I often hear an objection like this addressed to me: “You are proposing rather radical methods of struggle; it would cost the authorities nothing to tighten the screws even further and put you on a bottle.” Such a position is not only mistaken but extremely harmful to libertarians, as it limits our methods of fighting against the state.
“Tightening the screws” (expanding the powers of security services and the definitions of “crimes” for repression) will very quickly lead to an autoimmune failure of the regime. This is what happened to most countries under the rule of the authoritarian right, who maximized the machinery of repression against their ideological opponents. These regimes collapsed, and now judicial proceedings for past repressions threaten their former leaders and accomplices. Since libertarian ideas were not widespread in these societies, the machinery of repression itself has not been completely destroyed, but it has been severely weakened.
Terrorists can make a bomb from fertilizer? Let’s monitor every farmer, just in case he is supplying them with fertilizer! Someone plans to use viruses as a deterrent weapon? Let’s send a security agent to every school laboratory, just in case a recruited teacher is helping grow viruses there! Someone is actively spreading the theory of the stationary bandit online? Let’s ensure that only theories approved from above are taught in universities!
Each such form of control slows down scientific and technical progress, creates an atmosphere of fear in society and, most importantly, guaranteed to carry a certain percentage of “false positives,” where an innocent person is condemned by mistake. The more spheres the state attempts to control, the higher the percentage of false accusations will be. This leads to hatred of the authorities by the entire society, even by its loyal supporters. The current government is brutally overthrown, and in such a way that for several generations to come, any authoritarian movements in the country will have no further chance. With a sufficient prevalence of libertarian ideas in society, nothing may appear in place of the overthrown government, which is precisely what we strive for!
The post about dangerous psychos sparked a surprisingly lively discussion, as well as a comparable number of likes and dislikes; therefore, there is something to discuss.
First, many expressed doubt about the idea that insurance companies would face customer demand for the treatment of insane offenders, instead of shooting them, harvesting their organs, feeding them to pigs, or exiling them (where to?)
Indeed, this is merely an assumption, an extrapolation of the current trend toward humanization, as well as the current trend toward a more complete understanding of the principles of consciousness and the causes of mental failures. Therefore, I assume that this treatment will become cheaper and more reliable. Thus, dangerous psychos will, in most cases, receive their treatment before it leads to a tragedy, and only in the rarest situations—when a clouding of the mind went unnoticed and led to murder—will the conversation turn to post-factum treatment; and only after successful treatment can the conversation about financial compensation begin. In the long term, such an approach remains quite profitable for insurance companies.
Secondly, of course, I count on the fact that if anyone, including a psycho, attacks anyone, they will be stopped by the power of weapons, and then both the holes in their body and their brain will be treated, after which a bill will be presented. So, the general alertness of the ancap community, where people are ready to personally defend their freedom and property, should also work to reduce the significance of the raised problem of violence by the insane.
Thirdly, the question of who guarantees that insurance companies will not begin preemptively treating healthy people for mental disorders caused disputes. It is clear that the roots of this question grow from the practice of punitive psychiatry by the state. Why does the state do this? To ensure that the subjects do not have any “little thoughts” about the forced termination of the social contract with the ruling regime. Why would insurance companies do this? Who the hell knows. Applying forced treatment to one’s own clients is fraught with lawsuits if the client was healthy. Applying forced treatment to other people’s clients is a very strange form of altruism, and even more fraught with lawsuits if the person was healthy. Forcibly treating the uninsured might prove to be a useful preventative measure to avoid waiting until they start attacking clients. Here, one must calculate the benefits/costs. But even here, the forced treatment of healthy people brings no benefit.
However, the theme will live on in cinema for some time
We have psychiatric hospitals and maximum-security prisons.
Their “clients” remind us that there are very real psychopaths, maniacs, serial killers, and other problematic characters. Most of them are not Dexters or Hannibal Lecters, and they do not act in accordance with the public good. Due to the peculiarity of the processes occurring in their brains, there is no clear way to convince them using reasons or arguments.
How can ostracism help against them?
What would a system for searching and destroying or isolating such “Jack the Rippers” look like? If it is isolation rather than destruction, then with whose money and by whose efforts?
