Friends, I’m going away for a couple of weeks to relax, so posts may become significantly less frequent or stop altogether. Don’t lose me.
Vacation
How will things stand with graffiti and street art in general in Ancapistan?
анонимный вопрос
I have already had to answer regarding graffiti, but that was about current reality. How will the situation differ in Ancapistan?
Every wall is private property; where can a free artist go? Free creativity can only be illegal, otherwise what rebellious spirit could there be? So, we will leave banalities like the idea that one could only paint by contract with the wall owner to the lovers of banalities.
So, will private walls be painted in Ancapistan without asking the owner’s permission? Yes, of course they will! It could be a sincere desire to decorate a boring space, it could be Vasya’s intention to tell the whole world about his unearthly love for Olya, it could be the longing of a miserable lover to express his bitter regret that his beloved is leaving for Ptiburdokov—there are plenty of reasons one can imagine to fill an empty space with one’s own content!
What exact sanctions face the graffiti artist? Well, what sanctions are you prepared to impose on someone caught painting the wall of your private house? Well, you might swear, try to shame them, promise to give them a good thrashing next time. Or you might say, “Dude, sign your drawings so everyone knows it’s you who paints so poorly, and they can wish you a speedy improvement in your artistic skills.” Naturally, the more expensive the property, the more provocative the drawing, the greater the danger threatening the author of the masterpiece. He knows this. Nevertheless, I don’t recommend shooting them—people won’t understand. If you want to take a hard line, it’s better to sue and demand monetary compensation for damages.
If court fees are paid by the losing party, wouldn’t it be more profitable for the court to rule against the rich?
And what should be done if the losing party refuses to pay (they don’t have enough assets), doesn’t want to work, or has simply checked out entirely? And, perhaps a silly question, but how can one reliably find out about previous court decisions? It’s not like reading reviews for a pizzeria.
Yura
What should a restaurateur do if a customer orders a lavish lunch, eats, and then, without paying, grabs a fork, stabs themselves in the eye, and dies? Write off the losses. What should a court do that agreed to judge a client who was clearly unable to pay for its services? Write off the losses.
Of course, a court could try to make a decision based not on the correctness of one of the parties in the conflict, but on their solvency. But people go to court voluntarily and choose it from many competing offers on a free market. In the long run, such judicial bias is no longer a profitable strategy. Another thing is that a court is not obliged to take on every case brought to it. For a small claim — find a cheaper court or settle it on your own.
As for reliable information about previous court decisions, both the courts themselves (if they believe they have a right to be proud of them) and their potential clients are interested in its provision. Whether such information will be collected in a registry of some association of courts, or whether a private aggregator providing excerpts to anyone for a modest fee will handle it — I won’t make such a detailed prediction, as there are many quite viable options, and it’s not even a fact that exactly one will eventually dominate the market. It is clear that not all decisions of all courts will end up in such registries, just as buying a bag of sunflower seeds is usually not recorded on a blockchain. After all, a court is simply a service, and in a free market, it can be provided by anyone to anyone, as long as the principle of voluntariness is observed.
What-what? Vegetarianism?
You are passionately telling someone about your views, you see that the person is interested, but you realize that in five minutes they will forget half of the terms they heard, and when they try to Google them the next day, they will discover a lot of new things about vegetarianism and monarchy instead of libertarianism and panarchy… For this reason, it is always useful to carry a few simple business cards with you; that way, even after a very heavy drinking session, there is a chance that the conversation wasn’t in vain.
Bitarch and I have prepared a sample for you. Just print one page on heavy paper at any copy center; it will almost certainly come in handy. The business cards are made to be exactly the same size as a bank card, so you won’t have to guess where to keep them—after all, you keep your cards somewhere.
Dedicated lanes on private roads
I own a bus company and want to make buses more attractive for commuting to increase revenue. I’ve decided to use a dedicated lane.
Several private individuals own the roads in the city. I managed to reach an agreement with two of them, but not with the last one. Moreover, he owns the most congested sections.
What should I do?
Maksim Barbukhin
I strongly doubt that in a free market, dedicating a lane for public transport would be profitable for a road owner. It’s a different story if the private owner makes one of the lanes toll-based, and subscriptions for the right to use it are purchased by bus companies, emergency services, taxi aggregators, and simply those who need it urgently and regularly. Either way, in this case, you managed to agree on a preferential right of way, and the details are not very important.
But your routes run into a road section where traffic is denser and there is no dedicated lane—for example, it simply cannot be squeezed in here because it’s the old city and it’s too narrow. Or perhaps the owner simply has a different business model and is not inclined to adapt to your needs. In this situation, I would try this option: buy advertising along the problematic sections of the road, and there, present a request to give way to the bus. The motivational part can vary. You could appeal to social consciousness, for example: “a bus is like an ambulance for those waiting at the stop; please yield the lane so people don’t wait too long, and they will be grateful to you.” Or you could do it this way: “By yielding the lane to our company’s bus, you enter a prize draw. Every day, we raffle off valuable prizes for polite drivers.” And on the advertising screen, show footage of yesterday’s winner taken from the bus’s dashcam: here is a car with such-and-such a license plate moving to the left to give way; dear driver, you have won so-and-so, contact us to receive your prize.
Many other motivation methods can be devised, focusing not on the uncooperative monopoly owner of a specific section, but on the competitive market of the users of that section. After all, you don’t need the entire lane for yourself; it’s enough that your bus is let through. The more pleasant it is for people to do this, the more likely they are to let you pass.
