Hi, here’s the situation. I’m currently reading a couple of recent books on ancap in English — “White, Right and Libertarian” and “A Spontaneous Order: The Capitalist Case for a Stateless Society” (I started with the first one because of the meme title and Hoppe, who wrote the foreword, but then decided to start the second one since it came out earlier and it seems better to read them in order of release). At first, I was just reading, but then, to keep from losing my mind in current conditions, I decided to do a written translation (and to start developing my English more thoroughly). My proposal is: post the translations on your website. What do you think?
Anonymous question
I have nothing against it; send them chapter by chapter as you translate, and I will publish them. Include your wallet, and then readers can donate to you for the translation if they wish, although I cannot guarantee that. I don’t rule out that I might feel the urge to make some edits.
Is it possible to buy advertising on your channel?
Administration of the “SPL” telegram channel
I work for donations. You can always send whatever amount you deem appropriate and ask a question like “tell me your opinion about the SPL telegram channel,” or “such-and-such a post came out on the SPL telegram channel, what do you think of it?” or something along those lines. The point is that instead of a standard advertising text, my own unique post with a personal opinion would appear in the channel, which is much cooler.
Recommend works where the author criticizes ancap throughout the whole book from any position.
Potaro
Of course, Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick. Throughout the book, the author proves that even if ancap were to suddenly appear for some mysterious reason, it would immediately, according to the logic he describes, begin to mutate into a state.
An interesting question. People more often ask how things in the sphere of so-called public goods will work under ancap. Commercial real estate, however, is a private good. Under a state, the right of private property is to some extent conditional, because it depends on whether the state changes its mind about recognizing this right, or decides to nationalize a particular object. Under ancap, the right of private property is also conditional, and depends on how strong of a negative externality the property owner creates for those around them.
So, if I am to answer the question directly: commercial real estate under ancap will operate in such a way as to create minimum negative externalities and maximum income. Those entrepreneurs who solve this optimization problem better than others will prosper.
How will private detectives work under ancap? After all, it seems one cannot violate someone else’s property.
Anal Magician
As I already mentioned in the answer to the previous question, private property is a conditional concept. Well, this is my favorite mantra that rights are claims that are tolerated—you’ve probably already learned it by heart. Therefore, a private detective first conducts an investigation as far as possible without violating anyone’s property rights and without disturbing anyone—for example, using open data, recordings from public cameras, analysis of evidence provided by the client, and so on. If during the investigation he becomes interested in something located on someone’s property, he seeks ways to obtain the owner’s consent. If consent is not granted, he usually manages to find workarounds.
And in a situation where absolutely all leads point to a unique piece of evidence controlled by some owner who is unwilling to grant access, this becomes a strong suspicion that this owner is, in the worst case, the sought-after criminal, or their accomplice, or in the best case, a sympathizer. And here the owner may well be faced with a choice of what will bring them the lower cost: strong suspicions of complicity in a crime or granting the detective the right to investigate on their territory.
Let’s also add such a tool as a reward for assistance in the investigation—if the notorious owner understands that they will receive a reward for their inconvenience, then why not put up with it.
Suppose ancap has arrived, and on the street one person killed another. In the current system, the police would handle this case. But who will handle this case under ancap? Private detective agencies? But they must be paid, and what if the person had no relatives or friends?
anonymous question
Well, this is already an example of a traditional question about ancap: how public goods will be ensured. Fortunately, you specified the location of the murder: the street. The purpose of a street is to ensure the mass movement of people within a settlement. Exactly how the street owner monetizes the solution to this task is a separate question. In this case, we are interested in the fact that unpunished murders on the street hinder the task of mass unobstructed movement along it. If the street owner does not solve this problem, people will either have to invent ways to protect themselves on this street or stay away from this sinister place. In the second case, traffic drops, and this directly hits the owner’s income. In the first case, the costs for residents increase, they become less solvent, and the street owner’s income drops indirectly. So, he has economic incentives to solve this problem, even if he is not bound by an obligation to provide security on his street directly.
Of course, if the street owner manages to hide the incident, it will save costs. But you know these people: they are always sniffing something out, they are always suspicious… Once this episode surfaces, all sorts of speculations will begin that dozens of corpses are being hauled away every night and it’s time to flee this cesspool. To hell with that, transparency is more profitable.
A city known for the fact that security on the streets was provided by a volunteer. Well, that’s also a way, of course, but usually the heroism of one person only masks the failures of others.