анонимный вопрос
People value security and are willing to pay for it. Inadequate aggressors are not just dangerous, but because of their apparent irrationality, this danger seems even more serious than if people applied the cold reason of an insurance agent. The same considerations apply here as to why people fear terrorist attacks more than car accidents, even though mortality from the latter is much higher.
The most obvious market agent that could provide such a service is, of course, insurance companies. They collect premiums while the client is safe and pay out a benefit in insured cases. Therefore, assuming that insurance companies act in good faith and do not cheat their clients, it is in their interest to promote the maximum safety of their clients.
But security from maniacs can be provided in different ways, and this is determined by social mores. Clients may desire security from packs of stray dogs but categorically protest against their wholesale extermination, so those who undertake to satisfy this whim will have to account for the corresponding restriction in means.
Similarly, simple empathy no longer allows our wealthy and prosperous society (and under ancap it is presumably expected to be even wealthier and more prosperous) to demand security from violent psychotics through their extermination; rather, it is a matter of treatment. Again, a mental disorder may be acquired rather than innate, for example, as a result of trauma, and before that, the person could well have been a respected client of an insurance company. Thus, the obvious line of thought in our case would be the search for methods of treatment.
Will this be expensive? Pennies. I did not mention the comparison between terrorist attacks and car accidents for nothing. A disproportionate amount is spent on preventing terrorist attacks. In the same way, violent psychotics will receive a disproportionate amount of attention, although their number is completely negligible. Of course, if a person with mental problems had an insurance policy, they would receive higher quality and more expensive treatment, but even if there was no policy, they would still be attempted to be returned to normalcy, and by quite humane methods.
I present the translation of another chapter of The Machinery of Freedom, Anarchy and Effective Law. Here, Friedman recalls his description of the legal system in a free market and applies a standard economic efficiency analysis to it. The conclusion is that in the market for law, the benefit of law providers and its enforcers is not always precisely linked to the benefit of the clients of the respective agencies. In other words, ancap does not lead to one hundred percent justice for all, and the field of private law is also subject to market failures (which Friedman analyzes in detail in the previous chapter). Nevertheless, attempts to establish legal norms through political mechanisms are subject to similar failures to a much greater extent, so overall, the market still decides.
In my recent article on ideological diversity, I talked about how ideas of freedom spread and why this is better than direct missionary work within a single rigid doctrine. Now I would like to look at a related problem: what to do with ideas of un-freedom and their carriers.
Why are ideas of un-freedom attractive?
First, they are relevant to the current state of affairs. Today’s world is far from the ideals of freedom both de jure and de facto. Therefore, the desire to think within a realistic approach and not bother with utopias is quite natural. Understanding that the state was born as a purely bandit formation and then evolved into a modern corporate structure for the purpose of even more effective and stable suppression of the dissatisfied, seizing funds from subjects, and capturing new subjects from neighbors, will in no way help in communicating with state structures. What will help is studying the interconnections between these very structures, both formal and informal, making acquaintances with state functionaries, and other real topics that can bring money, influence, and a decent quality of life.
Second, there are many examples of the collapse of state structures and the transition of a territory to a failed state status—and every time it invariably turns out that the territory turns into a bandit enclave, and freedom in it can only be spoken of as the freedom to rob and kill without fearing retribution from the state, due to its absence. In other words, the state obviously curbs the rampage of private banditry, and therefore should be viewed as a blessing, and these “ideas of freedom” of yours shake the foundations, so please pay a fine for extremism and be thankful you aren’t serving a prison sentence.
The failed state argument: shaken foundations in the background
Third, there is a simple and clear principle: if it works, don’t touch it. Supporters of the status quo will always prefer the current, more or less understood situation, and even if they clearly see the flaws of the system, they will prefer to put up with them rather than choose the uncertainty of the future. If a potential reformer does not have a clear, realistic, step-by-step plan with which the opponent fully agrees at every point, that opponent will always prefer to touch nothing.
How to work with this?
