Let’s imagine anarcho-capitalism. A developed capitalist economy with a deep division of labor and the dominance of commodity-money relations, plus the absence of state power—meaning, no monopoly on rule-making or the enforcement of those very rules. Are gender prejudices regarding which lifestyle generally suits which sex possible in such a society? Of course, they are. This means there is ground for feminism; in other words, the question is at least not meaningless.
Theoretically, one can easily imagine a situation where the collapse of the institution of the state leads to the triumph of hardcore paleolibertarians building their own contractual jurisdictions, where women are denied agency entirely and are considered a type of family property. A woman wants to found her own contractual jurisdiction with different rules? A woman wasn’t given the floor.
However, any attempts to force a conceptual model to work that differs significantly from the real needs of active subjects will face more or less active opposition. First, individual deviants occasionally express doubt that the existing order is the best; then, such cases accumulate, giving birth to a sufficiently formed ideological movement, and then, as the classics of Marxism assure us, the idea takes hold of the masses and becomes a material force.
Of course, bare ideas are not enough; they preferably need economic backing. Slavery is not only immoral but also economically inefficient. Oh, in this specific case it is efficient? Perhaps, but it is still immoral. Similarly, a woman’s opinion should be considered not only because she is an equal human being, but also because it may prove useful. But even if she is a shrew, she is still a human being.
What methods are permissible for promoting feminism under ancap? The same as for any other social movement: PR campaigns, private discrimination, shaming, and similar methods of moral pressure.
To what degree of obsession can feminism go under ancap? Theoretically, to a degree as serious as it is now. But here, again, not only rhetoric but economics are important. Yes, men are potential rapists, but specifically Vasya is a valuable employee. You want him fired? Do his job for the same money. Yes, diversity on the board of directors increases a corporation’s income on average. But if diversity becomes an end in itself, it becomes a cargo cult, and income drops. In short, rhetoric is verified by common sense and is accepted without much discussion if it does not particularly contradict it.
In addition to everything said above, I suggest rereading the chapter Bargaining in the Absence of Government from Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom. Equality turns out to be the Schelling point in the issue of gender rights, and discussions on this topic will inevitably revolve around equality. Therefore, imbalances in gender privileges in one direction or another will always generate serious opposition, while equality itself is quite easy to sell to the public.
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.
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.
Provide a quota for girls? Let me say right away that this nonsense—claiming “we will establish a proper system where selection will be unbiased”—doesn’t work, because at the moment “this selection is also unbiased,” yet they still predominantly take guys, and it is difficult for a girl to get in.
liberal
It is a time of anarchy, capitalism, heat, and summer. A young woman submits an application to an educational institution where they teach effective ways of killing people and destroying material assets as part of organized groups and using various specialized equipment. In essence, this is as ordinary an event as if a girl were applying to an educational institution where they would tell her the history of how people effectively killed people as part of armed groups and so on—that is, a faculty of history.
What interests guide the institution when accepting her application? It expects to make a profit. What ways does it have to profit from educating students in the absence of state funding (due to the absence of the state)? There are two main ways. First, trading in knowledge—that is, educating for money anyone who is willing to pay. Second, trading in prestige—that is, implementing a strict selection process, providing the most effective knowledge and skills, and hoping that graduates will be maximally successful in life and then, out of gratitude, contribute to the endowment fund of their beloved university. The education itself might even be free, because the university here effectively acts as a venture capital fund.
If the military university in question makes money by selling knowledge, the girl has no problems. She pays—she receives what she bought. But if the university considers itself prestigious, then the girl has a chance of encountering disproportionately serious difficulties right at the admission stage.
Let’s start with the fact that historically, the army is a male brotherhood, and the entry of women into it often dealt a blow to the prestige of the army (historian Martin van Creveld talks about this interestingly in his book Transformation of War, I highly recommend it). We do not know to what extent patriarchal snobs will form the core of organized armed formations under ancap conditions, and how fundamental it will be for them that women not only do not enter the army, but do not even study military science. I find this unlikely, simply because trends have changed, inclusivity is in fashion, and work in the army looks less and less like a brutal slugfest and more and more like working in a delivery service or other logistics businesses.
