Тег: Ancap

A question about stock exchanges

Investments and exchanges are the foundation of the entire market economy today. Essentially, in the absence of a regulator in the form of the state, traders would be able to gain virtually unlimited power: they could inflate prices or, conversely, crash them to zero, destroy some companies and promote others. So the question is: how will exchanges work in ancap? What alternative will be offered to investors instead of the stock exchange in the event of its liquidation? How can the dominance of traders over the market be prevented?

Muller

The order book is, in fact, the quintessence of the free market. Pure supply and demand, stripped of any rhetorical fluff. It is not for nothing that the foundations of Austrian economic theory were laid by a stock market observer. So, of course, in a free market economy, the role of exchanges will only strengthen.

What are the main dangers facing an investor on the exchange?

First, these are possible exchange manipulations.

In the world of stock exchanges, blatant manipulations have become a great rarity because they care about their reputation. If we encounter any restrictions from trading platforms, these are usually requirements of external regulators—for example, regarding the suspension of trading in a situation of market panic. I do not know which exchanges companies will prefer for listing their shares—those that provide for an automatic stop of trading during price spikes, or those that guarantee continuity. Let the consumer choose.

In the world of cryptocurrency exchanges, attempts to protect against exchange manipulations led to the emergence of demand for decentralized platforms, where you cannot fake volumes. I would not be surprised if over time stock exchanges are also pushed aside when crypto-tokens begin to take the place of company shares.

Secondly, possible insider manipulations.

This is, in fact, a problem not of the exchanges, but of the companies that are traded on them. Even now, private companies are taking measures to prevent such machinations—through non-disclosure agreements for insider information that provide for serious payments for their violation, as well as through moratoriums on trading company shares for its employees in periods shortly before the publication of regular reports. The absence of such measures will simply be taken into account in the share price of specific companies as an additional risk factor.

Thirdly, market maker manipulations—traders who have access to very large capitals. This is the factor you are writing about.

Here, one can only say one thing: if you want to be indifferent to such manipulations—simply do not take loans secured by shares. Then you will not have to dump shares due to a margin call if someone temporarily crashes the price. No market maker is capable of completely zeroing out the shares of a prosperous company: no matter what panic rumors he spreads, no matter what volumes of shares he dumps onto the market, if you simply forget about your stake for a month or two, you will lose nothing; the price will return over time, it’s just that some will sell securities during this time and some will buy. It’s not even a fact that the trader who started all this will necessarily profit. He is not the only one—a large movement will attract others, and they will play it their own way.

So, there is no question of trader dominance in a developed market. This is simply their habitat. The more of them there are, the better the life of the companies traded in this market, and the harder it is for traders to manipulate the price of assets.

In general, exchanges are simply a tool through which it is convenient for a seller and a buyer to find each other. This is not some self-sufficient entity. If the tool works correctly, it will not cause damage to real companies in itself.

Consultations were used in the response from Srpski, as a gesture of gratitude he asked to reference his channel “Serbian Divergent”.

Mathematics Guarding Libertarianism: Brief Conclusions from the Article

Since I have started talking about experimental confirmations of the libertarian doctrine, it is worth mentioning mathematical modeling as a way of verifying claims.

I recently read a very good article on Freedom Pride about how a model was built with fairly realistic assumptions, and depending on the input data, it demonstrated what works better: contractual jurisdictions, democracy, or ancap.

The point of modeling is to see how the costs for members of society decrease depending on what mechanisms they have for adapting to and influencing society.

The conclusions in the article are written in rather cumbersome language, so I will translate them for myself in simpler terms.

  1. Democracy is a poor mechanism for optimizing one’s costs of existing in a society. Here, I cannot help but refer to my own longread on the subject.
  2. Instead of seeking changes through democratic mechanisms, it is much more reliable to reduce costs by voting with your feet—leaving the society that does not suit you and moving to one that does.
  3. The lower the relative costs of financing public goods, the more advantageous ancap is. The higher they are, the more advantageous contractual jurisdictions are. And for this last conclusion, I am very grateful to the authors of the article: they claim this is an argument for CJ, but for me, it means that as technical progress advances, ancap will become increasingly advantageous.

