The book on ancap that I recently announced will be gradually posted in the corresponding section on my website. Since this is my first such experience, I cannot guarantee that the text will not change significantly in the process, so you are unlikely to see regular announcements like “5 out of 70 chapters written” — I will certainly be shuffling pieces of text back and forth until the very end, adding some things, removing others, and reworking some ten times over.
For now, you can read the ultra-brief foreword, which promises that the book will be written without overly academic jargon, and right alongside it — the section dedicated to the principle of self-ownership, which turned out to be quite academic. So, after reading what I produced, I fell into a pensive mood: is it necessary to dig this deep, or should I try to lower the level of abstraction?
I look forward to your comments on this matter, and it is quite possible that I will take them into account.
I could have looked for a picture of an even more pensive girl, but this one reflects the process quite clearly
The vast majority of the questions I receive boil down to the formula “how will such-and-such sphere of life work under ancap?” In fact, I have already provided answers to many similar questions, and some more than once. I have built up a huge body of texts that few people are likely to bother re-reading. Now, I am increasingly thinking about consolidating them into a relatively compact and coherent material.
Many people also ask for a link to some basic introductory course on libertarianism, without the jargon, for those who want to go a bit further than Wikipedia and understand what libertarianism is, how well it suits them personally, and if it doesn’t suit them very well, whether libertarians should be considered dangerous enemies, harmless weirdos, or useful companions.
In principle, I have already translated one such opus—Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom. In progress is the translation of another opus with a similar message—Stefan Molinieu’s Practical Anarchy. But both works have at least one obvious downside: they are translations. This is an appeal to a different cultural background, which generates arguments that may seem strange and clumsy. There was hope for Mikhail Svetov, but a lot of time has passed since his announcement of a book on libertarianism, and there has been no progress.
Presumably, the work will consist of three parts. The first—a brief description of the libertarian worldview and a justification of why we need ancap. The second—tentatively titled “How under ancap”—a collection of examples of how this can be implemented. The third—how to bring ancap closer.
Forgive me for not planning to go to prison for the sake of writing a book, so the process may take some time. But on the other hand, I intend to post individual chapters as they appear, even if I am not entirely satisfied with the result and consider reworking them in the future. So you will have an idea of the paths my thoughts are taking.
Drop suggestions in the comments about which chapters are absolutely necessary in the second part of the book, besides courts and roads.
What if your house was surrounded by a fence while you were at Minarchit buying a new cat-wife? In this case, there is no attempted murder, and the person had the right to build a fence, just as you had the right to build your house before that. What should be done in such a case? Do you have the right to break the fence to get through? Is this a violation of the NAP? And what if such a concrete fence is poured every day?
Hate
How to maintain the freedom to leave communities under ancap?
Anonymous question
To begin with, I suggest rereading the chapter from the Mechanics of Freedom about bargaining under conditions of anarchy. Briefly, it talks about Schelling points—certain special positions of a system that, for one reason or another, appear unique to those dealing with it, and therefore are more likely to come to the minds of several potential counterparties simultaneously in the absence of prior agreements. Schelling points, in particular, help establish natural boundaries, the maintenance of which saves the parties more effort.
A given spontaneously formed status quo is obviously a Schelling point, and its violation, of course, will meet some resistance. If in a community men usually shake hands and women hug each other and men, then a woman who offers a hand will be perceived with caution, and she will likely be attempted to be hugged. If it is customary in a community to walk freely on neighbors’ lands, marking boundaries as unobtrusively as possible, not locking doors, popping in for visits, leaving mail under the doorstep, and so on—then an attempt to erect a solid fence will already be perceived with strained bewilderment. And a fence that isolates someone else’s plot from the outside world is unambiguous rudeness; a whole delegation will come to such an unfriendly neighbor and try to explain that things aren’t done that way here. On the other hand, if it is customary to fence oneself off, let vicious dogs into the yard, and fire into the air at any stirring near the border, then a new fence preventing you from getting into your own home will have to be viewed simply as an inevitable fuck-up: you must have been such a loser not to notice that your neighbor managed to completely surround you with his territory. Now you’ll have to drop some toxic plague onto him via drones, and only after that can you begin peaceful negotiations with the neighbor.
