Тег: Ancap

Hi, I wanted to find out how quality control will work (so as not to eat poisoned food, for example) under ancap?

анонимный вопрос

At the moment, in the field of product quality control, as in everywhere where the state controls something, there is more of a security theater than actual protection. Seeing a certificate from yet another “blah-blah-oversight” body stating that a product has passed inspection, the end consumer never knows: perhaps the product really was thoroughly checked, perhaps it was checked half-heartedly, perhaps the certificate was forged, or perhaps it was bought. The reputation of the certifying body may be as low as possible, but the manufacturer will still be obliged to crawl to them and obtain the paperwork if they operate legally. Thus, compulsory state quality certification always degenerates quite quickly into a fiction, which, however, costs some money, and the consumer will pay that money in full.

In the absence of compulsory quality control, the customer initially has no trust in the product manufacturer. What does this lead to? The most elementary quality check, which instantly arises in any bazaar: the consumer tastes the product before buying. This is a phenomenon of a relatively poor market, where no more expensive methods of control are affordable for either the seller or the buyer.

As prosperity grows and more complex goods appear, demand arises for more sophisticated control, such as chemical analysis and other instrumental research. What does “demand arises” mean? People start wondering to what extent the numbers and words on the packaging correspond to the truth. Next, for example, some video blogger (while this is more often television for now, but we are considering pure, unadulterated ancap) conducts a study and sees an increase in audience from its demonstration. Then a store may refer to this study, stating that their product is perfectly fine. In addition, consumer associations and producer associations may appear (it is also not in their interest for someone to slap “sausage” labels on crap and have people think that any sausage is crap), as well as the insurance companies constantly mentioned by ancap theorists—in short, many people will be willing to earn money by satisfying the market demand for product quality verification.

When the marketlet decided

Residents of the “Pravy Bereg” residential complex in Khimki are outraged that the developer deliberately filled the courtyard with old cars to occupy all the parking spaces. As an alternative, people are forced to buy spaces in the underground parking lot, with prices starting from 800K. How can this problem be solved under ancap?

Dmitry

What you described is a variation of the tragedy of the commons, where insufficiently clear property rights lead to a situation where it is profitable for everyone to exploit a shared resource as intensively as possible, leading to its rapid degradation.

As can be easily guessed from the introduction, the simplest remedy lies precisely in a clearer definition of property rights, for which ancap is quite well-suited. Let’s look at the details.

What do we have now? The developer obtains a permit from the municipality to build a house, reaches some agreement with the previous land owners, builds the house, sells apartments and underground parking, but has no right to take ownership of the land; the land under and around the house is the collective property of the residents because that is how the state decreed it.

How can residents who wish to park near the house and do not want to buy expensive underground parking spaces from the developer defend this right in the current situation? They would have to organize a homeowners association (HOA) and grant it the right to establish paid parking near the house, which must be voted for at a general meeting by a certain number of apartment owners holding at least half of the total residential square footage. After that, it would be costly for the developer to occupy the paid courtyard parking with his cars, and he would consider other ways to monetize his unsold property, for example, by renting out the spaces instead of selling them.

The scheme is not bad, but it is organizationally very complex, and as a result of its application, car owners will be forced to shell out for parking rent, which is clearly not what they would want, as it is much more pleasant to use a resource for free.

Under ancap, there is no external regulator requiring that the land under the house belong to the homeowners, and the developer will be interested in keeping it for himself, renting out both the apartments and all types of parking spaces to the residents. Or, as an option, selling the apartments and renting out the parking spaces. Or selling the apartments and the underground parking while renting out the above-ground ones. Or not creating one of the types of parking at all.

Fans of the HOA form would be able to either buy the land and build a house together by pooling funds, or buy apartments from the developer along with the land, should he be so inclined.

One way or another, in the absence of an external regulator acting as a force majeure, people will not have to perform strange and unnatural roundabout maneuvers when their interests can be stated and defended directly.

