And now I feel like the heroine of a joke, where an elderly husband comes to fulfill his marital duty for a second time on the wedding night because of sclerosis. Bitarch donated 0.01btc again and asked a new question. Just in case, I’m writing the cumulative total right on the sign, you never know)))
And as usual, the answer will come in a couple of hours.
анонимный вопрос
The triumphant march of Keynesianism across the globe is based on simple trickery. The Great Depression was declared a failure of the free market, rather than a failure of state regulation, and a set of state regulation tools was proposed to counteract such phenomena. From the very beginning, Keynesian theory was criticized by the Austrian and neoclassical schools, and throughout the entire time it dominated, no convincing answers to this criticism were provided.
Why did the Keynesians defeat the Austrians? Because the governments themselves acted as the arbiters in the dispute over which economic policy governments should pursue. This violates the fundamental legal principle “No one should be a judge in their own cause,” and it is no surprise that governments with grim regularity preferred those teachings that offered to grant them more significant powers, rather than those that proposed, on the contrary, full deregulation of the economy.
Fortunately, in democratic countries, some feedback remains between the government and the voters, and when stagflation occurred in the seventies—directly contradicting Keynesian theory—the monetarists, with their less clumsy methods, took the place of the Keynesians in the courts of the sovereigns. Countries with dominant Marxism were not so lucky; there, Marx’s teaching was declared omnipotent by virtue of its correctness; in other words, the feedback between theory and reality was absent.
I had to make this historical excursion to make it clear immediately: the success of Keynesianism is based not on logical justifications of the theory’s correctness, but on the fact that its implementation brought direct benefits to those implementing it.
Now I will touch upon the Keynesian proofs directly: after all, even if factual considerations did not match the public justifications, the Keynesians still had to provide some justifications.
At the heart of any theory lies a certain model of reality. Keynes refused to consider models of interaction between agents and focused instead on models of relationships between abstract entities such as aggregate demand, aggregate supply, total employment, the general price level, gross product, the velocity of money, and so on.
Thus, the model of a crisis according to Keynes looks like a system with positive feedback: the lower the demand, the lower the production, the higher the unemployment, the lower the demand. Within the framework of such a simple model, everything is logically flawless. Keynes’s conclusion: the government must stimulate demand through public works, regardless of what they are—even digging holes and filling them back in—and this will allow an exit from the vicious circle. It is evident that such a theory is perfectly suited for propaganda purposes: first, you frighten them properly, and then you promise to save them if they buy your miracle cure for the problem.
In general, the resulting model is completely counterintuitive: a crisis is caused by the overproduction of goods (according to the AES, it is caused by the overproduction of money, and when there are many goods, that is actually great, which fully corresponds to the worldview of any average person); the chief evil in the economy is savings (according to the AES, it is precisely savings that allow for the implementation of increasingly indirect production chains, which ensures economic growth); the best way to fight crises is the destruction of savings and the squandering of resources. Why the implementation of such madness is a sure path to ruin at the level of an individual household, but somehow magically saves the economy once the state begins such a practice for the entire country at once, the Keynesians did not explain. There is a complete logical gap between micro- and macroeconomics for them; they are two entirely unrelated disciplines.
Modern Keynesianism has mutated greatly compared to the original theory, merged in ecstasy with monetarism, and formed a single mainstream current that continues to create increasingly sophisticated models for various areas of life. If Keynes began by promoting the very necessity of state regulation of the economy, now the necessity of state regulation is no longer questioned, and economists are having a field day, infinitely refining specific ways to do it in the most sophisticated manner.
анонимный вопрос
As usual, I will begin by briefly defining the terms. Aggression is the initiation of a conflict. Conflict is the presence of grievances. Aggressive violence is the initiation of a conflict through the use of violence. NAP is a legal principle according to which no one can be granted the right to unpunished aggressive violence. Freedom of speech is a legal principle according to which words do not constitute a violation of the NAP. Bullying is the public tearing apart of a tied-up animal by a pack of dogs (there are many other uses of the word “travlya,” but in the figurative sense when people “hunt” or bully other people, it refers specifically to this method of hunting/baiting). An insult is a manipulation intended to provoke the insulted person into escalating the conflict, preferably to the point of violating the NAP, in order to justify further, more serious sanctions against the insulted party.