Transhumanists doubt ancap

My post from the day before yesterday was reposted in a transhumanist channel, where they also posted a couple of remarks:

1. Transhumanism is closely linked to scientific and technological progress, and that requires huge financial injections; even states have problems with this, as sufficient funds for science are often not found, and under ancap, where everything will be decentralized, it could become even worse (I may be wrong, I am not as familiar with ancap ideas as the ancaps themselves), even corporations might lack funds, especially considering their drive to maximize profit. Building things like the LHC could be impossible under ancap, given the required funds and, essentially, the lack of profitability. And there wouldn’t be enough philanthropists for such scales. However, considering that under ancap, capitalists will gain access to the resources previously owned by states, this should give them more opportunities, although it’s still not a fact that it will be enough. 

Here I want, firstly, to refer to my old post about funding fundamental science under ancap, and secondly, to point out that transhumanism does not need things like the LHC: research in biotechnology, bioinformatics, and other transhumanist agendas does not require a super-concentration of resources on a single mega-project, which means that funding can be decentralized, gradual, and quickly transition from the fundamental science stage to the applied stage, with rapid implementation of results in business. As far as I know, the most expensive research in this field was the sequencing of the human genome; it was carried out worldwide for many years by numerous laboratories without disrupting current scientific activities, and this is still much simpler than building some unimaginably complex installation in one place.

2. Regarding cyberpunk, that is incorrect. Cyberpunk is not tied to the fact of the existence of states; moreover, cyberpunk often depicts states as having either disappeared or lost all power, with corporations taking their place. And it is under ancap that a cyberpunk scenario of the world being governed by corporations is more than likely. One could even say that cyberpunk often captures precisely the world of anarcho-capitalism.

I am proceeding from Oppenheimer’s definition of the state, that is, an organization that uses systematic, regular, legalized, and continuously applied “political methods” to extract wealth from the producing society. Cyberpunk corporations differ from corporations in current reality in that they are states in the Oppenheimer sense, they are simply extraterritorial. This system differs from anarcho-capitalism precisely by the legality of political methods, whereas under ancap they are marginal.

Political methods are not needed, buddy

Is it worth building ancap if it is not a fact that it will work?

And with transhumanism, everything will be fucking great.
It will happen soon, we just have to wait!!!
Everything will be possible there, everything will be a blast,
There, we probably won’t have to die at all.

…And justice for all

Under a state, you’ll be fucking exhausted waiting for transhumanism, but under ancap, it really will happen soon. There is a market demand for transhumanism, but state regulations slow its arrival. Judge for yourself: even harmless genetically modified plants are banned in a whole number of countries, let alone the modification of the human genome?

Again, transhumanism will open up cosmic expansion for humans, and it’s not so easy to draw state borders in space. This is also a strong argument for the state in favor of banning research into adapting humans to extraterrestrial conditions.

In short, it’s possible to imagine ancap without transhumanism, but transhumanism without ancap—only in cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is exactly that kind of fiction where the main fantastic assumption is the preservation of the state upon the arrival of transhumanism. Granted, in most examples of the genre, these are no longer territorial states, but a cockroach-like system of extraterritorial protection rackets, but their essence doesn’t change much.

As for a society where there is no need to die, I have no particular fears. In essence, the only institution that would wither away in such a society is inheritance. And we didn’t really want it anyway. On the other hand, the individual planning horizon could grow significantly, and that is always a sign of a healthy and prosperous society.

How will accidents be resolved in ancap? For example, while defending myself from a bandit, I accidentally hit my neighbor and killed him with my automatic rifle.

анонимный вопрос

In such murky situations, it always makes sense to start by identifying the circle of interested parties: representatives of the deceased neighbor, representatives of the deceased bandits, surviving gang members, and perhaps other persons whose property was also at risk in this shootout. Then, the picture of what happened is reconstructed, making it clear whether you acted in collusion with the bandits, the extent of each gang member’s involvement, how the neighbor happened to end up in the line of fire, how you happened to hit him, and who ultimately suffered what property damage.

