On tangled court cases

Let’s imagine the following situation arising in an imaginary ancap society. In my opinion, someone has caused damage to my property, but in the opinion of that someone, he caused me no damage. And the circumstances of this case are such that it is very, very controversial; it is difficult for an objective party to determine who is right. As a result, this leads to a situation where, across a large sample of different courts, half of them side with me, and the other half side with the party I am accusing. To my suggestions to pay at least a portion of the compensation demanded by me (and by the courts that sided with me), the opponent categorically brushes them off, because, in his opinion, he did not cause damage to my property, and therefore does not owe me a single penny.

Under the conditions of a state, such a problem is reliably solved by a hierarchy of courts. Yes, someone will remain dissatisfied, but that is the whole essence of the institution of the court. In the conditions of ancap, however, we arrive at a complex conflict where my bailiffs and my opponent’s security must, in effect, start fighting each other, since both conflicting parties are equally right. What solution does ancap offer for such situations? And how should I personally behave in such a situation?

SK (the question is accompanied by a donation in the amount of 0.00088285btc)

The function of a court is to help the parties resolve their conflict. The only way to do this is for both parties to the conflict to recognize the jurisdiction of a particular court in a specific case. If the case is complex and convoluted, we cannot know in advance the position of any specific pre-designated court until it completes the proceedings. Therefore, all the parties to the conflict need to do is find a court that has a good enough reputation, is acceptable in price, and is willing to take on the case. Then, both parties enter into an agreement with the court that they are ready to execute its verdict in this case, and only after that does the court even begin to delve into the subject.

Since the case is so murky, the final court decision will likely be quite a compromise, such as one party receiving partial satisfaction of their claims while paying some compensation to the other party. But, however, we cannot know this in advance.

Naturally, each party to the conflict will be interested in the impartiality of the court; therefore, they will probably consider it important to include a clause in the contract stating that they reserve the right to withdraw from the process before the end of the proceedings if they can demonstrate the court’s interest in a particular outcome.

If one of the parties refuses in advance to recognize any verdict other than one that completely relieves them of obligations, they are thereby refusing the court as such, which means they intend to continue an open conflict with the second party. In this case, the party that agrees to the court can wave this readiness around, saying, “I am not the one starting a war here, I am merely defending myself,” and thereby gain new allies while gradually stifling the aggressor with sanctions, forcing them into peaceful negotiations.

By the way, peaceful negotiations, without any external arbitrator, are also a way of resolving a conflict, so a court is not a mandatory procedure for this at all.

As has been noted repeatedly by many, the state of affairs in international politics very much resembles ancap

Changes in the operation of the channel

While the channel was on pause, I reflected on its future, and now I want to formulate more clearly how it will be managed.

Every week, roughly on weekends, I intend to publish not exactly a longread, but a sufficiently detailed article on topics that interest me, which are not necessarily related to your questions. Alternatively, this could be an interview or something else equally labor-intensive.

On weekdays, no more than one post per day will consist of answers to questions accompanied by donations. I have already accumulated a huge pool of answers on a wide variety of topics, and continuing to fill the info-space at the same pace would mean inevitable self-copying, paraphrasing, and so on. I answered free questions because I needed it—it is easier for me to reason within a specific given topic than to fantasize about what else interesting to convey to the public. Now I am happy to continue answering, but only if you need it, and the best way to demonstrate your interest is to back it up with money. Free questions will now move for me into the category of sociological data on what people are generally interested in, and theoretically, they may form the basis for articles.

Bitarch’s column will be maintained as texts from him appear, not tied to specific days, but somewhat depending on the depth of my processing of the original text.

Mutual promotion with other projects is possible, but on my part, it will always be a review of the corresponding channel, indicating whether I subscribed to it myself, and I would like the same approach from the opposite side, although, of course, I have no control over the info-policy of other channels.

I am ready to post reviews of other channels as a bonus to an answer to paid questions asked by them, as was tested with the “Pravy Argument” channel. Reviews will be posted on a permanent basis and not deleted after a fixed period, as usually happens with advertising on various Telegram channels.

