The recent case of the seizure of power in Afghanistan by the Taliban movement only further confirms the theory of the stationary bandit, according to which states arise not through a mythical social contract, but because nomadic bandits decide to settle down and move from irregular looting to stable tribute (or taxation) and the subjugation of people. Even the most liberal and democratic states continue this tradition, as in their case as well, a person has no right to disobey the orders and tax rates established from above—disagreement with this is punished by violence, exactly as in the case of a bandit attacking an unarmed and defenseless victim. And even the provision of certain socially useful services by the state does not change the essence—it is the same as so-called “protection rackets,” where you either agree to pay bandits for some form of protection, or they will attack you.
But it is also important to note that the legitimacy of a specific group on the world stage, that is, its recognition as a state by other states, is purely a question of victory and the seizure of power. Some states are already ready to recognize yesterday’s Taliban terrorists today, and there are even talks of cooperation, including from Russian government structures at the level of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Similarly, in their time, the Bolshevik bandits were recognized; after they seized power, the representatives of the previous Tsarist government suddenly became the bandits.
The winner is recognized and always spoken with, even if they were a mad bandit only yesterday. And this is the only thing, rather than any “social contract,” that distinguishes a “legitimate” and recognized political force from an “illegitimate” bandit-terrorist. But the essence itself remains the same.
I have put together the first two chapters of the third section of the book about ancap. The section is called “The Market” and, of course, the first chapters are dedicated to anything but the market. In the first one, I ramble on about labor productivity, and then suddenly switch to inequality, and I’m currently pondering whether to remove the final passages. The second chapter is dedicated to planning, and this is the first place in the book where I appeal to specific named authorities, Mises and Hayek, which also creates a certain dissonance, as it might overcomplicate the text.
Overall, I am dissatisfied with the writing pace; I thought I would announce three chapters at once, but the chapter about the market isn’t coming along yet, so I have to report on only two.
I absolutely do not understand how, in a polarized society, the Ural Federal District and the Southern Federal District would agree on, say, the criticism of oatmeal cookies, because some have a liberal attitude toward oatmeal cookies, while for others, insulting oatmeal cookies is haram. It is obvious that judgments applicable to classical panarchy cannot be applied to FOCJs, since the conditional Ural Federal District is driven not by a desire for profit, but by other forces—the political goals of the elites of this Ural Federal District, for example. What should be done if a federal district continues to play at isolationism (which is impossible in classical panarchy); how should federal authorities react in this situation?
Old friend
The question refers to a translation I published quite a long time ago of a work on functional overlapping competing jurisdictions. However, it demonstrates a lack of understanding, quite traditional for a modern person, of how functional jurisdictions differ from territorial ones. A conditional Ural Federal District is a territorial jurisdiction. A conditional Ural University is a functional jurisdiction: although it has a certain territory, the university’s jurisdiction is defined not by territory, but by the function it performs. Its jurisdiction includes the process of its students obtaining higher education and certain related issues. Universities can play at isolationism, up to the extraterritoriality of campuses and their own security services, or they can remain dull agencies under the subordination of the Ministry of Education.
The FOCJ model was proposed by the authors primarily for the EU, as a development of the idea of federalism, in order to take away some powers from the states comprising the EU, but transfer them not to the level of the European Union, but to functional jurisdictions. A rather flexible model is proposed, with the possibility of forming FOCJs from the bottom up, and exactly in the sphere that covers the scale of the problem being solved.
Relationships between FOCJs can be competitive if they perform related functions; they can be reduced to relationships between a customer and a client, as, for example, between an FOCJ serving nuclear power plants and an FOCJ serving the power grid; they can be conditionally neighborly, like the police and the fire department in one city; or they may be completely absent, as between a consortium for the certification of boiled sausage production and an association of kosher food producers.
Since the interests of different FOCJs can indeed come into conflict, legal proceedings between them are possible. Within the original model, it was not intended to shift the judicial system onto FOCJ rails, so most likely one arbitration or another, such as the Stockholm Arbitration, will be used. Police interference in FOCJ activities is also possible if some higher jurisdiction, such as a relevant ministry, sees abuses or simply errors in reporting.
In some ways, FOCJs look like an under-panarchy, since they may imply not only contractual relations with those people whose lives they regulate within their function, but may even collect targeted taxes from them if the state delegates these powers to them. In other ways, they are ahead of the panarchy model, because under panarchy we have something like contractual extraterritorial states regulating a more or less arbitrary set of life areas, while the powers of FOCJs are strictly limited by their function, which makes them similar to Friedman’s ancap model.
An important question is how self-defense fits into the concept of the Lorenz mechanism (LM)/violence inhibition mechanism (VIM). From a rational point of view, restraining violence is a good and useful thing. But would a person with a strong LM/VIM be unable to defend themselves from an immediate threat of violence?
Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to find specific studies linking self-defense and the LM/VIM concept. In the future, I will try to study the neurophysiological aspects of self-defense in more detail and combine them with similar aspects of violence inhibition. However, I will now put forward a hypothesis about such a relationship based on the evolutionary aspects of the development of LM/VIM, which can serve as a starting point for further research.
