Targeted Promotion of Libertarianism

Our joint creative work with Bitarch

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.

Conservatives, believers, “patriots,” nationalists

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.

Who will own the street under ancap, and why won’t we get a situation similar to feudalism, where in order to get from point A to B, one must cross streets, the owner of each of which has set some incredible toll?

JediKnight

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.

Greetings, Ancap-chan! Tell me, is agorism left-market anarchism?

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.

How will things stand with the environment under ancap?

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!*

How will people interact, for example, in a village or in a city where every house is in a different contractual jurisdiction?

анонимный вопрос

Here, it seems to me, the confusion is caused by the claim about contract jurisdictions—that they will replace the state. “Yeah,” a person says, “so every house in the village will belong to a different state; what kind of mess is that going to be?”

What does the fact that a person’s house is in a certain jurisdiction actually mean for them? It means that if the house becomes the subject of a conflict, or if a conflict occurs on its territory, the resolution of that conflict (if the homeowner for some reason decides not to do it themselves) is handled by the jurisdiction.

The only case where a conflict arises with such an approach is a boundary conflict. For example, there is a dispute over who owns the fruit from a branch of a tree growing on one plot that overhangs another plot. In this case, both jurisdictions would have to be involved, and it becomes their task to agree on how to resolve the conflict.

And, obviously, if a client is not satisfied with how their contract jurisdiction handles conflicts, they look for one that presumably will do it better and enter into a contract with it. In general, fundamentally, nothing here differs from buying home insurance or a contract with a provider for connecting a home to the internet, gas, water, or electricity. Except that changing a jurisdiction is much easier than changing a gas supplier.

*If the apple example seems trivial, what would you say about a boundary conflict over an oil field?*

A question about stock exchanges

Investments and exchanges are the foundation of the entire market economy today. Essentially, in the absence of a regulator in the form of the state, traders would be able to gain virtually unlimited power: they could inflate prices or, conversely, crash them to zero, destroy some companies and promote others. So the question is: how will exchanges work in ancap? What alternative will be offered to investors instead of the stock exchange in the event of its liquidation? How can the dominance of traders over the market be prevented?

Muller

The order book is, in fact, the quintessence of the free market. Pure supply and demand, stripped of any rhetorical fluff. It is not for nothing that the foundations of Austrian economic theory were laid by a stock market observer. So, of course, in a free market economy, the role of exchanges will only strengthen.

What are the main dangers facing an investor on the exchange?

First, these are possible exchange manipulations.

In the world of stock exchanges, blatant manipulations have become a great rarity because they care about their reputation. If we encounter any restrictions from trading platforms, these are usually requirements of external regulators—for example, regarding the suspension of trading in a situation of market panic. I do not know which exchanges companies will prefer for listing their shares—those that provide for an automatic stop of trading during price spikes, or those that guarantee continuity. Let the consumer choose.

In the world of cryptocurrency exchanges, attempts to protect against exchange manipulations led to the emergence of demand for decentralized platforms, where you cannot fake volumes. I would not be surprised if over time stock exchanges are also pushed aside when crypto-tokens begin to take the place of company shares.

Secondly, possible insider manipulations.

This is, in fact, a problem not of the exchanges, but of the companies that are traded on them. Even now, private companies are taking measures to prevent such machinations—through non-disclosure agreements for insider information that provide for serious payments for their violation, as well as through moratoriums on trading company shares for its employees in periods shortly before the publication of regular reports. The absence of such measures will simply be taken into account in the share price of specific companies as an additional risk factor.

Thirdly, market maker manipulations—traders who have access to very large capitals. This is the factor you are writing about.

Here, one can only say one thing: if you want to be indifferent to such manipulations—simply do not take loans secured by shares. Then you will not have to dump shares due to a margin call if someone temporarily crashes the price. No market maker is capable of completely zeroing out the shares of a prosperous company: no matter what panic rumors he spreads, no matter what volumes of shares he dumps onto the market, if you simply forget about your stake for a month or two, you will lose nothing; the price will return over time, it’s just that some will sell securities during this time and some will buy. It’s not even a fact that the trader who started all this will necessarily profit. He is not the only one—a large movement will attract others, and they will play it their own way.

So, there is no question of trader dominance in a developed market. This is simply their habitat. The more of them there are, the better the life of the companies traded in this market, and the harder it is for traders to manipulate the price of assets.

In general, exchanges are simply a tool through which it is convenient for a seller and a buyer to find each other. This is not some self-sufficient entity. If the tool works correctly, it will not cause damage to real companies in itself.

Consultations were used in the response from Srpski, as a gesture of gratitude he asked to reference his channel “Serbian Divergent”.

Mathematics Guarding Libertarianism: Brief Conclusions from the Article

Since I have started talking about experimental confirmations of the libertarian doctrine, it is worth mentioning mathematical modeling as a way of verifying claims.

I recently read a very good article on Freedom Pride about how a model was built with fairly realistic assumptions, and depending on the input data, it demonstrated what works better: contractual jurisdictions, democracy, or ancap.

The point of modeling is to see how the costs for members of society decrease depending on what mechanisms they have for adapting to and influencing society.

The conclusions in the article are written in rather cumbersome language, so I will translate them for myself in simpler terms.