Next, the claims of the various parties in the proceedings against each other are outlined, the court issues verdicts on the validity of these claims, and then bargaining ensues until it is fixed who owes whom and how much. The court essentially becomes the moderator of this complex dispute, which, although it has the deciding vote, is interested in ensuring that, upon the conclusion of the dispute, no mutual claims remain if possible.

It is clear that in most such cases, the person who accidentally shot an innocent bystander will incur significant costs. It is clear that these costs can be partially offset by the attacker’s assets. It is clear that in a situation where the killed neighbor turned out to be of absolutely no interest to anyone, everyone will simply be very upset by such a fuck-up, and the matter may be reduced to ritual sacrifices like “lighting a candle for the repose of the soul every week and paying for commemorative prayers for ten years.” Feeling guilt for a misfortune that one inadvertently caused is normal for a human, and the market will certainly provide ways to make amends, as long as there is an obvious demand for such things.

A strange way for atheists to recover costs, even in the case where the subject to whom they are being paid is already gone.

Unemployment and Ancap

What should be done about the destruction of low-skilled jobs? Should a person invest their time in acquiring professions that are more difficult to master? Will there be enough positions, given that high-skilled work is always more limited? Unemployment will increase thefts; people can be imprisoned for violating the law, but this can break them, and “re-education” is even more pointless, as the theft is forced.

Maksim Barbukhin

Alex Murin answers

First of all, let’s figure out which jobs are disappearing and where? And to what extent automation will affect all layers of life. Jobs are disappearing in cities at large-scale production facilities. Only a large entrepreneur can afford production innovations. Most entrepreneurs used manual labor and continue to do so. A baker bakes bread, a janitor sweeps the yard, a clerk sits in a kiosk. For the most part, the majority of jobs are created by small entrepreneurs who do not strive for and cannot fully automate the production process. If there were no state with a heap of licenses, taxes, fees, and inspections, small businesses would not have the barriers that exist now. This means everything would be regulated by supply and demand. If demand is higher, a person will not have to give half of their income to the state, which would create public goods. Thus, with the development of small business, loaders and salesclerks will not disappear; there will be many farmers, small production sites baking bread, making things from natural products produced by local farmers. One should not expect global automation in this sector.

Another important point is the mastery of new professions. We master many things naturally. If the computer was a rarity in the 90s and required professional education to operate, now there is one in every home, and a child can perform basic work like typing text. Learning happens naturally. Those who find it difficult will, of course, remain outsiders. Those who want to improve will not engage in simply getting pieces of paper and sitting through hours of classes that are unnecessary for mastering a specialty; they will study what they will actually be working with. Many specialties can be mastered using modern teaching methods in a much shorter time than five years on a university bench.

Regarding “whether there will be enough positions” — that is a separate question. The number of accountants, secretaries, clerks, and document management specialists will be significantly reduced. The administrations of jurisdictions and municipalities are unlikely to be able to afford to maintain a huge staff and divide responsibilities as is done now. Electronic document management is already the modern reality. States do not want to use many modern solutions because they would have to cut a vast number of municipal employees. And there would be no one to look after the secretary of the director of the department of internal policy, as the department itself would likely not exist. What should all these people do? Learn in-demand specialties, start a small business. Everyone knows how to bake pancakes or pies, grow potatoes and cabbage. This is a rather harsh solution, but if it is not accepted, then incomes will have to be forcibly taken from everyone else to save the lifestyle of officials. And yes, professions that simply do not fit into the modern world will be eliminated. For example, we no longer need telephone operators, radio operators, or coachmen. But all these people did not end up without work.