I do not intend to personally place my own paid advertising on other channels, but I am ready to accept payment for such things as a donation, as was the case with advertising on the “Whales are swimming to the LSD crash pad” channel. In this case, if necessary, I can provide promotional text adapted to the audience of the corresponding channel.

When you just can’t focus on Hayek…

Conflicting Jurisdictions

For example, a friend invited me to a party at his house. I brought apple juice with me. Suddenly, the police burst in, and it turns out that juice is prohibited in his contractual jurisdiction.
1) Did I start violating the NAP from the moment I took it out?
2) How does the effect of another jurisdiction apply to me if I have not entered into contracts with it?
3) What happens if I am a user of another jurisdiction that the first one does not recognize and simply engages in vigilantism?

A similar question: will self-ownership help if a person runs onto someone else’s field? Can I shoot them without a trial or investigation?

Beginner AnCap (question is accompanied by a donation of 0.00030432btc)

What could be called laws under ancap is the codification of successful practices. Such codes, which generalize successful practices on various topics, are in demand in a stateless society because they save effort by allowing one to avoid analyzing every case from scratch. Saving effort will mean saving money, and a cheap court, all other things being equal, will naturally win in the competitive struggle against an expensive one. But even if an expensive court provides a higher quality review of the issue, there will also be demand for a cheap one; this is a natural market segmentation by price.

Thus, by recognizing the jurisdiction of a particular company over oneself regarding a certain circle of issues, a person under ancap usually has the opportunity in advance to find out which sets of norms are used within that jurisdiction.

Furthermore, humanity has a rich experience in resolving conflicts between persons belonging to different jurisdictions. In most cases, it was a convenient practice to recognize the laws of the party on whose territory the conflict occurred. Deviations from this principle were usually stipulated separately. This could be related, for example, to the particularly important status of certain persons, or to the disputed status of the place where the conflict occurred. Thus, the concept of diplomatic immunity and international maritime law emerged.

Now let’s move directly to your questions. Let’s replace apple juice with a more understandable irritant. You brought sausage to a vegan party and began to eat it with appetite alongside the salad. Naturally, for vegans, this is a very irritating situation. And they know in advance that something like this would upset them greatly. Therefore, the party announcement usually states right away that it is a vegan party, no meat will be served, and bringing it along is prohibited. Thus, your actions violate the agreed-upon conditions of presence, and you are fully entitled to be evicted from the party.

Worse, if the announcement states that the party is vegan, no restrictions are explicitly written, you are not a vegan and do not hide it, but you were invited anyway. Respecting the hosts’ right not to serve you meat, you decide to provide for yourself—and you run into a legal conflict. Here, both the hosts, who failed to explain the rules to you, and you, who failed to understand the local defaults, are in an awkward position. Usually, such mishaps are resolved by one of the parties making concessions, but if the party hosts do not concede, you will still be evicted, because this is a place where their interpretation of disputed norms takes priority. I had a similar case during a Kupala night celebration when I started kissing a guy; it turned out he was taken, and his girl confronted me for it, which caused my bewilderment: I sincerely believed that different rules apply on Kupala night—but I yielded; the world didn’t end over that guy, basically. Similarly, our hypothetical vegans might yield to you, albeit with a sense of deep bewilderment at your tactlessness.

Now let’s move from elaborate tales to conclusions.

  1. You are not obliged to follow the norms that you did not pledge to follow.
  2. You may be forced to comply with them if it is a fundamental point for the enforcing party, but not for you.
  3. You have the right to demand compensation for such coercion, but it is not a fact that you will receive it.
  4. The more the parties are interested in future cooperation, the more likely it is that they will make mutual concessions regarding a specific current case.

In light of these theses, how can we resolve the second case, with trespassing—that is, the violation of property boundaries, even without explicit damage to that property?

