Finished polishing the subject. In the course of the narrative, I often had to bite my tongue, because there was much that could be told about how we practice agorism in our Montellibero, but I promised to make the book as concise as possible, which means there is no room for lyrical digressions.
Each chapter about one approach or another to building ancap ended with a list of that approach’s shortcomings and a pointer to the fact that it is unable to lead to ancap. Now all that’s left for me is to summarize everything written, and after that, I can move on to editing while the trail is still hot.
The matter is gradually nearing completion. The book is almost ready in rough draft; later, I will polish it, adapting the text so that even a non-professional narrator can read it aloud without getting tripped up by tongue-twisting phrasing (I want to make an audiobook). For now, I present to you a freshly written chapter on the instrumental approach to building ancap. There are no historical studies on cypherpunks and such—just a very brief overview of why all this is needed, how it works, and why it doesn’t work very well.
Can parents commit an act of aggression against their children, or do they have full ownership rights over their child?
Is it an act of aggression against one’s child to stop feeding them, condemning them to death by starvation? Probably not, but if so, from what age to what age?
If parents have full ownership rights over a child, does this ever end, and if so, at what age does a person gain the ability to become a full member of society and sign the NAP?
Is it possible to intentionally kill one’s own child without violating the NAP?
Is selling one’s own child into sexual slavery aggression?
From what age are children allowed to work and consume alcohol/substances?
Andrey Fridges
The author of the question prefaced it with a quote from Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty about how a free market for children should be developed in a free society (I omitted this fragment), and it seems appropriate to me to supplement this deontologist with the utilitarian Friedman, who in his The Machinery of Freedomdedicated one entire chapter to the rights of children.
Now, I will express my own opinion on the specific questions asked. To start, of course, I suggest re-reading the chapter of my ancap manual that I have to refer to most often—the one on conflicts, morality, and law.
A child, being a human, possesses self-ownership from a libertarian point of view, and therefore the NAP is fully applicable to them—no one has the right to initiate violence with impunity. If a parent acts against the interests of their child, there is clearly a conflict between them. Libertarian morality dictates intervention in a conflict on the side of justice. Therefore, any third-party libertarian, driven by their own morality, will attempt to delve into the observed conflict between parent and child to determine which position is more just.
Justice, I remind you, is the feeling of proportionality between the damage caused and the value of the subject of the conflict. Therefore, a third-party adult, putting themselves in the place of the damage being caused to the child and comparing it with how valuable they perceive the subject of the conflict between the child and parent to be, may quite possibly conclude that the child should be protected.
Not feeding a child is not violence. But violence is preventing them from obtaining food, or preventing others from feeding the child.
Selling the rights to preferential guardianship over a child (that is, parental rights themselves) is not violence. If the buyer turns the child into a sexual slave, that would be violence.
Allowing a child to be hired for work or consume harmful substances is not violence. But violence is forcing them to work under a stick or imposing harmful substances upon them.
In all these cases, the guardian finds themselves in a situation where they can cause indirect harm to the child without direct violence. To what extent compensation for indirect harm can be recovered is impossible to predict under ancap conditions (decentralization of law plus the market); a unique solution may be found for every conflict, or a standard one may be consistently adopted if it generally satisfies everyone.
In short: here are the principles, and from there, decide for yourselves; books of ready-made recipes have some value, but they should not be perceived as dogma.
If this occurs under one state system or another, the answer is simple: responsibility lies with whoever is legally required to bear it. Usually, this turns out to be the judge and the taxpayers, or only the taxpayers. Additionally, false witnesses and other individuals involved in fabricating the sentence may also be caught in the gears.
But the question, I presume, concerns ancap, that is, a social order in which law enforcement is decentralized, and developed commodity-money relations are in effect.
Are courts possible under ancap? Yes, because conflicts are possible, and the service of resolving them through a verdict by a third party not involved in the conflict may be in demand on the free market. Are courts that issue death sentences possible under ancap? As a procedure implying the voluntary participation of each party—it is quite doubtful, since the party who may be threatened with the death penalty by a court verdict has a strong incentive to simply refuse to participate in the court.
Are courts that issue verdicts in conditions where one of the parties does not recognize the jurisdiction of that court over them possible under ancap? They are. When I speak of possibility, I mean potential market demand under ancap conditions.
Such a court can function in two ways.
First, it can examine evidence of a crime in a situation where the criminal is in hiding, and give the go-ahead for their pursuit and retribution by any means convenient to the plaintiff. Why does the plaintiff need this? So that other people can familiarize themselves with the verdict and not obstruct this pursuit.