The same applies to leaving a community. If it is a common occurrence, with people constantly entering and leaving, then such an open order of access is perceived as natural, and this Schelling point will be upheld. But if there have been no such precedents since the dawn of time, then the attempt to leave will be perceived as something extraordinary; you will have to explain yourself, prove your right, and perhaps somehow compensate those remaining for your departure. This, by the way, is not such an unlikely situation. Imagine, for example, an artel that has mapped out a front of work to a certain deadline—and then you suddenly decide to leave the community. They might simply not let you out until the work is finished, or shake you down for a serious penalty because those remaining will now have to slave away, which they had not planned.
An attempt to push one’s position against the status quo, whatever it may be, will inevitably meet resistance, and this resistance may turn out to be disproportionately serious, even if the required concession seems trivial. The reason is clear: if one simply gives in, the new status quo will be that you give in under pressure. Such things are clearly seen when representatives of different cultures clash, where for one, conceding on small things is good manners and a guarantee that you will also be met with reciprocity in the future—while for the other, a concession means that one should keep pressing until they break—after all, the opponent has already buckled, they must be finished off.
Now let’s talk about recipes. What to do so that your plot isn’t seized, so that you are allowed to leave a community, and so on. Build the reputation you need. By the way, we had a very good video about this, rewatch it.
If you have the reputation of a person who, upon seeing a fence, will start breaking it without looking, then that is a poor reputation. You break the fence, they shoot you, and then they explain to interested parties that this madman started breaking into my territory, didn’t listen to warnings, and I had to shoot in self-defense. Pity it was immediately fatal, it turned out rather unfortunate. It is far more useful to have the reputation of a person for whom a bunch of people will stand up. It is also good to have the reputation of a person who can bring a lot of benefit and with whom it is better to be friends. In short, working on your reputation can work wonders.
And finally, I want to recommend a very lovely cartoon Klaus. It is precisely about how to change the status quo in a situation where fencing in someone else’s house to keep the owner from leaving is just an innocent prank.
One of the central ideas of ancap is that all arising problems and disputes should be resolved ex post facto—through a court (assuming that courts under ancap work perfectly fine, no questions there). But real problems are easier to prevent than to “clear the rubble,” and this may require prohibitions. What do you have to say about this? Suing for compensation and a pile of penalties is all well and good, but doesn’t this resemble the famous phrase “come back once they’ve been killed”? Perhaps, if only for the possibility of preventive measures (but not those that infringe upon reasonable rights and freedoms!), it is worth having at least a minimal “protection” state?
Minarchist
The central idea of ancap is more that the problems whose resolution has been usurped by the state today should be solved privately, and only when there is a market demand for their resolution. This means that the same problem may be solved differently at different times, in different places, and in different situations. In one case, a condominium finances the work of police patrols; in another, an insurance company compensates the victim for the costs of an attack; in a third case, people rely on the success of self-defense and do not intend to spend money on insurance or security. Each time, the situation is based on a multitude of individual choices, and generally, it doesn’t matter whether economic calculation, religious prejudices, or ethical preferences were behind them.
There is nothing terrible about a certain community providing solutions to a number of typical tasks for itself using a “protection” state. What is terrible is if this state provides protection forcibly, based on territorial criteria. But as long as state services are provided within the framework of individual contracts that imply free exit from them—then by all means.
Moreover, if someone’s culture implies a number of prohibitions, the observance of which is expected from everyone, including outsiders, then it will be quite natural for the carriers of such a culture to conduct prevention privately. An example is in the image below.
It is another matter that under ancap, the role of prisons differs somewhat, but that is a completely different story
In the past (150-200 years ago and earlier), laws were much more primitive than they are now. Many aspects of life were not regulated at all, many definitions of terms were missing (for example, “everyone must pray loudly in the mornings” — how loud is loud, and where is the boundary of the morning?), and many points were left to the discretion of the subjects of law and the enforcers. Additionally, everyone had the right to carry weapons, and the tax burden was quite primitive. Can it be considered that the society of that time was much closer to ancap than the current one? And if so, why did we take the wrong turn?
анонимный вопрос
On this topic, it is worth first revisiting one of our videos about the stationary bandit, where we explain this simple theory and show how the natural state turned into the strange absurdity we have now.