  1. A person is not obliged to be aware that you are against them walking across your field. It is better to put a sign on the border saying “No Trespassing,” so that the person knows that a famous Willy No-Trespassing lives here, and he is not to be trifled with (for additional reading, I recommend the well-known text about Piglet’s grandfather, floating around the internet).
  2. You can force a person to leave the field if this is fundamental for you. And if they have read the sign and ignored it, you can carry out the enforcement using lethal force, without wasting time on additional persuasions.
  3. Compensation may be demanded from you if, for example, there was a beaten path across your field, the boundary was not marked, the sign turned out to be unreadable and hidden in the grass, and then you pop out like a jack-in-the-box with a Winchester in hand and start shooting. State your rules in the most explicit form possible.
  4. The more you are interested in future cooperation with the trespasser, the more likely it is that you will allow them on your field, even if they wandered in without permission. For example, it turned out to be a traveling salesman with a magical gift of persuasion, and now he will be your permanent supplier of tin foil hats.

Update to the “Donations” section

I received information from the author of a service that allowed anyone to send Bitcoin donations while paying in rubles from a bank card. Unfortunately, the service closed because the author’s Yandex wallet was blocked, and other ruble online payment tools do not have the necessary functions in their API. This, alas, is a typical situation for agorists—the state seeks to tax every transaction, and if it cannot, it prefers to crush everything in sight. As for Yandex, although it is formally private today, it is unable to resist the whims of the state.

So I had to update the instructions in the Donations section, removing the description of this option. However, taking advantage of the occasion, I added some updates to the Lightning description page—there, on the contrary, a new service appeared for exchanging those same Yandex rubles for Lightning; I don’t know how long it will last.

On the other hand, the VPN from Vee Security, which I advertised some time ago, is quite alive and has no intention of fading away.

I hope everyone who wanted to has taken advantage of the recent dip in the Bitcoin rate and stocked up for the future.

Why is minarchism bad?

If we imagine that any functions of government institutions can be outsourced to private entities, how would problems such as a crowd of people dissatisfied with the lack of state-guaranteed pensions and disability payments be resolved in an ancap society?

Alexey

The question seems inconsistent to me. If the functions of God are outsourced to private entities, then how do we solve the problem of a crowd of people dissatisfied with the lack of a God-guaranteed reward for spiritual merits? If the crowd makes claims against God, they are addressing the wrong party, because His functions have been given to private entities, and it is they who are accountable. If the claims are made against the private entities, then one must look at the content of the contracts concluded with them, and depending on this, the legal proceedings will yield one result or another. It is not necessary to gather as an offline crowd to file a lawsuit; class-action lawsuits are perfectly coordinated on the internet.

As for the first part of the question—what is bad about minarchism—it is far more useful to make it clear why it is good. It is good because it quickly and reliably provides a serious improvement in the quality of life for many people. As the great minarchist Kakha Bendukidze stated, reforms are when everyone quickly becomes better off. Minarchism becomes bad when it suggests stopping at what has been achieved. From that moment, the rollback toward a large state begins. At this point, minarchists need to be pushed aside and the dismantling of the state should continue, not giving them time to recover and ignoring demands to leave a small piece to play with.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest for your review an interesting interview between the minarchist Yaroslav Romanchuk and the ancap Boris Yurovsky regarding the practical measures proposed by the Austrian School of Economics for post-Soviet states. A particularly juicy moment was when Romanchuk stated that ancap and communism are utopias incompatible with human nature: you should have seen the range of emotions on Boris Savich’s expressionless face)))

Otherwise, the interview is quite constructive; Romanchuk proposes a mix of the successfully implemented Georgian reforms of the aforementioned Kakha Bendukidze, the reform program of the Ukrainian minarchist Gennady Balashov—and adds to them my favorite idea about the decentralization of law by removing the licensing of judges and the monopoly on jurisdiction, in order to remove restrictions on the widespread distribution of the only fair court—the arbitration court. In general, I liked it very much. Actually, I love minarchists.

How to show an apolitical person the inconsistency of ideas regarding state redistribution, support for the poor, and social welfare?