If you agree with the proposed definitions, it should become quite obvious to you that the content of any words—be it slander, a call for murder, or even an order to commit murder—according to the principle of freedom of speech, does not violate the NAP. Nevertheless, words can easily be a form of aggression, albeit non-violent, since words can be used to initiate a conflict.
It is also easy to see that I have defined the concept of bullying vaguely, because it is not a legal term, but a purely polemical one. Nevertheless, it stems from the image of an amusement involving the tearing apart of an animal deprived of its freedom, and this is a fairly important point. As long as the object of your actions, carried out through verbal insults, can freely avoid the conflict simply by ending communication, I would not call it bullying—the factor of coercion is absent. In other words, I define bullying as systematic insults under conditions of coerced communication; that is, there is an element of aggressive violence in bullying, but not in the words, but specifically in the restriction of the freedom to leave the conflict zone.
Thus, verbal persecution in prison or in a conscript army is bullying. Similar persecution at work is not bullying, but simply a conflict. It can be ended by resigning. Persecution in school is bullying only if the persecuted person is forbidden from leaving the school.
An important point. Legal responsibility for bullying lies specifically with the one who restricts freedom, not with the one who bullies. That is, not with the dogs, but with the one who chained the bear to the post. This is exactly why responsibility for bullying in school lies with the parents, teachers, and the state: the state obliges parents to provide the child with a secondary education, teachers apply sanctions to the child for leaving school without permission, and parents deny the child the right to switch to homeschooling. Similarly, responsibility for bullying in prison lies with those who put the conflicting parties in one cell and locked them in, and for bullying in a conscript army—those who conscripted the conflicting parties into one military unit and forbade them from leaving it.
As for Svetov, he did indeed, in a conversation with Boris Kagarlitsky, get somewhat confused in the definitions of “aggression,” “violence,” “aggressive violence,” and “self-defense,” which his interlocutor caught him on, and as a result, the debate was lost. Therefore, the assumption that he was insufficiently strict with concepts in some other conversation does not seem improbable to me. Furthermore, the term “bullying” itself has no precise definition, so a specific phenomenon that someone calls bullying may either include aggressive violence or be pure non-violent aggression. Moreover, one party to a conflict may call the behavior of the other party bullying, even if it contains neither violence nor even aggression. For example, someone performs their job poorly, receives criticism regarding the actual deficiencies in response, and loses their bonus. Why would that not be a reason to position oneself as a victim of bullying?
анонимный вопрос
As is well known, economic theory does not provide quantitative predictions, so let us not guess exactly how many days you will be unable to walk; instead, let’s actually reflect on how libertarianism stands in terms of sex.
Anything is permissible here, provided that voluntariness is observed. I will specifically note that voluntary consent can be withdrawn at any moment. If a penalty was provided for this by contract, then the penalty is paid. Post-coital disagreement is a legal nonsense; any sane court would tell you to get lost with such claims. A demand for a penalty for inadequate quality of services is permissible if such a possibility was agreed upon in advance.
If one of the subjects was bound by a contract with a third party, and the sex violates this contract, then the second subject, who did not enter into the contract, is not a party to the conflict and cannot be held liable. So stop pulling the hair of the vile home-wrecker and focus on the divorce from the husband.
The existence of a subordination relationship between subjects is not, by default, an obstacle to sex. Thus, if a department head promotes their sexual partner, or conversely, refuses a bonus nomination for refusing sex, that is the business owner’s problem.
The participants of the act themselves remain legally uninvolved, just as a dog is not subject to trial for mating with someone’s bitch without permission while the owners were looking away. All possible claims regarding the excess are settled between the guardians. Moreover, the fact that one of the guardians disapproves of what happened while the second has nothing against it is irrelevant. Justified claims may arise only if this disapproval was known in advance and the guardian of the second party incited the ward to act. Otherwise, post-factum claims make no more sense than the post-coital disagreement of one of the participants of the act.
A simple combination of considerations from the two previous sections applies here. Everything performed by mutual consent is permissible; a justified claim may arise only if the legally competent party was aware in advance of the guardian’s disagreement regarding sex with the ward.