According to Konrad Lorenz’s theory, the inhibitor is most pronounced in species whose representatives possess strong innate weaponry and do not have a statistically significant opportunity to avoid violence by fleeing. These two factors exert evolutionary pressure to strengthen the LM/VIM, as they create a threat to the survival of the species. And how did evolution handle this threat? It is not that complicated. Non-aggressive members of the population encounter intra-species violence only when they are attacked. Aggressive individuals, however, initiate violence themselves. Because of this, they end up in violent clashes much more often, and therefore die more frequently than other individuals, failing to pass their genetic material to the next generation. Thus, violence is weeded out, while the strong version of the violence-inhibiting mechanism is reinforced.
But for non-violence to be reinforced, it is necessary that the victims of violence be able to defend themselves during a direct attack using their weaponry. Otherwise, the aggressor’s life would be under no threat, and it would be the less aggressive individuals who die, leading to the opposite effect, and eventually to the extinction of the species (unless its representatives choose flight as an alternative, as hamsters do, for example, scattering after only a few mutual bites). But since we still observe heavily armed species in nature whose representatives are not prone to fleeing from intra-species aggression, and we also observe a strongly expressed LM/VIM in them, it means that victims of violence can indeed use their weaponry for self-defense against aggressors.
How might this work? An immediate threat of violence leads to a defensive reaction from the victim, which may weaken the operation of the violence inhibitor for a short period of time. As soon as the immediate threat passes, everything returns to normal. At the same time, the possibility of weakening the inhibitor to a state where the affected individual becomes capable of initiating violence themselves is excluded. Otherwise, the threat to the survival of many species would continue to exist, because the number of violent individuals in their populations would not decrease as a result of acts of violence, but might even increase, as victims would become new aggressors.
Self-defense is a permissible and evolutionarily optimal strategy for eradicating violence in a population. And humans are not exempt from this. If everything stated above is correct, then humans should also be capable of self-defense during a direct attack when there is a threat to their life, even if they have a strong version of the LM/VIM inhibitor. At the same time, they would not be capable of initiating violence outside of situations that directly threaten life, as this would relate to other, successfully inhibited types of violent behavior. I will also add that all of this points to the realism of evolutionary strategies for fighting and eradicating violence based on armed self-defense during direct attacks by various types of aggressors.
El Salvador now has a second national currency alongside the US dollar — bitcoin. Thus, since the autumn of 2008, in just under 13 years, bitcoin has grown from a project posted by an anonymous person for open discussion into a currency equal to the dollar. Although, so far, only in one country.
Now the world should wait for El Salvador to implement something like Estonian e-residency: then anyone wishing to do so will be able to remotely open a business in El Salvador and conduct completely official settlements in Salvadoran currency, because Salvadoran laws will mandate it.
To mark this giant step in bitcoin adoption, discounts have been announced: some lucky individuals managed to buy in today at a price of around 43 thousand US dollars per bitcoin. But it is still not too late: at the time of this post’s publication, bitcoin costs only 47 thousand dollars.
Vladimir Milov is preparing to make the first bitcoin transaction of his life: a hairdresser is telling him how to install a Lightning wallet
After an indecently long break, I am returning to the translation of Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molinari. I have already begun to miss his style, so I decided to ignore the lack of donations and translated another chapter just because; you’ll have plenty of time to chip in later.
Chapter Seven continues the first part of the book dedicated to methodology — the author approaches the explanation of his subject quite thoroughly, yet quite vividly. In particular, here he shows where the main strength of the existing world order, in which everything is divided among states, lies — in the fact that we cannot imagine it being any other way, although if we were to start designing the best possible world order from scratch right now, it wouldn’t occur to anyone to voluntarily build all this crap. On the contrary, the solution we devised would likely resemble something anarchic — simply because these recipes work perfectly in private life. In short, give it a read; it is presented quite well and convincingly.
Next, I am switching back to the translation of Libertarianism by Eric Mack, because a donation of sufficient size has arrived for the translation of another chapter, from which we will learn what Hayek thought about economic justice.
Yesterday, I put on a video by Milov to listen to before sleep, but I fell asleep before reaching the scandalous phrase about the inner libertarian. I had to start it over in the morning.
In short, Vladimir’s thesis boils down to the idea that it is not always appropriate to take the side of big business when it is in conflict with a state defending certain political interests, especially when big business is lobbying for its own interests. And if your inner libertarian only knows how to say “everything private is good, everything state-owned is bad,” then kill it and grow another, more adequate one. Because values are subjective, and nothing is “good” or “bad” in a vacuum; these terms are always attached to a specific interested party—specifically, who exactly benefits and who exactly suffers.
Is it good for the German gas consumer that their country will receive cheap fuel supplies with massive excess transport capacity? Obviously, it’s good, and from Montenegro, I can only be happy for them. Is it good for a Pomeranian worker that a new employer comes to their land and creates many high-paying jobs? Yes, it’s wonderful for them! Is it good for a Ukrainian worker that their local job maintaining the pipeline is under threat of abolition or at least salary cuts? Nothing good about that. But is it good for them that they can travel to Germany without a visa to maintain the pipeline being built there, already earning a German salary? You bet! True, they will have to compete with Germans, and here, if the German tries to use state protectionism, the Ukrainian will suffer.