Who will solve the problem of the unemployed? The free market. Even now, there are staffing agencies that offer a list of in-demand vacancies for a fee. They can also assist in negotiations and organizing meetings with employers. In essence, the Employment Center is a state staffing agency. And its services are not provided for free. We pay for its activities through our taxes. Everyone together—those who go there once a year and those who do not even know the address of the institution. Who will pay unemployment benefits? Private funds. But not just money for the maintenance of so-called professional unemployed persons, but for those who genuinely want to retrain and start their own business or find a new job. Where will the funds get the money? From those who need workers. Pay the fund, and they will find and train people for you. Moreover, not in philosophy, ancient literature, or theology, but in sausage production, potato growing, and the specialties that a specific employer needs. But again, not everything is so smooth. A social phenomenon such as the “professional unemployed” will disappear. At a state exchange, one can receive a meager benefit for a long time, then work a little, quit, and receive it again. Naturally, any private entity will send such a client to seek help elsewhere.

And another important point: if currently all free land is in municipal or regional ownership, then without the state, anyone can occupy a plot that no one claims. Consequently, a person will be able to legally live by subsistence farming, creating associations to make it easier to cultivate the land, without paying duties or taxes.

The question regarding theft is complex. But so-called forced theft does not exist. Theft is, in any case, a crime against property. Whether a person was starving or stole out of a love for art—they are still a thief. An honest person can ask for or take something unnecessary, thrown away, or that grows naturally. So, the arrest of thieves is a perfectly natural thing. Such people must either be isolated or re-educated. If a person finds themselves in a jurisdiction where everything is built on high technology and cannot find work, they can move to an agricultural community and live there. Most often, there are no extra hands in a village. If they do not do this voluntarily, they will end up in prison, which will send them to such a community so they can earn their keep, as well as pay for the services of the court, escorting, and monitoring. It is better to leave voluntarily.

And one more point regarding “extra people.” City dwellers prefer not to have many children. Most often, middle-class families in cities have 1-2 children, and the population is declining or struggling to maintain its size. Conversely, in developed agrarian settlements, there are many children. And work is found for everyone. Now, the state, through population control programs, is trying to break the natural course of events. Large families in cities are provided with social housing and payments. At the same time, the state cannot accurately account for the reduction in jobs in industrial cities. Precisely because of the mistakes of officials, we are forced first to pay taxes for benefits to large families, and then pay taxes for benefits to the unemployed. Market mechanisms could redistribute these people to places where they would find an opportunity to earn a living or grow their own food.

As they say, I know porn that started this way

How to achieve ancap if states, and not ancap, developed from the state of nature?

It is clear that all states cannot be destroyed overnight, but then how? What should guarantee the stability of ancap?

анонимный вопрос

States evolved from a state of nature because plunder proved more profitable than non-violent methods of enrichment. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then; people are becoming wealthier, as a result of which greed for preservation becomes more characteristic for them than greed for acquisition. That is, not the desire to snatch what belongs to others, but the strive to preserve one’s own. If one attempts to snatch what belongs to others, fraud becomes preferable to direct violence.

So the path to ancap is quite clear: technological progress, an increase in labor productivity, the emergence of free market tools that do not require centralized trusted intermediaries—and on one hand, we will have less and less moral justification for the forced redistribution of resources, and on the other—less and less technical feasibility for it.

Of course, the scenario where “all states disappeared at once” is quite strange; it is even difficult for me to imagine how that could happen without reptilians. The foundations of the state will be eroded gradually, as is actually happening now. It is difficult to say exactly which path humanity will take to reach ancap. The direct and clear path of minarchists, using ordinary tools of political reform? Progressive offshoring with a transition to panarchy? Harsh agorism with a heavy mix of crypto-anarchism? Seasteading and other Liberlands—that is, the construction of anarcho-capitalism through the occupation of no-man’s lands, with subsequent replication of the experience?

Any of these paths would satisfy me; there are no fundamental, insoluble disagreements between the different routes, for the state lives in people’s minds, and exactly how to expel it from there is, in many ways, a matter of taste.