Here, there is a firm presumption of disagreement. If consent is not expressed in an explicit form (for example, if the girl is dead drunk and asleep), it means there is no consent.
I hope that you are already gradually preparing for the Adam Smith Readings, which will take place in Moscow on November 4. Not only is it the largest annual Russian libertarian conference, but this year is its anniversary; it is celebrating its tenth year and should be held at a particularly high level. So, if you have the opportunity, be sure to go; you won’t regret it. You will hear Ekaterina Schulmann, the best Russian popularizer of political science, Natalia Zubarevich, who knows and can talk about the situation in Russian regions magnificently, and Vera Kichanova, our answer to state-oriented urbanists. And a few other good guys)))
And while the Readings haven’t started yet, be sure to subscribe to the Readings YouTube channel, where you can find not only recordings of previous Readings, but also some other equally interesting presentations.
I want to recommend several recordings from there that personally made a great impression on me and seem very important.
First, of course, is Dmitry Butrin, “Non-Cooperative Games”, a report from the seventh Readings in 2015. A very refreshing cold shower for everyone involved in politics. It may cause some rejection, but try to digest it. Especially relevant for those preoccupied with party building.
Secondly, a webinar by Alexander Rakviashvili that is quite similar in message: “Libertarian Reforms: Why It Is So Difficult”. This is especially recommended for those who, in the survey on preferred methods of achieving ancap chose the political path.
And thirdly (three is a sacred number for Russia), for variety, I will mention the optimistic report by Sergey Seleev, “Garage Economy in the Russian Province”, delivered at the eighth Readings in 2016. Unfortunately, the recording quality is poor, and the presentation did not make it into the frame. You can consider this an allegory for ancap, which, under current conditions, generally looks quite unsightly.
I hope the proposed selection not only allowed you to look at the surrounding reality differently, but also tells you something about me.
In closing, I will mention that money is required to hold the Readings. As is easy to see, the donation wallet is currently not very full, with only 6 transactions totaling 0.01429703btc. I urge you to add more there, as far as possible.
Bitarch (question paid in the amount of 0.01btc)
It is quite easy to imagine how, under conditions of the absolutization of private property rights to land, some landowner demands absolute inviolability of the land, refusing to enter into any negotiations. A person has the right to misanthropy as long as they are willing to pay for it and do not encroach on someone else’s property.
However, it is very difficult to imagine that commercial companies, especially those with multiple owners, would adhere to such misanthropy. As a rule, the goal of a company is to make a profit, not dominance and self-assertion. So, if there is a demand for the installation of utilities across a company’s territory, whether it be a cable or a path, this will generally be perceived as an opportunity to profit by meeting that demand.
Under ancap, any voluntary transactions are legitimate; as for forced ones, they can also easily occur, but apologies and compensation are assumed for them by default.
David Friedman, in “The Machinery of Freedom,” gives as an example of completely justified behavior a lost traveler who breaks into someone’s empty house to make a phone call and call for help, but upon leaving, leaves cash in the house in an amount sufficient to compensate for the inconvenience caused.
But we don’t need to go that far when we have our own taiga nearby. Any winter hut in the taiga is private property, but the doors are not locked, and there is always a certain supply of firewood, grains, and other equipment stored there. Any random passerby can spend the night in a winter hut, and before leaving, they replenish the supplies for the next visitor. This is the established spontaneous order. No one specifically engages in enforcing its observance; these rules of courtesy simply help people live. A society that does not develop such orders is less successful.
Similarly, in Rome, the very concept of easement was invented without any state, within the framework of private law, and there are no grounds to believe that a stateless society of the future would be less sensible than a stateless society of the past.
Thus, under ancap, in sparsely populated areas, the needs of people regarding transit territories will be guarded by a conceptual “bear prosecutor” who upholds the “law of the taiga,” and in densely populated areas—by the desire to obtain market benefit from providing transit through one’s territory. As for the plots of the few misanthropes, who, although they will inevitably be encountered like any other rude people, in the vast majority of cases can be bypassed via some alternative routes.
Today I received another question accompanied by a fairly large donation of 0.01btc. I decided not to stress over which one to answer today and which tomorrow, and instead address both in one day.