Second, the plaintiff can independently detain the defendant and forcibly bring them before the court. Why? So that the execution they intend to carry out is favorably accepted by those around them and not viewed as some kind of lawlessness.
Can a verdict of guilt be appealed? Yes, of course. The pursued party can present evidence of their innocence to another court, or even to the same one, and after reviewing it, the court may issue a verdict of innocence in light of newly discovered circumstances. If the plaintiff is not satisfied with this new verdict, they will have to act further without the support that the court decision provided, which could be critical for the ability to carry out the execution.
And what if the plaintiff has already executed the defendant using a court verdict, and then evidence of their innocence surfaces? That is, for example, some third party obtains the evidence and deems it important to make it public, after which one or several courts review it and issue an acquittal. By the way, will they do this if they aren’t paid? Actually, they have a market motive: if they can show that the court which issued the verdict of guilt was biased and conducted the procedure incorrectly, they will bury their competitor.
Thus, under ancap, the judge, the plaintiff, and those who execute the court’s decision (if the plaintiff does not carry out the death sentence personally) act at their own peril and risk, and bear responsibility to the extent that other interested parties are willing to spend effort to hold them accountable. Vague? There’s nothing to be done; decentralized systems rely on market incentives, not direct mandates. Just look at Bitcoin—that’s all it relies on, and, you must agree, it’s working out quite well.
How much are you willing to pay for the enforcement of a verdict under ancap?
My book about ancap has been supplemented with a new chapter on secessionism. This is the term I’ve conventionally used for a family of approaches to building Ancapistan—a territorial libertarian community populated almost entirely by libertarians from the start, in contrast to the minarchist approach discussed earlier, where the state as a whole, with all its hereditary ailments, idiotic practices, and dominant statist majority, undergoes libertarian transformation.
The external background today is not very conducive to writing monumental works, so new chapters of the book on ancap are coming out infrequently. Nevertheless, last night another one was born: about minarchism. For those who have forgotten the context, let me clarify that I do not view minarchism as a branch of libertarianism asserting that the state must be preserved while being limited by certain boundaries. No, for me, minarchism is simply a method of implementing libertarian principles into society: through political reforms from above. This is the method, with its obvious advantages and inherent limitations, that I discuss in this new short chapter.
Not only will there be no need for ordinary taxi drivers and construction workers, but lawyers, doctors, artists, and others will also lose their jobs en masse.
Yes, some people will be social workers, jesters, and prostitutes, but why are all the others needed? And what will they live on? People who have a sufficient cushion of assets are the exception, even in developed countries. And why wouldn’t the state be able to use this crisis to build a totalitarian hell?
Vietnamese
I’ll start from the end. The state doesn’t need any special reasons to try and build a totalitarian hell; it tries to do so permanently, and is limited in this pursuit only by the willingness of its subjects to live in a totalitarian hell. All that remains is to understand whether the situation under consideration will create any preconditions for a huge number of people to willingly agree to a totalitarian hell.
So, a vast amount of intellectual labor, which is currently considered an exclusively human prerogative, has been automated. Let’s assume it’s an ancap world. This means a free market. After automation, productivity increases sharply—consequently, the supply of the produced good or service increases sharply. Therefore, with demand remaining unchanged, its price will inevitably fall. The technological revolution leads to a situation where maintaining a standard of living that was quite wealthy by the standards of the previous technological era requires mere pennies.
Those lucky few whose labor within the new technological order turns out to be necessary on a regular basis will earn an obscene amount of money. Those whom the new economy does not need as much will be able to provide themselves with an acceptable standard of living even with rare, sporadic earnings. Want to update the furniture in your house? Donate blood, participate as an extra in a movie, train a neural network. Don’t need any serious expenses? Well, check a box on the websites of a couple of charitable foundations, stating you wish to receive a basic income—and that will be enough.
Again, after every previous technological revolution, those who were no longer required in the former numbers eventually retrained themselves more or less, and for their children, the new reality was completely organic, and they no longer had problems finding an occupation in it. Peasants’ children became workers, and workers’ children became clerks. Clerks’ children will become, for example, motivators for those titans of thought whose labor proved impossible to automate, or enter other spheres that are difficult for us to even imagine now, just as it was once difficult to imagine professional esports.