Secondly, the army still places significant physical fitness requirements on soldiers, including those related to lifting heavy weights and other disciplines in which women are relatively weak simply by virtue of their constitution. Theoretically, this should not become an obstacle to university admission, as it should, at worst, only narrow the range of available specializations. However, if physical training turns out to be one of the admission criteria at the university, then our hypothetical applicant faces obvious, though surmountable, difficulties.
So your fears are quite justified; it is unlikely that it will be much easier for girls to become specialists in the military sphere under ancap. Then again, this sphere itself does not look particularly promising, so it’s not like anyone really wanted it that much.
Yesterday, I read the tragic news that US President Donald Trump had his Twitch disabled, and Stefan Molyneux, whom I translate, had his YouTube disabled. After all, what a mess this creates—our opponents will say—here you are, wanting to rid us of the state, after which power will pass to mega-corporations; state censorship can at least be defeated democratically, but what can be opposed against the whims of a corporation owner? You say that the market and the institution of reputation will work against this, but the owners of media platforms don’t give a damn about their reputation in the eyes of their ideological enemies, and they only get more money because they fight those they position as a global evil.
Furthermore, they continue, you say that private discrimination will lead to the emergence of alternative platforms that will serve those who were discriminated against by others. But Twitter banned people for Nazi views, and indeed, an independent platform called Gab was created in opposition to it, where anyone could speak without any censorship, and what happened? It is being disconnected from payment systems. How do you like this triumph of ostracism and private discrimination, gentlemen ancaps?
At the same time, it is hard not to notice that this case differs greatly from the corporate wars depicted in caricatures of ancap. For instance, in the most famous parodic description of anarcho-capitalism, the subject is a war between mega-corporations McDonald’s and Burger King for market share—serious business sharks seeking only money.
In our world, however, the enmity of corporations toward customers is not about money, or at least not directly about money—but about ideology. What introduces such a strange correction? It is not hard to guess—it is the state.
In a free market, you get the maximum number of customers when you start satisfying them better than your competitor, but in a state, you have an additional powerful option—to ban the competitor. However, in a democracy, you cannot simply declare that this company should be given a tax break because it feeds the ruling party, and that one should be banned because it feeds the opposition. Instead, you can declare that the competitors are evil incarnate, literally Hitler, and a hundred other epithets—and therefore they deserve shame, condemnation, censorship, and ostracism. The state distorts market incentives. Always. From the towers of high theory, this may look like harmless private discrimination, but from the ground, it is perfectly clear that we are dealing with good old political struggle.
The market by itself does not defeat the state, only in combination with an ideology that asserts the values of individual freedom. Otherwise, it leads a subjugated existence, being over-regulated by those in power and subjected to arbitrary interventions under the guise of morality, behind which political reasons often stand.
Therefore, the recipe remains the same: defending the values of freedom, promoting them, and constantly searching for new bypasses that are, in principle, not subject to external dictate. And after mega-corporations protected by the state, corporations under ancap will seem to you like innocent lambs.
And we’ll all feel great when Money comes marching home…
Under a state, practically no one ever jams signals from radio stations or telephone towers, because the perpetrator would be found instantly (this is a very simple task) and then forcibly compelled to pay fines, compensation, etc. (it is difficult to deny that this is fair).
Under ancap, however, such actions by this perpetrator would essentially not violate the NAP, would not infringe on someone else’s property, etc., which means, logically, they would not face punishment. But that is surely unfair.
Anonymous question (accompanied by a donation in the amount of 0.00047976 BTC)
As it happens, I have already answered a very similar question in great detail regarding how property rights to radio frequency bands are established under ancap, so first, please read that answer, and we will continue the discussion.
Having analyzed the principle of using radio frequency bands, I stated that in an economic sense, this is a scarce resource, and therefore it can be converted into property. Moreover, as you yourself note, the violation of property rights (unauthorized use of a reserved band) is quite easily recorded. In an ancap environment—that is, a developed market decentralized legal order—such disputes are easily taken to court. The grounds for filing a lawsuit are obvious: communication collisions lead to quite measurable losses, all logs are kept, so the damage can be calculated with very high precision.
Under the dominance of the state, it happens frequently that, for example, security forces jam communications in a certain area, and usually, these are states of a sufficiently authoritarian nature that they wouldn’t even bother with the issue of compensation for damages. Nevertheless, even under a state, there are precedents for the judicial protection of the right to use radio waves. For instance, a year ago, by a court decision in Sudan, the plaintiff’s access to mobile internet was restored, after the military junta had previously disconnected the entire country. Thus, if it is sometimes possible to restore property rights even under conditions of weak protection, then under ancap, where much more attention is paid to such things, similar problems would be extremely rare.