With supporters of living in the real world, everything is quite simple. As soon as they see real-world examples that some free technology effectively handles and withstands the blow of the state, they simply incorporate it into their picture of the real world. For instance, any realist knows for sure that nothing can be blocked on the internet; it is a simple, clear, and easily observable fact. And the realist will themselves laugh at the naive dreamers from some Roskomnadzor, in whose fantasy world adding a resource to the register of blocked resources immediately destroys the corresponding information or service. Similarly, for realists, it is beyond doubt that the state is unable to block Bitcoin transfers, and therefore they logically perceive the complex of anti-money laundering legislation as a set of poorly working spells that should not be taken to heart. So just feed them facts from life, and after some time, they will themselves ridicule the naive etatists who rely in any way on this pathetic seventeenth-century rudiment, the so-called state.
It is also not difficult to find an approach to the adepts of the “don’t touch what works” idea. In general, they are psychologically ready to support a concept such as “everything new is free.” They can be shown how a certain endeavor worked and developed wonderfully after its appearance, and then the state came along and started “fixing” what was working. After that, it usually started working worse. This applies to attempts at state regulation of the internet, the enslavement of the electronic transfer sphere, KYC regimes in banks and exchanges, and all sorts of platform services like Uber—everywhere the principle of “if it works, don’t touch it” was violated specifically by the state. In the same way, it tends to interfere in any voluntary transactions. Finally, one can provide numerous examples of how the state “fixes” already working mechanisms directly related to the functioning of the state. Citizens learned how to achieve a relatively honest vote count in elections—the state changes the election law, making it harder for citizens to control falsifications. A danger arises that a district might go to the opposition—the state engages in gerrymandering or removes the opponent from the election. In short, the state itself so actively violates the principle of not fixing what works that suggesting one should not touch the state because it works turns out to be, at the very least, inconsistent.
All that remains is to deal with the failed state argument. Here, the main counterargument is that this state arises not because people strove for ancap. A failed state always arises after a dictatorship. If the dictatorship ignored reality, made external and internal enemies, and accumulated critical vulnerabilities in the system, then eventually the state broke, leaving citizens poor, fragmented, and incompetent in matters of peaceful cooperation. This created the failed state situation, where people trust only the strongest social ties, the crudest arguments, such as the threat of weapons, and the shortest-term strategies, since under conditions of strong uncertainty, there is no point in long-term planning.
Accordingly, if citizens are already learning to trust weak social ties, plan for the long term without including state handouts in their plans, and do not base their wealth strategies on robbery—then the more of them there are, the less likely a failed state will appear when the next dictatorship collapses. A number of countries that failed to overcome their dictatorship nevertheless did not collapse into a failed state after the dictators died, but began to build something more decent. Spain and Portugal serve as good examples. It turns out that the more actively the supporters of the dictatorship uproot civil society in the country, even if it is disloyal to the dictator, the higher the probability that it will end in a failed state. So they are simply fighting the wrong battle.
With such a civil society, for example, Europe’s penultimate dictatorship is no longer threatened by a failed state
I read a teaser on RLN.Today about the charter city of Prospera on the Honduran island of Roatán. Naturally, all panarchists are following this case with great interest, but for now, excessive enthusiasm seems premature. There was already an attempt to build a charter city in Honduras, but it fizzled out because they failed to agree with the central government on a number of important details. Now they have decided to try again, and they seem to have progressed further than the first time. However, if you look at the immigration guide booklet, it is clear that, in essence, you are not being invited to a special political zone with its own complete charter, but simply to Honduras, according to Honduran immigration rules. It’s not the worst country, more free than Russia—but for now, inside the wrapper of a free city, there is no free city to be seen.
So I would not recommend rushing off to settle on this wonderful island right now—without first getting acquainted with the project initiators to assess how far the negotiations on the political and economic autonomy of the future city have actually progressed, and what the guarantees for its future preservation will be.
However, Prospera has a chance today to truly become a free city very quickly—it just needs to open free immigration for the residents of Hong Kong and give new citizens the opportunity to establish their Hong Kong-style systems in the new location.
What I love about libertarians is the flourishing diversity of their ideas. This is especially true, of course, for those who maintain anonymity and are therefore less constrained in their intellectual explorations. At the same time, I consider the most dangerous of possible trends in the libertarian movement to be the use of such an ancient technology of dominance as “excommunicating” people from the movement.