A question from the Telegram channel Right Argument, accompanied by a donation of 124 rubles. And yes, if you were wondering how advertising could be bought on my channel—this is roughly how it would look.

The reasons for apoliticism can vary, but they usually boil down to the fact that a person pointedly places their immediate self-interests above some abstract values, and therefore doesn’t consider politics to concern them in any way. Thus, we need to show the person how state redistribution and state social welfare jeopardize their self-interests. And for that, in turn, we need to understand what those interests consist of.

I have recommended a similar approach before when explaining how to tell your mother about ancap if she is traumatized by the nineties.

The most common type of apolitical person who approves of state intervention is the one who simply doesn’t want to bother thinking about all this nonsense. The state doesn’t trouble their head with taxes because the employer acts as the tax agent, yet people receive some pensions, study, get medical care, and occasionally receive some benefits. Various loud words about the state robbing someone have as much value to such a person as any annoying advertisement. If someone tries to convey this information, it means they expect to make money from it. Maybe the State Department is paying them, or maybe they’ll start extorting donations now.

In this case, it’s best to sprinkle in anecdotes of two types from time to time. The first: how a certain mutual acquaintance successfully evades taxes, made money on Bitcoin investments, or settled a complex issue within state jurisdiction through a private contact—and so on. The second: how someone was fleeced for extra money through property taxes, had some entitled social payments withheld, or had their business seized in favor of the “brass,” and so forth. In short, provoke cynicism toward the state in the person—essentially, that all the fairy tales about the state being necessary for people are written for suckers, while self-respecting gentlemen will, of course, grab a piece of the state if given the chance, but seriously rely only on themselves and other respected gentlemen.

The second type of apolitical statist is encountered much less frequently. This is a calculating guy who has all the necessary benefits and social payments, considers receiving them entirely fair, and will most likely gladly provide consultation on various nuances of welfare. Having grown accustomed to the unpredictability of politics, he doesn’t bother his head with who is there or what they promise before elections, or how one politician is better than another. You simply need to be in the state’s good graces and do what is approved by the current authorities.

Here, it makes sense to encourage such “entrepreneurship,” but remind them that when everything collapses, it’s important to know how to pivot. In the Soviet Union, trade workers were in favor, but in the early nineties, most of them turned out to be professionally unfit for the new conditions. Today’s trade workers slave away and don’t look anything like the former privileged stratum. So, when social welfare ends, it’s important not to end up on the street as a useless specialist in obtaining benefits; it would be good to have other competencies.

Fortunately, such people usually don’t need long convincing that social welfare will sooner or later collapse. Since he is consistently in the black, he knows deep down that no free ride lasts forever.

Of course, there are many other varieties of statists, but I have listed specifically those who are apolitical. If you encounter statist political activists, that’s a completely separate conversation, but that’s a whole other story.

There is a certain charm to kitchen conversations, since they successfully survived the USSR

And as a postscript, I’ll briefly share my impressions of the channel Right Argument. I would say that this young resource is still forming its own style, so the channel looks somewhat eclectic. Initially, the authors apparently assumed they would ask themselves questions, answer them, and result in a fairly concise catechism for communicating with leftists. But now the channel has expanded beyond the original intent and has begun to intersperse arguments with reactions to the current agenda. So now it can also be used as a source of those very life anecdotes that are so useful for kitchen conversations.

Libertarianism ex machina

Bitarch, Ancap-tyan

In many plays staged in ancient theater, an unusual technique for resolving character conflicts was often used — “Deus ex machina” (“God from the machine”). It consisted of the sudden appearance of a new god-like character on stage at the end of the work, who had not been mentioned previously in the performance and had the ability to quickly resolve the heroes’ problems. Simply put, external forces solved the heroes’ problems without delving into the essence of the conflict. This technique is suitable not only for works of art, but can also be useful for political transformations aimed at the destatization of society.