Maxim Katz’s nightmare…

Если вы пришли сюда по ссылке из других соцсетей, напоминаю, что на мой канал можно подписаться в телеграме, а для обсуждения деятельности канала там же, в телеграме, создан уютный чатик.

How will things stand with documents under ancap?

For example, a passport, a death certificate, and so on. Will they be issued, and if so, by which organization, and if not, what will replace them?

анонимный вопрос

Probably, if an IT specialist were to tell the history of mankind, the whole thing would boil down to who issued certificates to whom and how…

Any communications in a more or less complex society inevitably run into the problem of trust. Information is transferred from node to node via unsecured channels using an unknown number of intermediaries. Natasha Rostova, tripping while stepping out of a carriage, turns into Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol sitting on a branch after a chain of retellings. Lieutenant Kizhe appears out of nowhere. Orwell writes from Spain about how war reports are composed without any link to real events. Chinese generals use the corpses of their own peasants for reporting purposes because it is easier than winning battles against a real enemy. Russian FSB agents repeat the feats of Chinese generals. And all of this is called the Byzantine Generals’ Problem—which, as is not hard to guess, tells us that the Eastern Roman Empire also had some difficulties with data reliability.

The state solves the Byzantine Generals’ Problem by creating cross-verification procedures, duplicating communication channels, and similar measures. Nevertheless, we frequently encounter episodes where a migrant in the EU had fourteen identity documents and received benefits for each, or conversely, a Russian pensioner spent several months proving to the state that he had not died, as written in the documents, and was still entitled to his pension, or Petrov and Boshirov turn out to be Chepiga and Mishkin.

Fortunately, all the technical means to solve this problem under ancap are already available. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto described a mechanism for solving the Byzantine Generals’ Problem through blockchain. A distributed public ledger stores unfalsifiable and indelible records thanks to the greed of miners and the suspicion of network node owners. And even earlier, asymmetric encryption made it possible to solve the specific problem of abandoning trusted intermediaries in data transmission, and now we communicate in secret chats, knowing that even Durov does not have the encryption keys, let alone Comrade Major.

With a competent approach, it is possible to ensure almost complete certainty that digital data will be preserved without distortion and will fall only into the hands of those to whom it is intended, while for everyone else, it will be nothing more than information junk. The trusted intermediary problem arises only at the stage of digitization. Yes, we can be sure that a document is certified by Alice’s signature, but we have no idea whether the signature has been compromised, whether Alice was under duress, and what kickback she received for her signature. So the problem of offline reputation will not go away even under ancap, but at least you will always know for sure that if Alice has certified a document with her signature, you can trust the document to the same extent that you trust Alice in general—both her competence and her ability not to fuck up her private key.

Perhaps the most well-known example of implementing passports and other documents associated by statists with the state, but without the state, is bitnation. States that look benevolently toward minarchism, such as Estonia, are already cooperating with the project, but any private company could do this with equal success.

In the photo: the most famous of the Byzantine generals and the most famous of the Byzantine emperors (the second one is just tagging along)

How are international crimes handled in the case of ancap? For example, carding.

royal_hacker

First, I want to say that the word “ancap” does not go well with the word “international” or the word “crimes,” because “international” is used today as a synonym for “interstate,” and “crime” means a violation of the law, which, again, does not exist under ancap; instead, there are many private rules and preferences that form spontaneous orders. So I will have to translate the question from statist to ancap before I begin to answer.

So, how are property rights violations handled in an anarcho-capitalist society when using global market tools? Let’s take carding as an example.

One of the popular carding business chains today looks roughly like this:
1. Using holes in the security systems of banks and online stores, hackers steal databases of credit card data.
2. Carders buy these databases in parts for further use.
3. A carder uses the stolen credit card data to buy goods from an online store.
4. The goods sent by the store are received by a drop.
5. The drop shares part of the cost of the goods with the carder and sells the product.
6. The carder launders the money received and gets a clean profit.