What guarantees the stability of ancap? Only economics. The less profitable plunder is compared to non-violent methods, the lower the probability of the return of systemic plunder, i.e., the state. In the form of marginal practices, it will not pose a serious danger.

Economics and rhetoric. Interest and morality. Being and consciousness. These are mutually influencing things. Based on bare economic incentives, the state will not collapse for a long time and will persist simply by virtue of tradition. Based on bare rhetoric, the abolition of the state is unlikely to be stable: a new lucky plunderer will come and declare an era of prosperity under the shadow of the paternal care of the great steersman. In short, both factors are important.

Mao is perceived by us as a funny ancient deity, but what if I posted a picture of Stalin? Leaders are attractive…

Parasite or symbiont?

Today I was in Bangkok, at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. There is nothing to do there: the Buddha is small, photography is forbidden, talking is forbidden; you can only stand and think about the meaning of all existence. That is what I did. I have never been into meditation, so I don’t know how similar this was to it, but at some point, I suddenly grasped the entire beautiful and amazing picture of spontaneous orders—how the simplest rules followed by people give rise to the most complex and exquisitely coordinated mechanisms of human interaction.

The state was there too, and it also appeared in the form of something very similar to spontaneous orders. After all, it also grows out of people following fairly simple and uniform rules, but it forms the most complex and sophisticated mechanisms of robbery and deception. There were no total clichés in this revelation, such as identifying society and the state as yin and yang, eternally struggling and interpenetrating; rather, the state became increasingly indistinguishable from society.

Anyway, then I left the temple, shook myself off a bit, and began to reflect in the usual European way.

Zolotoryov defines spontaneous orders as the stable result of people observing simple rules, which is formed unintentionally and is useful for the members of society. The word “useful” in this definition smells of voluntarism, and it would be better to do without it. The state is also formed from people observing simple rules, and for some time now, the result of their observance has also become quite stable. What are these rules?

Early states were formed by following the rule “take your neighbor as an accomplice and rob the stranger.” Such states, as Zolotoryov correctly notes, usually disappeared without a trace shortly after the death of the founder, and people returned to the familiar stateless society.

Then, having established themselves where people had nowhere to flee, states mutated—that is, basically, the rule that formed them began to change. Now it became this: “there is a special breed of shepherds; they have the right to eat the sheep, but in exchange, they are destined to protect them from wolves.” To be more precise, that is how I phrased the ideological justification for the new type of state, but the rule became something like: “if you feel you have the strength to lead the herd, become the shepherd, and it is yours.”

This is an extremely stable construction that still works perfectly in paternalistic societies, and especially vividly in Thailand, where the authority of the royal power is very great, criticism of the king is unthinkable, and yet, regarding each king, people proudly tell not of what lands he annexed or how many captives participated in his triumph, but how many temples, universities, and bridges he built.

But liberal ideas ripened in European society, and the state mutated again—that is, the rule whose observance forms the new type of state changed once more. Now it sounds roughly like this: “if you can convince a sucker that you know how things should be done, then lead them.”

So here it is. The consistent observance of this rule should lead to a state that is exclusively herbivorous and, generally, harmless, because if you don’t convince the sucker that you know how things should be done, you will have to leave them alone. And if the sucker is convinced by someone else, then they are that person’s cash cow. In other words, such a rule should produce panarchy, which has been mentioned several times on this channel.

It’s just that from the time of the French Revolution until roughly the Cuban Revolution, a strange intermediate version of the rule worked: “if you have convinced enough suckers that you know how things should be done, then take them as accomplices and rob everyone as best you can.” Obviously, the resulting state turns out to be very unstable: suckers make poor accomplices, and they lose faith quite quickly—while they have to be paid an enormous amount for their complicity in the robbery. This gave rise to the total debt crisis of modern democracies, constant popular unrest over trifles that would have been completely unnoticed by the subjects of a shepherd-type state, and other symptoms of malaise.

Well, the next mutation of the state-forming idea after panarchy should logically be (okay, not logically, but in my revelation, it is exactly so) a formulation like this: “don’t treat people like suckers, and you will be able to sell them more.” And that, kids, is ancap.