Let’s look at any libertarian public page on social media, chat, website, stream, podcast, or channel. What will we see? Most likely, an endless discussion of the same topics — how libertarian courts work, who will build roads under ancap, contractual slavery, abortions, the agency of children, nuclear weapons, drugs, the Austrian School of Economics versus Keynesianism and state planning, minarchism versus ancap, ancap versus panarchy, territorial communities versus ECUs. Often, this boils over into an endless holy war, where people spend many days in a row defending their point of view.

But the thing is, if you argue endlessly among yourselves and spend all your resources on it, you won’t achieve much! And is it even necessary? Perhaps there exists a single universal recipe for how to resolve all these problems at once and spend our scarce resources for the benefit of the movement?!

Yes, it exists and is found in the very nature of the state — a stationary bandit can conquer a society only when the balance of violence potential (BVP) is disrupted, while when this balance is maintained, a stateless society exists quite stably, as proven within the methodology of neo-institutionalism. You can hear about this briefly and clearly in the first part of Alexander Auzan’s lecture “Evolution of the Stationary Bandit.” After the formation of centralized coercive structures (the state), movement in the opposite direction toward a decentralized society becomes impossible without applying external effort to the system (this pattern is analogous to the second law of thermodynamics: heat will not spontaneously transfer from a colder body to a warmer one).

If we restore the BVP, the costs of initiating violence become higher than the costs of defense, and the territorial monopoly of the state simply disappears. Beyond that, everything else simply doesn’t matter! Of course, it is better to know the answer in advance as to who will build roads or how to determine the agency of children, but even without that, people will have no choice but to solve this without the state. It simply cannot exist when the BVP is maintained. If you are a programmer or simply know Boolean logic, you understand well: after calculating the value of the first operand in a conjunction (&&), you don’t need to calculate all the other operands if it is FALSE, as the result of the conjunction will be FALSE anyway. Or for a disjunction (||), you can skip calculating the other operands if the first is TRUE, because the result will be TRUE anyway.

It follows that a sufficient condition for the transition to libertarianism is merely bringing the violence potential in society to a more uniform distribution. As you have probably already guessed, this can be achieved by creating and spreading tools for the doctrine of deterrence (DD).

The advantage of this approach is that the development, production, and implementation of DD tools into wide use can be carried out by a much broader circle of people than those currently involved in political campaigning and protest actions. Co-opting techies who can assemble a drone, a blinding laser, or other interesting tools from freely available parts to fight the regime is far more promising in terms of expanding the protest base than limiting recruitment to humanities scholars and economists who are well-versed in the nuances of ideology. Even more useful is the involvement of engineers and managers capable of organizing the mass production of such items, which is also a very numerous category. It should also be noted that semi-cottage production or writing a software product is easily hidden from the state and is therefore safer than attending rallies, which serves as an additional stimulating factor.

When reliable, mass-produced, and inexpensive tools for deterring aggressors are available even to a grandmother, it won’t be long before the “market decides” the fate of the state. After the deus ex machina does its work, all of today’s theoretical disputes about how to organize under ancap will abruptly move into the practical plane. We observed something similar relatively recently, when economists argued about whether it was possible to return to the gold standard in the era of fiat money, and then Satoshi arrived, and now instead of the gold standard we have the bitcoin standard. That’s it, the subject of the dispute has vanished; the agenda is now the widespread practical implementation of private hard money.

What is the difference between natural law and positive law?

Libertarianism is based on natural rights; why is Svetov against them?

анонимный вопрос

In a recent video by Mikhail Svetov, which your question is about, much seemed strange to me. Since that is the case, I will first go through the entire video and then move on to the topic of the question, so as not to make two posts about one video.

To begin with, Svetov uses a definition of anarchy as a Hobbesian war of all against all. I don’t remember if Hobbes used the exact word anarchy; I recall the term state of nature more. However, in our video on the deterrence doctrine, I tried to show that a war of all against all is not the natural state of society, meaning that Hobbesian (and Svetovian) rhetoric is based on a dubious foundation.

Svetov also uses the word rights as a synonym for the word privileges, thereby limiting himself to so-called positive rights. This is indicated by his phrase “fear people who want to grant you rights.” Libertarian discourse, however, usually concerns negative rights, which are freedoms. One is not “granted” such rights, because their realization does not require the actions of others; non-interference is entirely sufficient.