Specifically, the video indicates where we took the wrong turn. We took the wrong turn every time we traded freedom for security. In the case of the proto-ancap of Ireland or Iceland, we are talking about the external conquest of quite blatant backwaters, so one could say it didn’t matter what the natives chose; they effectively had no choice, and brute force decided. But in the USA, you cannot rely on the factor of external conquest, as they managed to win the War of Independence in a mode of anarchy. But after that, there was indeed a turn in the wrong direction. In a free market, competition among producers is beneficial to the consumer. But to the producer, of course, a monopoly is beneficial. There are more consumers, but they are worse organized. A cohesive minority is capable of securing a disproportionately large amount of influence. Thus, in the USA, the federal government began to swell, introducing economic regulations, and the state of affairs in the states began to look less and less like ancap. They put a finger in the state’s mouth, and it bit off the whole arm.
From a slightly different perspective, but in much greater detail, this process is examined in the book by Rodion Belkovich, Blood of Patriots, which I recently pirated (don’t forget to donate to the CRI after reading, as the author dislikes pirates and needs to be re-educated). In Europe, the same processes took place with even greater permissiveness from society because they never even got a whiff of real anarchy, so they tried to invent an unreal one based on the denial of private property.
Next, check out our second video on the conditions for the stability of anarchy.
There, we talk about the main condition without which nothing will work. Looking at the macro level, it is a matter of prevailing values. The value of freedom must be higher than the value of security; otherwise, it will be impossible to turn toward ancap, and even if one manages to get there, without the personal protection of one’s rights, it is easy to return to slavery.
But how can freedom remain more valuable than security if the value of human life is growing? The thing is, there are living people on the aggressor’s side too, and they also value security. The willingness to inflict unacceptable damage on the attacker during defense is the basis of the deterrence doctrine, about which we also made a video, and I suggest finishing today’s topic with it.
In it, the speaker presented his views on political philosophy in a clear and coherent manner (and one must acknowledge their depth).
As I understand it, the main contradiction between the republic proposed by Mr. Belkovich and the market anarchism of the AES lies in the fact that the economists (a conventional term) are concerned with contemptible personal enrichment, while the stern knights of republicanism consider the public, rather than the private, to be the cornerstone of a true citizen’s life. How can balance be achieved?
Stepan Pavlov
There are practically no contradictions between republicanism and market anarchism, as long as both are implemented according to their principles. A republican recognizes the citizen’s right to res privata and emphasizes that he should have no concern for exactly how that citizen asserts themselves in their private sphere. An AnCap recognizes the freedom of association, that is, the right of people to res publica, and emphasizes that he should have no concern for exactly how they assert themselves in the public sphere.
Personal enrichment is not contemptible to a republican; it is simply that for him, the criterion for comparing people is gloria — the result of their activities for the sake of res publica. Political activity is not contemptible to an AnCap; it is simply that for him, the criterion for comparing people is how well they satisfy his own market demands.
As soon as the public sphere intrudes into the private, both the republican and the AnCap will rise up. Neither agreed to this. And both will demand respect for their rights.
Is it necessary to try to find some balance between these doctrines? It will be established naturally if you consistently defend the values of either republicanism or AnCap. Someone who is poor and incompetent will not earn much fame, which means they should invest more in the development of their private sphere to claim something in politics and thereby achieve gloria. Someone who is wealthy and market-successful will change the world around them, because entrepreneurial success is based on constant vigilance regarding how to better satisfy customers. This means they will bring innovations into the world that will also affect the public sphere, and that is immortal fame. After all, we revere Edison, and even Gates, although in the public sphere he is quite the leftist.
Of course they can. The most vivid example of this is the British East India Company. Therefore, the question one must actually answer is “how to prevent corporations from doing this?”
Political philosophers have long been chewing over a related question about how to prevent a government from descending into tyranny. The proposed solutions can be divided into two categories. The first is technological. These are various schemes for the separation of powers and other types of institution-building. The second is ideological. This is the promotion of a readiness to resist any attempts to slide into tyranny.
It is roughly the same with corporations. One can build schemes for exactly how conflicts will be resolved in a distributed mode under ancap. For example, I am quite fond of the Friedmanite, or the related Molinieu scheme. Or one can simply postulate that, firstly, it is always the individual who decides whether to abide by a particular contract or leave it, and secondly, that man is the measure of all things, and if he believes he sees an injustice, it is up to him to decide whether to help eliminate it. There is no magic non-aggression pact that is mandatory for universal compliance; there are only private notions of what is right. Has a corporation crossed the line? The corporation should be punished.