Om!

How the Moscow Metro would work under ancap, and what would happen if someone bought all the stations? After all, competition would become impossible

анонимный вопрос

I’ll start from a distance and first recommend a recent video by Grigory Bazhenov, where he opposes authoritarian urbanists and, in particular, explains the main purpose of a city — the opportunity to earn money.

Of course, historically, the city often served as a fortress as well. But the ability to protect wealth from an external plunderer largely echoes the ability to become wealthy in the first place. If people didn’t gather in one place and accumulate assets, they wouldn’t be able to afford the construction of such convenient urban infrastructure as protective structures, nor would there be a great need for it — individual caches in the forest or migrating with herds to secluded areas would have prevailed. So, the ability to accumulate wealth by gathering in a compact, large crowd is primary.

All the conveniences that the city provides for people adapt to its main function. And if this is done poorly (for example, if the city is managed centrally and hinders people from earning), the city withers, losing the competitive race to alternatives. This also applies to the organization of urban transport.

The more mobile a city resident is, the more choices of workplaces they have, the better the place they find on average, and the wealthier they become. As a result, they gain the ability to create solvent demand for various conveniences, including even greater mobility. For the most part, it doesn’t matter what the ownership structure is in different companies providing transport services, as long as they don’t have the power to forcibly dictate their rules to competitors or consumers. In other words, properly organized transport can belong to anyone, except for the institution that creates the rules.

So in the Moscow metro, each line could have its own owner, or each station, or separate owners for stations, tunnels, and depots, and separate owners for the trains. In principle, the metro as a whole could have a single owner, and even in this case, it would continue to operate in a competitive market; its competition consists of all alternative ways to get from point to point within the city. But even if the entire city with all its streets, houses, and transport belongs to a single owner, the alternative to using urban transport becomes video communication or moving elsewhere. After all, a city is first and foremost a place where one can earn more money than outside the city, and only then is there all sorts of infrastructure for spending leisure time together in large crowds. If you can earn enough money for your needs elsewhere, the city no longer holds you as strongly.

A question about hitmen

As I understand it, it is the hitman, not the client, who exits the non-aggression pact, and therefore the perpetrator should be the one to face punishment. But in the murder of Nemtsov (and other political murders), should the clients really be exempt from responsibility?

анонимный вопрос

In order to exit a contract, one must first enter into a contract, so the very concept of a non-aggression pact is as dubious as, say, the concept of a social contract for the establishment of a government. One can only state that people are generally not inclined to kill each other without reason, as if they had agreed upon it, or that people generally behave toward the government as if this institution acts on their behalf. In reality, people are simply inclined to adhere to the status quo and view its violation with suspicion.

States are organizations that systematically exercise aggressive violence, so in the current worldview, political murders are precisely part of the status quo for many people, which means it is an ancient and venerable tradition: a state representative has the right to order a killing, and the perpetrator must follow orders, and for this, the court will treat them with understanding. Therefore, of course, in a deeply etatist society, where it is not difficult but quite easy to find a perpetrator of a political murder on behalf of the state, placing all responsibility on the perpetrator signifies a lack of understanding of the foundations of the world order by the person doing so.

So it is more correct, until proven otherwise, to view murders in the interests of political groups as a common division of labor, where there is a client, a manager, and hired workers; all of them are to some extent involved in performing the work, and all of them to some extent bear responsibility for the result, whether it be the success of the operation or a trial of its participants.

Now, under ancap, should a contract killing occur, it is conversely more appropriate by default to assume, until proven otherwise, that the perpetrator bears full responsibility, since it is he who makes the decision based on his own personal moral convictions. If, during the investigation, a serious economic dependence on the client emerges, or hostages, or some other crap where not only the reward for successful work but also serious sanctions in case of refusal to execute the order depend on the client—then it would be appropriate to hold the client responsible, as if it were the ancient wild era of total etatism.

The vertical is a double-edged sword.