Lawyer Abdelazim Hassan guarantees: the right to use radio waves is respected even in Africa, let alone under ancap
Ancap is a free, unregulated market. That is, any decisions within ancap are made voluntarily and for mutual benefit. Now let’s look at who cares about demographics under ancap.
First, there are producers of goods and services. They are interested in increasing demand, and specifically, in increasing demand for children’s goods. Children are a very capacity-rich market because they need special nutrition, they quickly outgrow clothes, quickly change their preferences in toys, their safe outings require specially designed spaces, they need to be educated, treated, and so on. So I will receive various tempting offers, from “Today in our store we have a tasting of baby food, be sure to try it and see that your child would be satisfied” to “Planning a tour? Special group discounts for families with children!” I will be shown movies and clips on the internet praising the joys of motherhood. In general, I will constantly feel that with a child, I will be a welcome member of society.
Second, there is me. If I know that my relationship with my child concerns only the two of us, then I will have no fears that I will be deprived of parental rights over some nonsense that bothers neither me nor the child. If I know that people will be happy to sell me any technically possible product or service, from ectogenesis to caring for the child while I feel the urge to take a break from them—then I will have no fears that I will be alone in the face of many accidents, because specialists will help me deal with all the unpleasant chores. So, in essence, the only things separating me from having a child will be money and desire.
But at the same time, if I am too lazy to earn good money, too carefree to save anything or use contraception during sex, and too squeamish to care for an infant—then at least I will know that parental rights to a newborn can be profitably sold to those who, for some reason, have problems having their own child. So it will be completely unnecessary for me to have an abortion, especially if the process of carrying the child is easy enough and doesn’t stress me too much.
From this, it can be concluded that under ancap, the birth rate will be higher than in miserable countries with powerful juvenile justice and a heap of regulations related to children. But lower than in traditionalist cesspools where a woman is property, and if her purpose is to give birth, then go, fulfill your purpose and don’t complain. In short, there will be as many children as those who decided to raise a child need, and whether reproduction ends up expanded or the human population declines in certain periods—I have no idea, it’s not my business.
By the way, here is another category of consumers ready to raise children
The question is long, so I will break it into parts.
1) Will there be a single emergency number? Remembering a bunch of three-digit numbers is difficult, but it is also difficult to reach a consensus, given that there will likely be many mobile operators seeking only their own profit, and moreover, they will be limited very little in a stateless society.
Providing a simplified interface to facilitate access to a multitude of complex and diverse services is a high-demand task. On one hand, it is more convenient for users to remember one single most convenient method of communication—provided, of course, that the intermediary works quickly and reliably. On the other hand, it is also convenient for service providers for someone to take on the trouble of finding out all the necessary details from the client and issuing the assignment in a formalized form, without emotions and scandals. In this way, they save on the call center, and therefore it is more profitable for them to pay for their connection to an aggregator.
Most likely, there will also be several aggregators. One might hold, for example, the number 911. A second provides a mobile application in which placing an order is even more convenient than by phone; most of the information is entered from the screen, and only non-formalizable details are communicated by voice. A third, say, sells a bracelet with a single emergency button, or one that reacts automatically to spikes in heart rate and blood pressure. As for some other mechanisms for ordering services, it is difficult for me to even imagine them now; let the market offer and the people try.
2) What happens if the owner of a territory refuses access to rescuers? It is their territory, and entering it without consent would be a direct violation of the NAP.
In general, everything depends on who called the rescuers and why, without ensuring their access to the rescue object, and whether the contract provides for the rescuers’ obligation to ensure this access themselves.
2.1 For example, a person falls ill with a dangerous and severe disease, but their religious, obscurantist relatives recognize only folk healing methods and refuse to let a medical team into the house.
If a person needs medical assistance but third parties are holding them on their territory and preventing them from receiving help, then that person should call not only doctors but also the police. Or simply state the circumstances via the aforementioned single phone number, and then the aggregator will attract specialists to solve the described problem. Blood relation is not an indulgence for a criminal, and the fact that they are in their own home is not either. Holding a person against their will is kidnapping.