Anarchy is not viable without the constant readiness of people to take direct action to uphold justice. Certain structures, such as dispute resolution organizations, simply allow for the division of labor. A small and tight-knit corporation of evil is capable of terrorizing a small territory and squeezing it dry. But under conditions of anarchy, it has little chance of building on that success and expanding beyond a certain limit: the accumulation of a critical mass of coordinated adversaries will drain all the corporation’s strength into containing them.
So, if I wished to assert myself under ancap through coercion and the seizure of others’ property, I would do so with a small group, anonymously, and vanish into the night as soon as the opponent regained their senses. In a developed information world, this would most likely mean hacking attacks—it is harder to cover one’s tracks after raids on physical objects. Yes, this kind of criminality is entirely possible and even viable under ancap. But all those speculative cases in the vein of “your grandfather installed a pirated version of Windows half a century ago, interest on the penalty has accrued since then, and therefore by the decision of our pocket court, you are consigned to contract slavery for thirty years”—these are attempts to imagine an anarchy in which everyone remains afflicted by statist brain rot. As long as they are afflicted, there will simply be no anarchy, and once the disease is overcome, such cases will become impossible.
Friedman devoted two chapters of The Machinery of Freedom to the problem of territorial defense against an aggressor of the “nation-state” type, with an interval of forty years between them. In the first part, he estimated the chances of an anarcho-USA fending off nuclear aggression from the Soviet Union and concluded that for the sake of defense against such a serious aggressor, he was willing to accept the existence of a state. In the second part, once the USSR was reliably dead, he breathed a sigh of relief and began to fantasize about how territorial defense is ensured without a state.
In my view, Friedman pays excessively much attention to the territorial aspect of the problem. For example, when he dismisses the model of financing defense through insurance, he puts the cart before the horse and assumes that clients will be tried to be sold “national defense” specifically (and that they will hope to save money, counting on their neighbor buying it). But the client does not need national defense. They need assurance that if an insured event occurs personally to them, they will receive the money. Whether they are on territory near where they bought the policy or on the other side of the planet is unimportant to them. And exactly what means the company uses to reduce its own risks of having to pay out insurance does not concern them either, as long as the company does not commit fraud.
Thus, if the organization of territorial defense truly reduces the chances of an attack by an external “state”-type aggressor, insurance companies are capable of calculating how much to invest in it to keep it profitable, and how to interact with other insurance companies to share the costs, for example, proportionally to the client base.
Friedman also presents an interesting thesis that the absence of a single jurisdiction over a certain territory is not in itself a guarantee against an aggressor’s claims. And when a conditional USSR arrives in a region where ancap reigns, it is sufficient for them to smash one city with a nuclear bomb and declare something like: look, see, Alderaan was here, it is no more. If the residents of Yavin do not wish the same fate, they owe five hundred million credits by the day after tomorrow, and we don’t care that they have neither a single administration nor taxation; if they want to live, they’ll figure it out somehow.
Effectively, he suggests that when it is too costly for a stationary bandit to expand its territory, it retains the option to act toward that territory as a nomadic bandit. Further, as you understand, everything depends on how coordinated the response will be. If a community is capable of reaching a level of coordination sufficient to pay a large tribute, it is reasonable to assume that further resistance will be coordinated at a level at least no less. This means that the second Death Star will indeed be destroyed without firing a single shot, unlike the first, which managed three.
At the same time, let us note that it is the free market that contributes to the fastest scientific and technical progress. And if, at the initial stage of ancap, states will still be able to oppose network market structures due to the difference in scale, then by the end of the transition period, the technological backwardness of states will become too obvious, and they will have to focus rather on holding onto the remnants of power over their own subjects.
Perhaps by ancap’s foreign policy you did not mean defense. But since for ancap the state is nothing more than a bandit, relations with a bandit amount to nothing more than deterring it from banditry directed at oneself, and other diplomacy is reduced precisely to this aspect. Visa regimes? That is about ensuring the bandit does not attack travelers. Customs regimes? That is about ensuring the bandit does not rob caravans. Regulatory regimes? That is about ensuring the bandit does not interfere with contracts. All these negotiations will come down to the interested party spending money on a payoff. As long as this money is less than the money required to eliminate the bandit, the latter will have a chance to survive.