Democracy is a poor mechanism for optimizing one’s costs of existing in a society. Here, I cannot help but refer to my own longread on the subject.
Instead of seeking changes through democratic mechanisms, it is much more reliable to reduce costs by voting with your feet—leaving the society that does not suit you and moving to one that does.
The lower the relative costs of financing public goods, the more advantageous ancap is. The higher they are, the more advantageous contractual jurisdictions are. And for this last conclusion, I am very grateful to the authors of the article: they claim this is an argument for CJ, but for me, it means that as technical progress advances, ancap will become increasingly advantageous.

Socialists do not like to admit mistakes, but like to say: “That was the wrong kind of socialism.” Under what circumstances could ancaps admit that libertarianism is a false idea?

…And justice for all

The political program of libertarianism boils down to the consistent reduction of the role of the state, that is, deregulation and tax reduction.

If movement in this direction leads to an increase in the security and wealth of residents until the state is reduced to the role of a “night watchman,” and further curtailment of state functions causes the level of violence to rise and prosperity to decrease, then the minarchists are right and the ancaps are not, and there exists a minimum state optimum below which it cannot be reduced.

If the state optimum is not found, and every reduction of the state brings only benefit to the people, then the ancaps are right after all; the state is a harmful parasite and must be completely eradicated.

If an optimum is found, but not where the minarchists assume it to be, but, say, at the level of “night watchman plus a poorhouse,” then the social liberals are right, and the hardline libertarians, with their meager brains, have failed to grasp the full importance of competent centralized redistribution of resources.

And finally, if it turns out that sustainable results are impossible to achieve because different societies have their own optimum of state functions, then the panarchists are entirely right: people are too different to be treated with a one-size-fits-all approach. Some need more state, some less, some zero—let everyone receive according to their request.

But in order to achieve all these results, a willingness of people to experiment in building a society convenient for them is necessary. However, decades of violent socialist experiments have largely discredited the very idea of consistently building something new. Therefore, we now more often see sporadic attempts to improve something, followed by rollbacks. But just as a long peace has taught people not to take the danger of a major war seriously, a long period of ideolessness can return the taste for reforms to the people. Our task is to ensure that at that moment, the idea of specifically libertarian transformations is floating in the air.

Sale of harmful goods to children

According to libertarian law, the sale of alcohol and tobacco should not be prohibited by force of law (nor should it be subject to fines), including to minors, because it is a victimless crime.

Given that I am currently working as a cashier, my colleagues and I ask for IDs from everyone except those who look under 50, because those participating in sting operations are 17-year-olds who look much older than their age: young men with gray hair, thick beards and muscular builds, and girls who are tall, stout, with makeup and “first” wrinkles. Dozens of customers daily harass us, telling us “not to take it to the point of absurdity” or to stop creating “Kafkaesque” situations. The solution proposed to me by the surrounding statistes is even more of a hell—to ask everyone, to lobby for checking documents through the register as in the USA, etc. My old acquaintances and friends harass me by saying that alcohol consumption at a young age increases the risk of alcoholism many times over. Yes, I am aware. Moreover, I myself actively stood by the same prohibitory position, was an active lobbyist and advocate for control measures on alcohol and tobacco, which was sometimes a topic for discussion with these friends and acquaintances or even a reason for meeting. That is why my social networks are under tension right now. But it is inevitable. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then; I have been studying economics and history for three years, and for the last few months, I have openly considered myself a libertarian.

So, the sale of a product that sits on a store shelf for legal money is not violence. But some people believe that by selling to those under 18, I am committing violence. People tell me that advertising and propaganda force one to start drinking, and that until a certain age, a person supposedly has no freedom of choice. As if they acquire it on their 18th birthday. As if they have none at all before that. Simply, parents should handle upbringing while children live with them, not the state. This answer does not satisfy such people.

How can I clearly explain to them that the decision to sell or not sell anything should be made by the owner, and they should not be punished for selling or not selling?

Sergey Sushinsky

I would suggest approaching your argumentation from two sides.

First, you need to demonstrate that the very idea that the state does good through trade bans is a poor idea. Remind them how in the Soviet Union people were imprisoned for trading foreign currency, and in general for any entrepreneurship involving reselling (for this, a seemingly neutral economic term, “speculation,” was used as a condemnation). Later, currency trading was permitted, but no one compensated those previously imprisoned for currency operations for their losses. All over the world, the trade of marijuana is gradually being legalized, while in Russia, more people are imprisoned for the distribution of substances than for theft. And when marijuana trade is permitted in Russia, it is likely that no one will compensate the losses of all those previously convicted under Article 228 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Remind them that in many Islamic countries, the sale of alcohol is illegal not only to children but to adults as well. In short, there are many restrictions on free trade that are introduced by the state and then repealed. So why did they decide that the ban on selling alcohol to children is actually necessary and will not subsequently be repealed by the same state as mistaken or even criminal? And who will then reimburse alcohol traders for their losses in fines and bribes during the period of the ban?

Secondly, point out to them that if the satisfaction of a need is pushed out of the legal field, it begins to be satisfied illegally. A child was unable to drink beer and smoke cigarettes—they have an unsatisfied need and unspent money. Tomorrow they will buy mephedrone. Maybe it would have been better to sell them beer?

Surveys about money

Today I have two polls for you. The project has started to take up quite a lot of time, which has increased the importance of the question of its monetization. To avoid making mistakes while trying different options, I first want to ask about your preferences.