Is it good that gas is extracted in Russia and a transport network is built allowing its delivery to various corners of the world? This is an incorrect question. The question does not specify the subject for whom we are making assumptions—whether it is good or bad for them. For Putin, it’s good—the geopolitical club is long, heavy, and shiny. For the rotational workers laying the pipes—it’s great. For Gazprom shareholders—it’s questionable, because the commercial profit from the project is unclear; it’s less about money and more about geopolitics. For Russian citizens counting on some taxes from this Gazprom—don’t count on other people’s money and you’ll sleep sounder; and what are you even doing in Russia? Get out of there, following me and Vladimir Milov. The inner libertarian sticks its head out and gives the budget workers the finger.
In short, a huge thank you to Vladimir Milov for promoting libertarianism. Navalny is in prison and can no longer, as before, send us to forced labor, so Milov has to take the heat. It’s okay, he’ll manage.
Quite often, the “worst-case scenario” argument is brought forward against the idea of a free society. It posits that we cannot abandon the state because we have something to lose; although the state may be a poor solution to our problems in many respects, it could be much worse without it, and therefore it is not worth the risk. This argument cannot be called valid because it does not consider the possibility of the opposite situation—that is, the “best-case scenario”—and moreover, it completely ignores the worst-case scenario that could occur if state power is preserved.
Absolutely any human activity and any aspiration carry both the possibility of achieving a positive result and the risk of encountering various dangers. This applies even to everyday actions, such as walking to the store or to work. Even in such elementary activity lies a small, but still present, risk of tripping on something along the way, falling and being seriously injured, or being hit by a car at a pedestrian crossing. And what can be said about something more complex than a walk?
However, the probability of the worst-case scenario occurring does not deter people from activity and aspirations if they can also lead to a best-case scenario, and especially when there exists a worst-case scenario associated with abandoning them. I think it is obvious what worst-case scenario awaits you if you refuse to go outside. Many initiatives have found realization in an attempt to avoid the worst-case scenario of inaction, even though action also brought certain risks. If every initiative were discarded solely on the basis of the presence of risks, without considering the risks of inaction, we would now live in a more backward world without many of the phenomena and technologies we are accustomed to.
Perhaps in the pursuit of achieving a free society, as in any other pursuit, certain risks are hidden. However, again, let us not forget that there is not only a worst-case but also a best-case scenario, and that there is a worst-case scenario if the status quo is maintained. By the way, history has already shown us many examples of the latter. How many state regimes have destroyed millions of lives. And can anyone really say that the worst-case scenario of a free society would be even worse than life under another Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot? After all, all states strive precisely for centralization and the strengthening of their power, and we can observe this process even now. Just 10-20 years ago, both in the Western world and in our post-Soviet space, there were freer orders, and now one can very easily receive punishment (up to imprisonment) even for actively defending positions, or simply making statements that do not coincide with the state agenda. Thus, it is not far to go to the level of the authoritarian communist/fascist regimes of the last century.
States have always moved, and continue to move now, toward their own worst-case scenario. This alone indicates that we should attempt to achieve a free society as an alternative capable of providing a best-case scenario. This is especially relevant in the case of the post-Soviet space. Perhaps people of the Western world have something to lose in economic terms; they have accumulated a certain wealth, the risk of losing which most likely will not justify such a pursuit in their eyes. We do not even have that. For us, a free society is like an injection of an experimental drug for a terminally ill patient—either this, or nothing will remain but to resign oneself to the rapidly deteriorating state of affairs.
Out of habit, I continue to watch new videos from my former team, but I’ve somehow forgotten to promote them on my own page; that’s untidy, so I’m correcting it.
In the video, which this time is dedicated to propaganda, as usual, there is an extensive historical introduction, and, as usual, it hangs in the air somewhat, because no thoughts are derived from it that the main part of the video could rely on. Next, there is an equally extensive analysis of how it works and what methods it employs, and in conclusion, it is stated that propaganda is not bad in itself, since it can be used for benevolent purposes. For example, promoting vaccination against a fashionable disease and other beneficial methods of state care for the population—what else could libertarians bring up as a positive example? Certainly not Svetov with his propaganda for lustration!
I continue translating Friedman’s latest book. This time, I’ve gone in order. I translated the introduction and the first chapter, regarding law in the Chinese Empire. An attentive reader may notice that I haven’t fully completed the work, and about half of the footnotes are missing from the text. That is the case; I got exhausted. Tomorrow, I plan to quietly upgrade the text—both for online reading and in the ebook. I also still hope that someone will take on creating a Russian-language cover for the book.
What I like in the book are the constant comparisons: look, here’s how it was for the Chinese, exactly like in modern America. And this—just like in 18th-century England. And then there are attempts to show for what purpose the legislation was made exactly this way, what worked, and what didn’t quite.