If new children are held by force in the community and outsiders are not allowed in as a rule, how to ensure the children’s right to get the hell out of there?
What actions can the bad side take to keep them, acting according to ancap, and what can the good side do?
анонимный вопрос
I’ll start by saying that, of course, any group of people can already go into the wilderness and live there, without any contact with outsiders. Amazonia, the Andaman Islands, Papua — there are enough places, in general. If society in some part of the world evolves into ancap, such isolated communities will be left alone even more so, on the rights of exotic fauna that can be filmed with a drone, but it’s better not to venture toward them personally.
It’s a different matter when your community has regular trade relations with the outside world. Here, you can’t pass off as exotic fauna, because let’s recall East Berlin: even very complex fortifications did not allow for the complete elimination of emigration. If there is any communication with the outside world, the isolation regime is already broken, and the more thoroughly one tries to observe it, the sweeter the forbidden fruit. People will flee your isolated community by any means necessary, and gradually the whole world will learn about the customs that prevail inside. Then, the depressurization of the community is simply a matter of time. More and more companies will refuse to deal with you as long as you restrict emigration, and you will have to make compromises, like the USSR did regarding the Jewish question. Gradually, there will be no one left to maintain your sanctuary, and it will collapse from within — too many of its residents will want access to the outside.
Of course, I do not exclude that there will be individual special operations, where in response to a plea for help from the sanctuary, a group of volunteers from the Mainland will pinpointedly rescue a couple of children. This will certainly have a PR effect, but I believe that the main mechanism for the collapse of a community with closed borders involved in trade with the outside world will still be the increase of internal contradictions.
The Efficiency of Violence
What do you say about the idea that the costs of ensuring security and protecting property rights are higher for private companies than for the state, and that the state, by virtue of its exceptional efficiency in applying force and maintaining order, can better provide the protection and guardianship of law and order, as well as courts, than private companies, and therefore it is necessary in this regard?
анонимный вопрос
How can the state’s costs for protecting property rights be lower than those of a private company? Only through games with budget line items. Yes, for a police officer, it is enough to hang a sign saying “forbidden, fine is so-and-so” and carry out a couple of exemplary fines—whereas a private entity would have to constantly hover and be vigilant to ensure the prohibition is not violated. But this does not mean the police officer is mega-efficient. It means that he himself might receive pennies, or even feed entirely on bribes, while the state must bear the primary costs of ensuring that people are afraid to contradict this police officer. And the costs of maintaining this fear are spread across a heap of budget items, from education to the maintenance of prisons.
A private entity, on the other hand, often has to compete with the state under completely unequal conditions. Where the state provides a service already paid for via taxes and requiring no additional money, the private entity is forced to charge the client additional money, since the state does not share taxes with them.
The state introduces distortions, often quite unpredictable ones, into the market picture, and as long as these distortions persist, judging market efficiency becomes more difficult. One might start a business relying on the current market conditions, only to encounter a completely new regulatory framework in the middle of the project, and that’s it—the project must be shut down and the losses written off. State institutions can usually count on their interests being considered during legislative innovations, so planning is a bit easier there. But it is somehow strange to conclude based on this that the state is necessary. This is simply an example of unfair competition, which is created by the state itself.
To summarize. Indeed, the state can impose arbitrarily high costs on private companies for anything by using force or the threat of force. But who needs such a state? Certainly not the consumer, onto whom all these costs will eventually be shifted.
Rally for Internet Freedom
I am currently watching the broadcast of the Moscow rally. And simultaneously, news is coming in like “in St. Petersburg
activists have blocked the Roskomnadzor building”.
Everyone, as usual, considers themselves a strategist when viewing the battle from the sidelines, but it seems to me that it is wrong to organize simultaneous actions in different cities. I mean, who will be closely following St. Petersburg today when there is Moscow? On the other hand, imagine how cool it would be if every day one large, awesome, well-prepared action took place in a new city! Let the actions be different in style, in format; let people try to outdo one another. Let them say: well, in St. Petersburg it was okay, but then in Krasnodar it was absolutely mind-blowing! Meanwhile, people in each specific city, by the time it is their turn again, will have had time to rest, save money, gather enthusiasm, see others’ creative ideas, and come up with their own.
Thus, by shifting the focus from place to place, one could set up a truly indefinite nationwide public campaign, rather than another “shouted and dispersed” event.
For clarity
Added an illustration to Bitarch’s article “Realistic Libertarianism”.
How will phone pranks and IRL pranks work in Ancapistan?
Will everyone really be on edge and ready to defend themselves immediately (with weapons), ruining all the fun?
анонимный вопрос
Alexander Rozov, in his recent books from the endless Meganesian cycle, painted a rather vivid picture of what unfortunate pranksters face in a society where everyone is on edge and ready to defend themselves immediately. In those stories, the pranksters took a severe beating, but since the footage of them getting beaten was broadcast live, their ratings only grew, along with their monetization. It’s a strange way to make a living, but people commit to even more serious eccentricities just for the sake of a joke.
Generally, a sense of humor is the ability to derive pleasure from the discrepancy between what is observed and what is expected (not my definition; I don’t remember where I read it). In a society where everyone is on edge, it will indeed be difficult to maintain a sense of humor in situations where you have every reason to perceive a subject’s actions as an attack, only for it to turn out to be a prank. However, the already famous prank with Vader and the street toilet is perfectly suitable for replication in any armed society. Even if the girl in the screenshot had a submachine gun instead of a bag, she would hardly have opened fire, but she certainly could have raised her weapon to see how these guys liked a counter-prank, and whether Lord Vader would wet his pants.