And since this is the first time a donation wasn’t anonymous, it’s a great opportunity to express separate gratitude in graphic form.
anonymous question (paid in the amount of 0.0001btc)
How does a human neighbor differ from other annoying factors, such as a thunderstorm, a highway under the windows, flying planes, barking dogs, and so on? Only in that you can try to reach an agreement with them, whereas the most realistic way to avoid the other annoying factors is soundproofing.
But the neighbor, in turn, also understands that by coming to them and demanding that the noise stop, you are demonstrating double standards, because if you had actively protected yourself from the noise of the other sources mentioned above, then the noise from behind the wall would not bother you, as its level would be below the threshold.
Thus, after hearing your requests regarding reducing the volume level, they will expect a deal. The subject of the deal may turn out to be the most unexpected thing.
You can state that since they are celebrating so wildly that it’s impossible to sleep, they should pour you a drink as well—and join the party.
You can ask when the banquet is expected to end, and, having received an answer, declare that you are willing to tolerate it until then, but if they continue after that, they should be prepared for the harshest sanctions, from “I’ll shit under your door” to “I’ll smash the door with an axe.”
You can agree on monetary compensation, enough to spend the night in a quiet hotel nearby…
In general, there are plenty of options.
But, of course, you may also fail to reach an agreement. This will mean that you and your neighbor were unlucky with each other: you had a grievance, you initiated a conflict, the conflict was not resolved, and escalation is possible in the future, which entails costs for both parties. And no daddy-mommy-state will help; you are adults now, it’s time to learn how to negotiate on your own.
Right now I have 14 unanswered questions for the next two weeks, and I hope that interest in the project will only grow. In this regard, I wanted to ask for your opinion on the most appropriate way to handle such a situation.
анонимный вопрос
A similar question was asked of me three years ago, and at that time I wrote a whole essay on the subject titled “Why Altai Succeeded.” Now, without overthinking it, I am simply publishing it with minimal edits.
The Gorno-Altai Autonomous Region is a small, sparsely populated peripheral territory of Southern Siberia on the border with Mongolia. There are no railways, almost no industry; there are mineral resources, but they are expensive to export due to a lack of infrastructure. It is inhabited predominantly by livestock breeders who are united into kolkhozes purely formally. It possesses significant tourism potential, which was practically unused by the socialist planned economy.
In the summer of 1990, talk of sovereignty began in the autonomous region. The leadership planned to demand a status upgrade to an autonomous republic, but instead, announcements began to appear—first in Gorno-Altaysk and Mayma, a few days later in all other district centers, and then everywhere. They hung on poles, on the doors of shops, post offices, and savings banks, or were simply pasted onto gates. The first print run was produced at the regional newspaper’s printing house, and thereafter it became a grassroots effort: some used typewriters, some wrote by hand. The text was as follows:
Comrades!
The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Comrade N.S. Khrushchev, promised Soviet citizens the construction of communism by 1980. Unfortunately, he was removed from office by a handful of party officials who preferred to develop the socialist system instead of building communism. But the laws of dialectical materialism cannot be cheated! And so, ten years after the promised deadline, Altai has finally built communism.
According to the teachings of Marx-Engels-Lenin, the state is an instrument of class oppression. A communist society is classless; therefore, the state on the territory of Altai has henceforth naturally ceased to exist.
The Communist Party, which served as the vanguard of the builders of communism, no longer persists as a structure separate from the rest of the people upon the achievement of communism. The task of the Communist Party is accomplished!
The basic principle of communism is: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Therefore, the inhabitants of communist Altai shall henceforth freely exchange any goods and services, valuing them only and exclusively according to their own needs. The amount of labor invested, which served as the socialist measure of a commodity’s value, is now disregarded. Concepts of added value, price zones, central planning, and the like are henceforth considered obsolete and possessing only historical value.
Since states that use money as a measure of value still exist in the rest of the world, the inhabitants of Altai may also freely use the currencies of any states in their settlements according to their own needs, alongside any other values.
