alone those who practice a certain voluntary whim? Here, the author shows that a proactive legal system, which interferes in the relations of third parties without a request from them, is simply expensive. And if the funding of this legal system is voluntary, a powerful economic incentive arises to evade this funding. At the start, people may strongly dislike drug addicts and, out of old statist habit, ganging up on them. Later, they will pick all the low-hanging fruit, realize that addicts are no longer lying in every alleyway, and are actually hard to find—and searching costs money—and they will calm down. A certain dynamic compromise will emerge: one set of eccentrics does not offend the eyes with their stoned bodies in public spaces, and another set of eccentrics does not offend the ears with scandals on this topic. And so it goes with any moral foundations.

Here, credit must be given to the author: the social theorist has triumphed over the moral philosopher within him—that is what life-giving economics does!

The translation of the new chapter of Practical Anarchy is ready. This chapter, with the long title Stateless Dictatorship: How a Free Society Prevents the Re-creation of the State, seemed a bit weak to me. It provides counterarguments to the well-known claim that in the course of free market competition, one protection agency will inevitably begin to dominate over others and form a new state—only this time without any checks and balances like the separation of powers, but simply as a business enterprise for robbing the natives, similar to one East India Company or another.

The weakness of Molynieu’s argumentation is that he exaggerates the inevitability of using centralized services—in an anarchic world, no less—and the possibility of horizontal coordination between multiple agencies in the pursuit of a single goal. Imagine threatening people in a world of bitcoin, drones, and 3D printing with such laughable measures as bank freezes, control over the distribution of weapons, and similar totalitarianism. It is clear that all these technologies, at the time the book was written, were either nonexistent or in their infancy, but if your forecasts collapse with just one decade of technical progress, how much are those forecasts worth? As for his hypothesis about the flawless coordination of independent economic entities around a strategic goal despite the prospect of immediate market gain (someone banned in one place will be willing to overpay in another)—that is the well-known problem of cartel agreements. They are unstable.

Molynieu should have focused on explaining specifically the decentralized mechanisms for countering attempts to re-create systems of organized robbery. In my book, they are mentioned quite briefly, because the book is not exactly about that. In general, it can be put this way: if anarchy is imposed from above, and a sign saying “Ust-Perduy District Court” is simply painted over with “Ust-Perduy PRA,” then nothing much may change under the sign compared to the dark times of etatism. However, if ancap evolved from below and the state truly withered away from obsolescence, then the very human qualities that killed the state will not allow a new one to grow. Ancap is not just a society without a state. It is a society with immunity to the state.

As previously indicated, my last remaining long-term translation project can no longer escape, and presented for your attention is the translation of Chapter 19 from Stephan Molneux’s book Practical Anarchy. The chapter is titled These Cages Are Only for Beasts. Previously, while describing his proposed system in which dispute resolution organizations (DROs) operate instead of modern law enforcement systems, Molneux emphasized how powerful an effect a coordinated active boycott can have on an individual. In this chapter, realizing that he went too far and created so much dread that totalitarian anarchy might seem to many a less preferable solution than existing state models, Molneux, conversely, explains that multiple checks and balances are also provided against DROs, and therefore they will not be able to act lawlessly and become a new edition of the state.