Don’t think anything strange—all these materials can be Googled in five seconds, and in half an hour you’ll have more knowledge about carding than I managed to acquire 😉

So, the peculiarity of this high-tech criminal business is the developed division of labor, the use of advanced anonymization technologies at every stage, and, accordingly, a rather high cost of catching even one of the chain participants, let alone unraveling the whole thing.

Another feature related to carding is that the cardholder is insured against such fraud through a bank chargeback procedure, and the bank, in turn, passes the costs onto the online store. Thus, the final victims and the main parties interested in the destruction of this criminal industry are the online retailers, and their primary tool is by no means the search for fraudsters, but the improvement of protection, which they can perfectly well do whether a state exists or not, since it seems to have no role here, as it apparently does not affect anything.

In reality, it does. State regulations make it difficult for stores to switch to cryptocurrency payments—which, unlike centralized banking systems, knows no such concept as reversing an operation, meaning it completely removes the store from the line of fire in such situations and makes the final victim the one who lost the private key to their crypto wallet.

In the absence of a state, it will be harder for banks to pass costs onto retailers because they will have to compete honestly in a free market with crypto and offer stores the most favorable acquiring terms possible. So they will at least have to obsess over data protection, implement two-factor authentication for online purchases across the board, and so on, and if a refund request does occur, they will mostly have to bear the losses themselves. Which is great; let them stay sharp.

So, can carders feel safe under ancap? This will depend on the strategy banks use. If they focus on passive defense, carders will be drawn into a technological race, which will increase the cost and intellectual threshold for engaging in the carding business. But defense can also be active. The market can be flooded with fake drops who will scam the carders, fake database sellers who will sell non-existent credit card details and try to report their buyers to the customer, moles can be planted in themed communities—in short, this criminal industry can be made significantly more costly and risky than it is now, and this could also lead to most criminal entrepreneurs retraining for something more innocent.

White cardboard is about another powerful branch of carding, but that is a completely different story

If, for example, people were given the opportunity to take revenge for one night, as in “The Purge” — it would be a very useful practice for reducing crime. How does ancap view this?

анонимный вопрос

As a reminder, the purge night is a concept from the movie of the same name, according to which the state designates one night a year during which it refuses to prevent any violence of citizens toward one another, but at the same time does not remove itself from the scene, and even reserves the right to apply completely arbitrary violence against citizens on this night, for which no claims are accepted.  

Let’s agree right away that the non-violent implementation of the specified institute under ancap in this particular form is impossible, simply due to the absence of a state. So, I would rather reason through how I would act to implement a purge night under ancap.

  1. The “Founding Fathers” corporation buys a large plot of cheap land somewhere in Nevada.
  2. A Purge-city amusement park is built there.
  3. Throughout the year, the amusement park makes money by renting out sets for film shoots, paintball, airsoft, hardball, and other innocent shootouts.
  4. One night a year, volunteers from all over the world gather in the city to shoot at each other with live weapons. Before purchasing a tour, they sign a detailed contract, including a waiver of claims against the company in the event of death or injury at the hands of other players, as well as a waiver of claims against other players for any of their actions that do not violate the rules of the “Purge Night” attraction. The contract also provides for the company’s obligation to pay participants an agreed-upon bonus for the fact of survival, and a bonus of the same amount for each frag obtained. In addition, of course, the company undertakes not to kill players themselves, including by entering into any special agreements with any players. The rules also specify the permitted classes of weapons, as well as a number of other nuances that I will omit here for brevity.
  5. The costs of conducting the purge night are perfectly offset by income from advertising placed on the sets, from the sale of broadcasting rights, from merchandise, and so on.

What is the circle of primary potential participants?