In their relations with one another, the inhabitants of Altai shall henceforth be guided by only two principles: mutual respect and communist consciousness. The first means that in their actions, residents take into account the interests of their neighbors and other involved parties, cementing their decisions with agreements. The second means that residents consider not only immediate needs but also care about what they will leave behind for their grateful descendants.
All conflicts are settled amicably by the residents involved in the conflict, according to the principles of mutual respect and communist consciousness. They may also turn to any other persons or organizations for judgment, pledging to carry out the decision rendered by them.
All property remaining to the inhabitants of Altai from the times of the socialist system, both personal and state-owned, continues to remain under the management of the same persons who managed it under socialism. Mechanisms for changing the managing persons are developed by the residents independently for each specific case, based on the principles of mutual respect and communist consciousness.
In relations with citizens of other states, the inhabitants of Altai are guided by the same principles as in their relations with each other. Any person is free to come to Altai for recreation, for settlement, or to engage in various activities. As long as they observe our principles, they are our welcome guest.
The inhabitants of Altai consider wars to be a remnant of a bleak past; therefore, they respect the borders of states and have no intention of seizing their territory by force. When traveling outside Altai, the inhabitants of Altai are guided not only by the principles of mutual respect and communist consciousness but also comply with the other requirements of those states.
The inhabitants of Altai will not tolerate attempts to turn history backward; therefore, they will oppose any attempts to revive a class society and a state on the territory of Altai. A sign of a class society is the distinction of any groups for whom different rules apply than for others. Signs of a state are: the forced seizure of valuables, the coercion of people to work, the restriction of freedom of action, and other violent actions carried out otherwise than as compensation for specific calculated damage.
It is clear that the stated principles differed greatly from the trends of recent years, and scholars of Marx’s works might find many of the introduced definitions quite debatable. But, first, the main, well-known communist principles were explicitly stated in this manifesto. Second, anyone who had read science fiction could easily recognize the bright communist future in these principles, and nothing else. But the most important psychological factor was that the manifesto declared victory. While the rest of the USSR was contemplating admitting defeat in the competition with capitalism, and reading “Dunno on the Moon”—where it was assumed that man is a wolf to man—as a visual aid for building a new order, the majority in Altai understood perfectly well what kind of system they had established and how to behave within it.
According to the manifesto, all functionaries of the national economy fully retained their positions; only party workers were left completely without roles. Attempts to assert their rights led to them being reminded: “You bitches removed Khrushchev!”. And, frankly speaking, the CPSU aktiv was not that large in a territory with a population of fewer than two hundred thousand. In any case, some party workers left for Russia; no one placed obstacles in their way.
Russia took a pause; the union leadership found itself in a predicament. Had this been a matter of militant nationalism, with the oppression of Russians and other excesses, they might have considered deploying troops. But to forcibly return those who had already moved to a new stage of development back to socialism? That would mean the collapse of the entire ideology. Keeping such a thing secret would have been impossible; glasnost had long been triumphantly sweeping across the USSR. It ended with Gorbachev officially announcing in October 1990 that an experiment on the transition to communism within a single region had begun on the territory of the Gorno-Altai Autonomous Region.
Already the following year, as everything in the USSR began to shake and the first foreign investors arrived in Altai—several hotel chains and one agro-industrial holding—a mass exodus of Soviet cooperators, currency traders, and other sufficiently wealthy citizens to Altai began. They discovered that both they, their money, and their initiative were welcome here.
At first, Soviet rubles were mainly used in Altai, then they predominantly switched to the US dollar and the Swiss franc. No one saw the need to conduct their own currency policy.
The few asphalted roads did not have time to fall into complete neglect during the transition period. Road services initially scraped by on small orders for asphalt paving inside villages or repairing bridges over mountain rivers, but gradually larger investors stepped in, and orders became overwhelming. In 1991, road workers set up a post at the entrance from Russia and began charging transport traveling to Mongolia. This was enough to maintain the Chuysky Trakt in a satisfactory condition. Gradually, a sufficient number of services emerged, each grabbing various road sections for maintenance and profit. Over time, the fee-collection mechanisms evolved toward greater user convenience—as is customary, in accordance with the principles of communist consciousness and mutual respect. Also, strangely enough, the total absence of any bodies designed to establish traffic rules and monitor their compliance did not particularly affect the accident rate.