In attacking liberals, Svetov implies progressives of the American type, given that he uses headlines about minority quotas and affirmative action as illustrations. In Europe, they more often call themselves social democrats, and it is unclear to me why Svetov separates them from socialists at all, saying that from one side we are pressed by a socialist boot and from the other by a liberal one, while in fact he is speaking of the same socialist boot.

Another interesting point: Svetov opposes morality and conscience, claiming that evil liberals removed conscience from man and replaced it with morality. However, Svetov does not define what conscience is and where it comes from, if not from the experience of interacting with other people and the memory of their moral evaluations. Or does he want to say that conscience is the voice of God? Well, in that case, it is unclear what he has against natural rights, understood as divine decrees.

Another phrase that Svetov uses in his video: “where there is no law, there is no crime.” Yes, that is correct; crime is a term from positive law, which is a system of commands. There is a command, someone violates the command, they have committed a crime. In private law, there are no crimes; there is property damage, breach of contractual obligations, and so on, and the person who suffered the damage is free to oppose this and demand compensation—or not oppose it and not demand it.

Thus, I would say that Svetov’s video is simply a juggling of terms. We define anarchy in a way that no anarchist defines it, after which we prove as simply as two plus two that anarchy is bad, and even that the state is anarchy. Everything is logical, but we get nothing but confusion in the end.

Now let’s return to the question of whether libertarianism grows out of natural law. Historically, yes, but today that is not important because human thought has not stood still. We can derive libertarian principles deductively based on the laws of logic: here is an apodictically true statement that a person belongs to themselves; now we show that any attempt to refute this statement implicitly relies on the very premise we are trying to refute. Those whose brains haven’t melted have grasped the Tao and discovered natural law. Or we can examine human interactions and show which behavioral strategies prove more advantageous and therefore survive through natural selection. This utilitarian approach gives us the same libertarian principles, but in this case, the laws of logic do not stick out as if they were god-given and people were merely objects under them. Therefore, such an approach is less irritating to people like the hypothetical Mikhail Svetov with their obsession with ethics, but more so to connoisseurs of mathematical rigor.

Personally, I first became acquainted with Rothbard and the Hoppean derivation of the principle of self-ownership, and then with Hayek and the Friedmanite utilitarian justification of property, and I suggest not arguing over whom to love more—father or mother. Both praxeology and spontaneous orders are two equally useful methodological principles; let us use both, depending on the situation, rather than imitating Svetov, who is so right-wing that he tries to bite off libertarianism’s left leg.

Guide to Panarchism

The rise of the Russian libertarian movement over the last few years has not only led to the word “libertarianism” being frequently mentioned outside the libertarian circle itself, but also to the fact that the exposition of libertarian ideology in Russian, adapted for the Russian-speaking reader, is beginning to consolidate. Mikhail Svetov moved from five-minute videos to hour-long lectures, and is now writing a book. I started with answers to scattered questions, but for six months now I have been working with the Libertarian Band team to prepare a systematic video course presenting my understanding of libertarianism. And just yesterday, Ved Neuman also announced the start of work on a full-fledged panarchic manifesto, but first constructed a guide to panarchism, in which he collected and grouped by topic most of the materials published on this subject by the developers of the panarchism doctrine itself.

I hope you have already read or watched most of the materials provided in the guide — its value lies precisely in the systematization.

NAP

Check out the new video on the Libertarian Band channel! As part of the second series of stories about libertarianism, we have reached such an important term as the NAP, or the Non-Aggression Principle. We analyze how it emerged from the doctrine of deterrence, how it evolved, where it is presumed to evolve, and what its limitations are (since there are many in the libertarian community who want to build absolutely everything based on the NAP).

Of course, a full and thorough analysis cannot fit into six minutes, but we tried not to take up your precious attention for too long. We will talk about other aspects of living in society in the following videos. Work on a new video — about the institution of reputation — has already begun.