  1. Adrenaline junkies. Meet John Watson, a former paramedic and three-time Purge Night individual champion!
  2. Teams from poor warring states. Meet Team Congo, a two-time Purge Night team champion!
  3. Betting enthusiasts. Meet David Loser, who is participating in the Purge Night because he lost a bet to Carol Winner, having predicted that the bitcoin rate would fall to ten ounces of gold in August!
  4. Duelists. Meet Najib Gasan-ogly and Samvel Budumyan, who decided to fight in a duel on Purge Night and defend the honor of their people!
  5. And various random party-goers who decided that this is cool. Meet Fyodor Konyukhov, who decided to cross Purge-city on Purge Night without a weapon from west to east and meet the sunrise at the edge of the desert with a cup of Nescafe!

What social consequences will such a business lead to? None in particular. What social consequences does the existence of the no-rules fighting industry in today’s reality lead to? Well, there are fights, and that’s fine. Some people go, pay money; others fight, get money; others make fun movies about it. It’s the same in our case.

Will the level of violent crime in the world decrease in the intervals between purge nights? Unlikely; most likely, it will continue to gradually decrease as people’s wealth grows. Will my business take off? Maybe it will. Will I remain a monopolist in this market? Only if it is very narrow; otherwise, competitors will likely join in and take some market share.

The market will decide!

That’s not how it’ll be, not at all!

How can the continuity of pension payments be ensured during the transition to a libertarian society?

Now, as you probably know, the majority of the pension budget consists of transfers from the federal budget, where the working generation supports pensioners through taxes. The PFR (Pension Fund of Russia) exists purely on paper; without transfer payments from the budget, it would be exhausted instantly; accordingly, its privatization would achieve nothing. In a stable libertarian society, it is clear how the pension system will work (private insurance, assistance from children, charity, capital income, etc.), but what should be done during the transition period before this has been created?

Bitarch (question paid in the amount of 0.01btc)

The state, by forcibly seizing money from people, does so under the pretext that it assumes certain obligations in return. In the case of pension contributions, this is the obligation of a lifelong annuity, starting from an age determined by the state. After the liquidation of the state, the fate of its obligations may vary depending on exactly how the state was liquidated.

Minarchism

In the event of a minarchist government coming to power, everything is relatively simple and predictable (and for me personally, this is almost the only argument in favor of minarchism as a transition period to ancap). For example, the transition period is described in the LPR (Libertarian Party of Russia) program, and the proposed mechanism generally satisfies me completely:

At the initial stage of reforms, all obligations of the state to pensioners and persons who have begun to pay pension insurance contributions will be fulfilled through the creation of a special State Pension Restitution Fund, to which current profits from the privatization of state enterprises and corporations will be directed. All those who made mandatory pension insurance contributions will have them returned as funds from the sale of state property (including the property of the Pension Fund of Russia itself) enter the State Pension Restitution Fund. 

Program of the Libertarian Party of Russia

Upon completion of the restitution, the LPR program envisions the liquidation of the fund and the transfer of the remnants to charity, which is an unfair and corruption-prone measure; therefore, it would be much simpler and more logical upon the liquidation of the fund to distribute the remainder equally to all citizens as a one-time payment.

Anarcho-capitalism

But no minarchism may happen at all. The moral and financial bankruptcy of the state may lead to its liquidation occurring not from the top, with payment on state obligations, but from below, from the side — yes, from everywhere people can reach, without the formation of any successor structures. In other words, state property will be partially bought up by private individuals and partially stolen by state employees at the pre-bankruptcy stage, and the least liquid assets will be scavenged by anyone and everyone once the state is actually liquidated.

How much will pensioners be able to grab for themselves at the pre-bankruptcy stage? Perhaps some land, since as difficulties with paying pensions grow, the demand for land for personal farming will increase, and the distribution of land to pensioners and “persons of pre-retirement age” during this period is quite likely.

How much will pensioners be able to grab at the stage of scavenging the remains? Working budget employees will scavenge the most because they are closer. Some of these working budget employees will be pensioners; they will get something. Non-working people will get something if they hustle, using old connections and similar tools.