Small aviation continued to operate between district centers, as well as to Biysk and Barnaul. By the time small aviation in Russia began to wither away, the Japanese had already started building an international airport in Gorno-Altaysk.
Private clinics first began to appear at hotels and sanatoriums; over time, solvent demand emerged in district centers as well. The rescue service began moonlighting by transporting patients from remote villages to district hospitals. In some cases, these were one-off orders, in others, subscription service agreements with residents, and in some, insurance companies managed to hustle in.
The level of education naturally dipped at first. Former school teachers worked with individual students on specific subjects, spending the rest of their time in their own gardens. Gradually, it became clearer what kind of specialists the communist economy needed, and the process began; in some places, it remained at the level of tutoring, while in Gorno-Altaysk and Ulagan, one secondary school each opened. Mainly, teachers gathered mixed-age groups and gave an intensive course of one or two subjects over a couple of months. The academic load remained laughable compared to the Soviet past, so children were more involved in household chores and found a full source of income quite early. On the other hand, it became common to voluntarily study specific areas of knowledge at a more mature age, when a person knew exactly what they needed and was ready to pay for it.
In the early nineties, excesses occurred when gangs from Russia arrived in jeeps, stealing cars, household appliances, and money. These issues were resolved in different ways. One could obtain contacts for a rival gang and lead them to the gang returning with the loot. One could organize armed resistance, as there were no restrictions on carrying weapons in Altai. One could provide leads to the Russian cops. In Mayma, which naturally suffered from raids more than others, a private security organization existed for a time—it was founded by Biysk gangsters who had been pushed out of the station market by competitors. Gradually, the opinion formed in the criminal circles of the Altai Krai that it was “beneath them” to act lawlessly toward the communists. They went there for cultured recreation, and sometimes for arbitration—the communist consciousness of their southern neighbors could be trusted.
In ninety-eight, Belokurikha joined communist (the de facto anarcho-capitalist system thus retained its original ideologized name de jure) Altai. In the RF, there was a default, a carousel of changing prime ministers, salary delays—while Altai investors offered good money in hard currency for the state property in the purchased Belokurikha. In the early two-thousands, the RF unilaterally carried out the demarcation of the border, established customs checkpoints and other strange attributes that states love so much. In 2014, Zhirinovsky suggested considering that Belokurikha and Northern Kazakhstan, along with Novorossiya, are ancestral Russian lands, but Zyuganov pulled him back, telling him not to dare sharpen his teeth on communists, and that in general, we could actually learn something from our southern neighbors rather than intruding upon them with our volunteers.
In 2006, there was an attempt to officially register the state of the Communist Republic of Altai—with the goal of joining the UN, WTO, and providing offshore services. However, the next day, the applicant’s entire fence was plastered with the communist manifesto, and he, after sober reflection, decided that things were fine as they were. He did not attempt to prove to his neighbors that his idea implied neither taxation nor other signs of a state mentioned in the manifesto, and he dropped his initiative. This communist inflexibility of the Altai people meant that no international company could keep its headquarters in Altai, as it was required to have a state registration, but this did not hinder real operational activity.
For trips around the world, the inhabitants of Altai initially used primarily Russian passports, which they obtained in Russian Biysk, but after the 2008 Georgian war, citizenship of the Baltic states and Israel became fashionable, and from 2010, Mongolia introduced a simplified procedure for the inhabitants of Altai, thereby fully satisfying the market demand.
Altai became a refuge for Edward Snowden, but this was not his most successful idea. NSA representatives, not hiding themselves particularly, flew to Gorno-Altaysk and captured the fugitive sysadmin, after which they departed for the RF and then to Washington. The Altai people did not obstruct the detention, but, first, they began to refuse US dollars en masse, gradually switching to Swiss francs for cash and bitcoins for cashless settlements, and second, in 2014, a veterans’ club opened near Onguday—something like a base for free mercenaries from all over the world—and when in 2017 the Russian FSB tried to capture Arkady Babchenko, who had fled to Altai, its employees were met with a rather unkind reception. However, it was managed without casualties or international scandals.
In 2020, the Manifiesto Comunista spread to Cuba, but that is a completely different story…