In Petrozavodsk, the rules for placing signs were recently canceled, and most likely, entrepreneurs will start hanging very bright banners again to advertise their establishments; however, ordinary people will clearly not be very fond of such an arrangement. What will happen to the design code of signs (and to the facades of buildings, since differently glazed balconies and air conditioning units spoil the appearance of the object) under ancap?
анонимный вопрос
This is a typical example of a question about externalities. Who will pay the owner of a historical building for a careful reconstruction instead of a cheap and high-quality modern renovation? Who will forbid defacing the facade with convenient and useful air conditioning units? Who will encourage the creation of banners and signs that please the fastidious taste of an aesthete, rather than those that simply increase sales? Who, if not the state?
You probably already know that any ancap should answer this question. “The market, of course,” an ancap will answer. But how will the market do all this? It doesn’t have hands. The market has invisible hands, don’t worry. Now I will explain where they grow from.
First, the invisible hands take the economy by the scruff of the neck and pull it out of the obvious hole. If no state clings to the economy in the process, it will be easier for the market to pull it out. Every entrepreneur will decide for themselves, based on local cultural norms and their own ideas of what is acceptable, what size and what acidity of colors is appropriate for a sign here in order to maximize profit. And the better their property rights to what is under the sign are protected, the more this profit will be viewed in a long-term perspective.
A poor person will buy a cheaper apartment, as spacious as possible and not too far from work. A well-off person will buy a spacious and cozy one. A rich person will build a beautiful house in which every detail will please their own eye. Somewhere between being well-off and rich, it will already be strange to remember such an archaic problem as an air conditioning unit sticking out in a prominent place.
Some historical buildings will be demolished for the sake of objects that bring more income. When this income turns into wealth and prosperity, the remaining historical buildings will become expensive and prestigious—those who want to live in historical buildings themselves or house tourists there will invest in their careful reconstruction. And whoever finds the old historical buildings insufficient will find a great architect, and they will build a new building that will become no less historical—despite the fact that niches for air conditioning units will be provided in it. And the signs on it will look solid and noble. Or perhaps lush and neon, if that turns out to be the spirit of the neighborhood. Because why hang a sign that violates the spirit of the place, especially if you are not limited in means? It will not be as effective.
And in some places, instead of such subtle matters as spirit, there will be strict rules prescribed by the owner of the territory—or a homeowners’ association. They are within their rights, but most likely they too will use their rules to ensure that their land is worth more, the district is considered more prestigious, and the tenant is not too frightened by unnecessary strictness. They will have a far more direct motivation for this than officials from some urban planning department.
I understand little about football, and among international sports organizations, I am more or less familiar only with the Practical Shooting Confederation, but that is not particularly fundamental. In any case, all such organizations are created to promote certain types of sports or other activities (some GreenPeace or Red Cross are organizations of the same sort, although they have nothing to do with sports).
The task of such organizations is to simplify interaction between local teams, clubs, and similar units, to develop uniform rules, organize competitions, and so on. They are funded by participant fees, donations, the sale of advertising, merchandise, and the like. In short, states are not required for their activities at all.
How does state participation in the activities of such organizations manifest? Well, for sports, it is the existence of national teams, national championships, and so on. If there are no states, then instead there will be some competitions within a conditional red league, green league, purple league, and so on — and then a final battle for some, hm, rainbow cup.
Various Olympic Games now officially host events not in countries, but in specific cities; thus, it will be municipalities, or even private owners of stadiums and hotels, who will compete for this right, rather than states.
For some “Doctors Without Borders,” borders, as is easy to understand from the name, only get in the way. The same can be said about other international associations of activists — their opportunities will increase significantly upon the abolition of the concept of “state sovereignty.”
Consortia like W3C and their likes already operate as if there are no states, or, in the worst case, are forced to somehow adapt to their presence, and they will not weep over their loss.
In short, I cannot imagine a situation in which any current non-governmental international association would be unable to continue its activities practically without changes under ancap.
As is easy to see, there are no state borders on the FIFA emblem