Libertarians may disagree with one another on the issue of intellectual property, and that’s normal: some quote Kinsella, others Rothbard. They may argue about the acceptability of a minarchist state, drawing arguments on one side from Mises, Rand, and Nozick, and on the other from the same Rothbard or, say, Zolotorev. They may simply be fond of one particular doctrine because it is most interesting to them—for example, Alexander Elesev focused on non-violent child-rearing, Bitarh on the idea of outliving aggressive violence through a multitude of non-trivial ways, Svetov on lustration, and my favorite, Artem Ferier, on contractual slavery. This entire array of ideas is the direct realization of one’s own freedom, without restricting that of others.
The idea of encouraging intellectual diversity is often opposed by the idea of intellectual purism. It has its own obvious appeal, because it is always exclusively pleasant to be in an echo chamber, and knowing that your ideas are in demand and supported is usually very inspiring. One could also quote Lenin and his famous “Before uniting, and in order to unite, we must first decisively and definitely demarcate ourselves.” In other words, you clearly state the theses that constitute the essence of your teaching, give it a specific term, anathematize everyone who tries to call themselves by the same name while having a different set of postulates—and then launch a media campaign promoting precisely this purified product. Resources that were previously spent on searching for ideas and internal discussion are redirected toward missionary work, and the teaching begins to capture the masses.
The obvious problem with such an approach turns out to be fragility. Not only do heresies regularly form within the teaching when someone reinterprets the original set of theses in their own way, but attracting allies who have their own relatively coherent doctrine also becomes problematic. For example, Svetov has a teaching very closely related to what Elesev or Bitarh bring to the masses, but he is unable to attract them to himself except at the cost of their renouncing their own perspective on the issues. And why would they want to do that? Decisive demarcation remains self-sustaining until some teaching begins to occupy a dominant position. Only then can people unite: yesterday’s intellectual rivals join you, first repenting for their blindness and renouncing everything in their early views that deviated from the current canon. This trick worked for Lenin. Today we see similar mechanisms in the advance of the ideology of political correctness. Could the same thing work with libertarianism? Easily. It is just a word, and one can embed however narrow and dogmatic a content into it, having nothing to do with freedom itself.
We have a fork in the road. On one hand, the possibility of growing a rigid but successful teaching that will capture many minds. On the other, the freedom to dwell in a swamp of fruitless intellectual rambling. The preference for the lesser evil suggests itself, and for many, this turns out to be joining the ranks of the “Witnesses of NAP” or something of that sort. Fortunately, this fork is a false dilemma.
Only fans perceive music as whole albums. Usually, someone appreciates a specific song, someone gets attached to a couple of phrases from the chorus, someone remembers a little tune. It is the same with ideologies. Ideas are gathered into teachings for logical consistency, which is important to those who are deeply interested in understanding them. However, indoctrination occurs through the spreading of individual ideas, or even practices based on ideas—not through large-block constructions. Therefore, it is far more important that ideas of freedom take the most diverse forms and presentations, and that they grow into practices with the most varied styles. Some will appreciate cryptocurrency as “free money.” Some will like autonomous energy. Some will prefer coordination structures parallel to the state. Some will promote homeschooling. And some will go into politics, advocating for economic deregulation from elected positions.
Ideas spread unnoticed. Also, ideas can be born independently. You look at a person who doesn’t even know the word “libertarianism”—yet they are internally free and project a highly attractive pattern of action to others. There is no need to immediately examine them for compliance with a given talking-point memo. Just rejoice aloud: oh, one of us!
Let’s look at what the prerequisites for the creation and operation of trade unions might be under ancap conditions.
At the start, we have ancap, meaning anarchy (the absence of a generally recognized institution for producing norms and enforcing them, i.e., the state) plus capitalism (developed commodity-money relations, private ownership of the means of production, freedom of contract, and so on). At what point, for what purpose, with what restrictions, and how successfully can a trade union (an organization for coordinating the collective pressure of hired workers on employers) appear in such a society?
Hiring for a job is an ordinary service provision transaction on the part of the employee. Whether these are services for massaging heels, managing document flow, or maintaining a machine is a secondary matter. A service agreement usually specifies the nature and volume of services, as well as the amount and principles of payment. In any case, a contract cannot foresee all conceivable nuances, and therefore allows for a more or less loose interpretation of individual provisions, which is usually expressed in the form of informal traditions. Each party to the contract, naturally, prefers to shape traditions to their own advantage.