And what changes if we encounter this new reality while still having modern-type states? It will be more regulated. Those who receive an obscene amount of money will not be those whose labor is necessary to maintain the new technological order, but those who rob them and redistribute the funds. A large class of government employees will remain. Many will consider the state of affairs, if not the best, then the only possible one. Will this be a totalitarian hell? Unlikely; rather a kingdom of apathy, not of artificial totalitarian enthusiasm—but that doesn’t make the picture any more pleasant.
What could allow such a scenario to be realized? Mass stupification and conformism. Do we see tendencies toward this? We certainly do! And what could make such a scenario stable? A high level of professionalism among managers, allowing them to maintain a high-tech society while leading a mass of fools and conformists. The scenario proves to be fundamentally unstable: current trends will inevitably force a transition to some other future. This could, of course, be new Dark Ages. Or it could turn out to be ancap. So let’s work toward making it ancap!
This problem is clearly visible in the US Civil War, where the Southerners had a larger army, a more powerful economy, and more money, but they lacked one thing: naval supremacy.
In other words, the essence of the problem is simple: maintaining ships is hellishly expensive, more so than any other weaponry, and there are great doubts that a single firm could maintain a nuclear aircraft carrier. If it were maintained by several firms, there is a high chance it would turn into a “federal” aircraft carrier.
Without a fleet, self-defense is impossible. With a fleet, controlling counter-revolution is impossible.
How is it proposed to deal with such a problem?
P.S. This is, of course, referring to minarchism or ancap in a specific country.
Anonymous question
In many ways, this question resembles the problem of cities being buried under layers of horse manure as the population grew in the late 19th century. In other words, the problem belongs to one technological era, while the circumstances for which a solution is being sought already belong to another.
Proto-ancap existed in Iceland for three hundred years and then surrendered to the state. Proto-minarchism existed in the USA, conventionally speaking, until that very Civil War—meaning less than a hundred years—and was then crushed with great bloodshed by the federal center. So, of course, the problem of power centralization itself is not imagined, but at its core lies a pronounced positive effect of scale when increasing armament. If this effect disappears, the problem of power centralization also disappears.
Today, naval supremacy is a thing of questionable effectiveness. Let’s say there is some mega-bandit who has robbed his subjects of such an astronomical sum that he can afford a mega-fleet superior in strength to all other fleets. What is the profit from this? The ability to ensure an effective naval blockade of any chosen coastal territory? The ability to control the sky over any territory within the reach of carrier-based aviation? And how do these capabilities convert into money? For the mega-bandit as some unified entity—almost not at all. These expenses will never pay off, and naval muscles serve the bandit almost exclusively as decoration.
On the other hand, the mega-bandit is a conceptual entity; in fact, decisions are made by specific people, and for them, what matters is not what income the mega-bandit receives, but what income they personally receive—by reducing the overall efficiency of the mega-bandit. Again, if instead of increasing one’s own efficiency, one reduces the efficiency of others, then this is also a quite effective strategy for remaining the coolest, even at the cost of reducing one’s capabilities in absolute terms; and the mega-bandit can indeed act quite rationally based on this extremely “smart” strategy of “you die today, and I tomorrow.”
How could a conditional ancap community prevent such moronic attacks from these atavistic predators? First, as the episode with the cruiser Moskva showed us, anti-ship missiles are quite effective against a fleet at a significantly lower price. Second, the elimination of individual regime functionaries is usually even cheaper than the destruction of thousand-ton tubs. Third, the idea of the nation-state is becoming less popular, and with it, the popularity of patriotism falls, which is expressed, in particular, in the unwillingness to serve in the army. As a result, today even countries with huge military budgets have serious manpower shortages. It is already difficult to man a fleet, and when the situation develops to the point where the first significant territorial ancap communities appear on Earth, the situation will become even more depressing for etatists.
Yes, horses will not give way to cars overnight, but cities will no longer be buried under manure; the trend has changed. Conflicts will become increasingly market-justified, which means minimum costs for maximum efficiency. Not the time for aircraft carriers.
I’m not sure if I chose the most suitable chapter structure, but the one that I finished writing today relates to the resolution of the problems outlined in the chapter before last. The chapter was quite difficult to write because I don’t like all these quasi-psychological matters, but there was no way to avoid this topic. As usual, I hope that it didn’t turn out too banal, is concise enough, and perhaps even convincing.
I held back for a very long time, and now, finally, as late as the third part of the book, I mention that there is, you know, such a thing as the state.
If last time I analyzed the main problem within us hindering the transition to ancap, then now it has come down to the primary problem around us.
Next, the plan is to cover the main approaches to overcoming these problems. Libertarian Band has a video series on this, created based on my script, but let’s see if these topics can be presented more clearly in the book.