2.2 I came to a party with alcohol and drugs to have fun, but at the height of it, I—a thin and weak youth unable to protect myself—had the misfortune of being in one room with a drunk host who began to threaten me with a knife or a gun over some minor quarrel. Or the same thing, but instead of the host, one of the drunk guests is threatening me, and the host himself is passed out and by definition cannot give consent for police officers to enter.
It is the same here. A person has the right to call for help wherever they are, and the costs of ensuring access to the object of assistance can be compensated later. You simply pay the sobered-up host for a new door to replace the one that was broken down.
2.3 Something catches fire on a person’s territory, but they hope too much to extinguish the fire themselves and refuse to let firefighters in, despite the fact that they store flammable and/or explosive substances—meaning that if they do not trust the professionals, then besides their own house, all surrounding buildings belonging to other people will catch fire or blow up.
Since the firefighters have already arrived, it means their work has been paid for; all that remains is to let them do it. Even if their task is to save neighboring houses and the burning object is not their area of responsibility, they will be forced to extinguish the fire there as well to protect the object that is important to them. Why might they be stopped?
First, if it is a high-hazard facility, it is possible that it needs to be extinguished differently; a regular fire crew may not have the necessary tools, while the owner of the facility does. Then it is quite logical for them to politely ask the outside crew to stay away and ensure the surroundings do not catch fire, while a specialized team arrives. I am not technically proficient enough to describe the specifics, but everyone understands firefighting at the level of “do not put out live wiring with water”; there are surely other nuances.
Second, the owner of the burning object wants it to burn down completely to hide something important.
Third, they are overconfident and believe they can extinguish the fire themselves with less collateral damage to the object.
Who makes the decision on whether to intrude on the territory to extinguish the fire? The firefighters, of course. If they decide to intrude without the owner’s consent, the owner can subsequently sue them. If the owner interferes with their intrusion and as a result neighboring houses are damaged, their owners can sue the owner. If the firefighters do not dare to charge in with axes and hooks, then they are clear.
3) How will they deal with schoolchildren, drunk and mentally ill people, or simply ill-wishers making deliberately false calls, or simply uselessly occupying the line, saying stupid things and insulting the operator, if it is not always possible to track them down even now, and blocking numbers is too cruel since even they might need real help from rescuers? Would it be fair to dump all the costs on those who can be identified, or to block the ability to call from other regions?
It is unlikely that under ancap DDOS attacks will be fought any differently than they are now. If there is a possibility to find the attacker using available means—they are found and held accountable. If not, they simply increase the channel capacity and filter out false messages. Naturally, there will be attempts to charge the found culprits for maximally inflated costs, but a court is an adversarial procedure, so the amount of compensation will be determined individually in each specific case. If the court issues an absurdly large fine that incorporates losses from many attacks to which the found culprit was not involved, then this may cause dissatisfaction among people who learn about it. This carries the risk that attacks will only intensify, as the risk of being caught is quite small, so excessive severity is also disadvantageous for the companies suffering from such hooliganism.
Doctor Hannibal Lecter (question accompanied by a donation of 250 rubles)
Voluntary cannibalism is formally very similar to euthanasia, which I already wrote a post about. The exact same considerations apply here: a person has the full right to dispose of their own body, as long as they do not cause harm to others in the process. Thus, the main difficulty here would also be to convince everyone that the instruction to kill and eat oneself is given voluntarily and with full awareness of the consequences.
Of course, even if everything is legally handled completely cleanly, there will be those who condemn this deal from a moral standpoint. With equal success, they could condemn the already mentioned euthanasia, the production of fur coats, a laboratory developing GMOs, a porn studio, or, say, a coffee shop.
As long as moralists use means of moral pressure such as angry social media posts, picketing the home of the cannibal or their place of work — they are within their rights to non-violently ruin the life of someone who, in their opinion, deserves it and should abandon their harmful inclinations. In response, the cannibal can create a society of cannibals, push cannibal memes, music, Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” and other cultural elements, and strive to make such a way of leaving life a respectable tradition that does not cause any unhealthy hype.
– How do you plan to die? – In my own bed, surrounded by weeping grandchildren. – That’s just philistinism! I, for one, want three charming girls to slit my veins and joyfully splash in my blood, while I look at them and smile. And when I die, they will prepare many exquisite dishes from me and hold a festive feast. – Oh, you’re such a romantic!
Armin Meiwes, a guy with peculiar ideas about romance