Bleak? I’m sorry, I have no other ancap for you in Russia. But there is also good news. If, as the state gradually goes bankrupt, people manage to prevent a collapse into socialism, then by the time of the final liquidation of this parasite, society will already be ready: it will have developed most of the necessary institutions for ancap, primarily mechanisms for private protection and the establishment of property rights, and then the transition period will pass relatively painlessly.

Now, if the state is socialist at the moment of liquidation, then, I’m sorry, instead of ancap, you get Somalia. This is exactly the process we are seeing now in Venezuela.

Lovers of Meganesia will appreciate this!

What will happen to electricity and housing and communal services in general under ancap?

Anonchik Oleg

Generally speaking, it is clear why electricity was chosen for this question. Although there are currently a vast number of producers of this type of energy on the market, the end consumer’s ability to choose a provider is usually quite limited. So limited, in fact, that we can safely consider as typical a situation where the consumer always deals with only one provider.

Are there any prerequisites for a different arrangement to become the norm under ancap? Generally, no, since the current state of affairs is caused not by government regulation, but by the characteristics of the market. However, today the state, at least in Russia, regulates prices in this market, and the natural question arises: will they skyrocket if they are completely deregulated?

The norm where electricity is primarily produced by a large producer is linked to the fact that there is a pronounced positive economy of scale in this industry: a large producer has lower production costs. The norm where the end consumer is usually connected to only one power grid also has a quite understandable origin. What, then, will limit the greed of the electricity producer, as well as the greed of the grid owner?

The most obvious market constraint on the retail price of such centrally supplied electricity is, of course, home generation. The higher the retail price in the grid, the more profitable decentralized energy production becomes, whether it be solar panels, wind turbines on the roof, or simply a banal gas boiler in the basement.

Does it turn out that large producers together with power grids in a free market can inflate the price almost to the level of the cost of private generation? Generally, no, and here is why.

The thing is, the positive economy of scale works for large producers only if a large amount of electricity is produced. If a power plant is large but operates at 5% capacity, then the production cost, considering equipment depreciation, ends up being much higher than if the generation parameters were close to optimal. Therefore, the electricity producer is interested in selling all the energy that they are technically capable of producing. Moreover, artificially lowering generation opens up a field for potential competitors.

And so it happens that without any tariff commissions or other remnants of state planning, in a developed free electricity market, the producer’s margin drops to average market values for business in general, meaning roughly to the average bank deposit rate.

And this is without me even considering exotics like large-scale solar or wind generation, where the price of energy fluctuates depending on the weather, and on sunny or windy days producers might even pay consumers just to burn off the excess electricity produced—precisely such excesses will eventually be solved by developing energy storage technologies.

May I not examine all other types of utility services in such detail? I assure you, the same patterns apply there, with their own peculiarities, but leading just as surely to quite reasonable limits on tariffs.

So, shall we burn?

Is the use of violence by ancaps against representatives of law enforcement agencies, such as the police or army, who are violently enforcing the state and its laws, aggressive or nonetheless defensive?

анонимный вопрос

To be honest, such questions feel somewhat dogmatic to me. It’s as if someone started pestering an imam, for example: “Is the killing of infidels a defensive jihad—or an offensive one?”

Well, in the name of the great and merciful Market, I shall begin!

Since the state is a system of institutionalized violence against private property, then, of course, any person who is a subject of any given state has grounds to present property claims against that state. Since no state not only refuses to consider the possibility of restitution for property forcibly seized from people, but also applies sanctions for the very act of contesting such seizure, it must be concluded that an open conflict exists between the state and the individual, which is essentially a euphemism for the term “war.” In our case, it is a form of guerrilla warfare.

Thus, the question of how appropriate it is for an individual to use violence against certain state employees is merely a question of the laws and customs of war, as well as a question of tactics and strategy.

I remind you that the primary element in this war is the existence of property claims the individual has against the state, arising from the state’s forced seizures of the individual’s private property and the restriction of their freedom. Therefore, victory in the war is brought closer by reducing the rate of seizures and restrictions, reducing the share of state property in total wealth, and reducing the number of civil servants and other persons supported by the state.