The main tool available to a worker in a situation of dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs at work turns out to be the threat of quitting. Essentially, it does not matter whether the employer is complying with the contract. The worker may be dissatisfied with the current conditions, even if they are better than the situation that existed at the time the contract was concluded. For example, they may have managed to increase their qualifications and are confident that they are now worth more. Or they see a favorable change in market conditions that has led to an increase in the employer’s profit, and believe that it would be reasonable for the employer to share part of this profit with the worker.
Faced with the prospect of production losses, the employer may prefer to compromise or even satisfy the worker’s demands in full. Thus, the contract (or the informal practices that do not correspond to the contract) is revised, and the parties move forward in a new reality. Alternatively, the worker receives a refusal and either accepts it or carries out their threat, which logically leads to dismissal.
When there are many workers of this profession both at the enterprise and in the labor market, it is not difficult to replace the dismissed person. Hence a quite natural hint from the workers of a specific profession: to present coordinated demands, threatening a mass refusal to work. If such a practice becomes recurring, it makes sense to form permanent structures for coordination, i.e., a trade union.
Since we are in ancap, I fundamentally do not consider violent ways of raising the stakes in this conflict; we are talking only about peaceful pressure.
What happens next? The higher the direct and indirect costs to the entrepreneur from the workers’ breach of contractual obligations, the higher the probability of an entrepreneurial solution that radically eliminates the problem. This could be the automation of production, moving the business to a region with a more loyal workforce, or simply closing the enterprise and shifting capital into something more capital-intensive than that based on mass unified labor.
Thus, trade unions under ancap are possible, but they generate negative feedback, and the more successfully they operate, the sooner the unions are abolished along with the professional group that spawned them. Therefore, a more stable model seems to me to be one with spontaneous mass actions of discontent, which do not lead to the creation of permanent organizations for inventing new reasons to pressure the employer. Anger works convincingly as long as it is not institutionalized.
After all, if I am just a small entrepreneur, a local gang could seize everything I have. And there would be an unthinkable number of such gangs due to the crude nature of humans and an unwillingness to work. Am I supposed to rely only on a gun in my pocket?
Tigrenok
I analyzed this topic in great detail in the script for the Libertarian Band video on the conditions for the stability of anarchy; you can even skip reading further and just watch the video instead.
If you happen to find yourself in an impoverished society where robbery is significantly more profitable than peaceful labor, then you, as a small entrepreneur, will indeed have to rely on both your gun and a good “roof” (protection)—you will spend a very significant share of your income on protection in one form or another, and the cost of your distrust toward everyone will be factored into the price of the goods you sell, which consumers will have to pay for. Thus, your life will be poor and dangerous, and you will be seriously outperformed in labor productivity by your peaceful neighbors—and it will remain this way until a certain critical mass of people in society crawls out of the swamp of poverty: money provides confidence in tomorrow, meaning it expands people’s planning horizon. In this way, they unlearn the principle of “you die today, and I’ll die tomorrow” and switch to a “let’s let each other live” mode.
In any case, regardless of your starting conditions, you will not be able to transition to a peaceful, stable, stateless society until you are personally ready to defend your individual freedom. That is, as you quite correctly noted, rely on the gun in your pocket. A gun in a safe that you do not dare use, regardless of what happens, will not help you at all.
The translation of Friedman was recently encouraged by a donation, so here is another chapter of The Machinery of Freedom.
The most common argument in favor of the state from economists is the assertion that external coercion is useful for solving the problem of market failures. Some ancaps, such as Vladimir Zolotorev, simply deny the existence of the phenomenon itself in response, pointing out that if something is not being done, it means it wasn’t wanted that much. Friedman suggests not arguing with the economists, but simply redirecting their argument against the state, showing that it is precisely because of market failures that the state causes so much completely inevitable harm.
By the way, I was recommended a story by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge The Uncontrollables, written in 1985 under a serious influence of The Machinery of Freedom. It presents a textbook plot of “the state attacks Ancapistan.” In general, I enjoyed the author’s style. The story turned out to be part of a larger cycle; I will read it in full in my spare time.