So, can you beat up cops after all—or not? Theoretically—you can. Practically—there is usually no point. Privatizing something state-owned or securing a tax deduction is far more useful. Achieving a reduction in tax rates is an extremely noble cause indeed. But killing a state employee is simply killing a human being. It is permissible if they are carrying out a direct attack dangerous to your life, but it will in no way diminish the state, reduce taxes, or weaken regulations. On the contrary, it more often leads to a tightening of the screws and personal bitterness toward you from the deceased’s previously indifferent colleagues. So, this offensive jihad is not the duty of a libertarian.

Now, the widespread looting of state property kills the state quickly and reliably, even one as powerful and creepy as the late USSR. Widespread sabotage of taxes and regulations does the same. It is this defensive jihad that is more pleasing to the Market.

May the Market guide you on the straight path and be favorable to you. Amen!

The omnipotent Market knows best!

Can the free town of Christiania be considered an anarcho-capitalist community, even if only in its infancy?

анонимный вопрос

The more I read about Christiania, the more parallels I find with Elausestere—a group of islands on the outskirts of the Tuamotu Archipelago where, according to the Meganesian Cycle by Alexander Rozov—a piece of sci-fi popular among Russian libertarians—a communist enclave existed within a minarchist confederation.

A group of people homesteads unclaimed property, organizes self-governance, establishes its own exotic order, and then the outside world eventually notices this commune, and its first impulse is obvious: to bring it to a common denominator. It quickly becomes clear that this is, first, difficult; second, disapproved of by local residents; third, not approved by all other citizens; and finally, that profit can be derived from this attraction.

Next come the negotiations, a partial adaptation of the enclave to external rules of the game—and that’s it, it lives freely and happily in symbiosis with its surroundings.

What is more prevalent in today’s Christiania—anarcho-communism, anarcho-capitalism, or is it simply something like a Chinatown, only formed not by cultural-ethnic, but simply by cultural traits? From the state’s point of view—definitely the third. An anarcho-capitalist will see primarily ancap traits in Christiania. I think an ancom will see primarily ancom traits.

Well, it’s wonderful that Christiania managed to please everyone and allow each person to see something of their own in it!

I’ve made a note for myself: when I travel around Europe, I’ll stop by Christiania.

For weed, against heroin; for bicycles, against cars. Moderation itself!

How will the transition to ancap be carried out in general, and in Russia in particular?

анонимный вопрос

In the post about ancap and minarchism, I described two possible ways of building ancap: the political and the countercultural. The political approach boils down to reforming the state into a minarchist state, and then further reducing it through political means up to its full formal dissolution. The countercultural approach boils down to a factual refusal to use the state, and especially a refusal to provide it with any resources whatsoever, from money to brains.

In a poll on the most promising method, my readers preferred the political method, although a significant number of votes went to the view that one should first achieve the maximum possible through political means, and then use the countercultural method to finish off the weakened state mechanism.

Personally, it seems to me that there will be more and more ancap in our lives as people learn to hide their income from the state more effectively and grow wealthy faster than they are plundered. A poor person may still hope that the state will rob the rich and give it to them. A wealthy person only needs to be left alone; they will figure it out themselves.

It is very important that working for the state be humiliating and serve as a demonstration of incompetence, while working for a private individual signifies both respect and prosperity. For this, it is important that entrepreneurs and their employees realize the unity of their interests: the less the state gets in the way, the more those who work will get. And this is achieved only through the widespread penetration of ideas.

The temptation of the political path is that a politician can lead society to their desired result almost by force, whereas the method of cultural transformation assumes a broad acceptance of libertarian ideas by society. It is also important to understand that any failure of libertarian political reforms hits the image of the ideology (look what those damned liberalasts have brought the country to!), and any success is easily converted by the state into its own strengthening (you’ve grown rich—now share!). Meanwhile, public sentiment cannot be uprooted so easily, which is why the path to approximating ancap through it is much more reliable.

This is the kind of tax collection graph we need