Is the client of a hitman responsible for the murder, and did the employer commit an act of aggression from a libertarian perspective?
I have already answered almost exactly this question. In short: if the employer and the executor are linked only by market relations, then all responsibility lies with the executor. To the extent that the executor is in a non-market dependence on the employer, a share of the responsibility falls on the employer, because this very share of dependence is effectively their share of participation in the co-organization of the murder.
Is the unintentional infection of a person with a disease a violation of the NAP?
The measure of responsibility for the person who infected is determined by how capable they were of preventing the infection and how expected these precautions were on their part. For example, in a situation where an epidemic is occurring, it is expected that people maintain distance, wear masks, and so on. If all this took place but the infection occurred anyway, responsibility is waived. If the infector carelessly led a normal lifestyle, responsibility is not waived. The same criteria apply to the infected person—what they did to avoid being infected. However, if there is no epidemic or nothing is known about it yet, then no particular claims arise against the infector.
Should infection be considered a violation of the NAP? As you wish. A violation of the NAP is a purely theoretical construct, while in real life, what matters is who should bear the property claims.
What is the difference between contractual jurisdiction and a state?
The presence of a contract that clearly specifies the conditions of jurisdiction. The more blurred the range of issues for which a subject is subject to a certain organization is, the more difficult it is for them to actually avoid jurisdiction, and the more implicit the contract is, the smaller the difference between contractual jurisdiction and a state.
For instance, a hypothetical island owner who places a sign on the shore stating that anyone who steps onto the island’s land thereby accepts a contract of indefinite gratuitous employment for an unspecified range of labor duties—has de facto created a state, which will exist exactly as long as he can produce enforcement of the aforementioned oppressive contract, enslaving all accidental tourists and shipwreck survivors.
When does a person reach the age of agency?
It makes sense to read my old answers under the “children” tag; there are reflections on emancipation scattered across several posts. In short: others recognize the guardian’s right to guardianship until the child expresses a clear desire to terminate this relationship. Accordingly, a child has the right to break the connection with current guardians at any moment, and thereafter either live independently or agree on guardianship with someone else. Since a child does not learn to defend their interests immediately, they will likely need the help of adults, and the task of those adults is not only to ensure the child’s rights but also to convince other adults that the child’s rights have been respected.
Last time, I enjoyed responding not with one large text to a single question, but with short answers to a series of questions. A number of such topics that do not require detailed answers have accumulated in the queue.
Ancap-chi, it seems to me that it is better to promote the term “polystate” rather than “panarchy,” because the latter sounds too much like “anarchy,” and ordinary folks, as I think you know, are very triggered by that word.
It’s a matter of habit. Legend has it that the first libertarians in Russia were often mistaken for vegetarians. Minarchists, naturally, are mistakenly read by many as monarchists. As for the possibility of confusing panarchists with anarchists, at least that is not offensive, because panarchy is one of the paths to anarchy. It seems to me that terms like polystate make sense to be used as auxiliary for now. For example, “I am a panarchist, meaning I advocate for a polystate, or more accurately, for multiple governments within one country” (as Alexey Shustov correctly notes in one of his interviews, in the Russian language, the state is a subject, not a system, which creates inconvenience in political discussions, and it is better to use “country,” “government,” or “regime” depending on the context instead of the overly vague “state”).
I saw an ad for agorists here; they have an article about obtaining an anonymous debit card by forging appearance and a passport. Apparently, there is only administrative liability and a fine of up to 80 thousand for this, but perhaps you know better ways to remain anonymous when making purchases in fiat?
This refers to this post, where at the end I referred to an article from the Cryptoagora channel. By the way, in the post, describing crypto-ATMs, I wrote that they work only in one direction: buying bitcoins with fiat. Later, in Georgia, I verified that the reverse is also possible; there, I actually had to sell bitcoins. I just want to note that for greater anonymity, when approaching a crypto-ATM, you should wear dark glasses, pull something with a wide brim over your head, raise your collar—in short, hide your face as much as possible to shield yourself from cameras. Cameras can be located both in the crypto-ATM itself and around it. Also, of course, when you go to a crypto-ATM, it makes sense to take a phone with a “left” SIM card. All these paranoid measures are intended to complicate operational-investigative actions if you suddenly become their target for some reason.
Is it true that under anarcho-capitalism, intellectual property is not provided for?
Maxim
Any person has the right to monetize any of their intangible assets by any non-violent means. They have the right to use violence only in the case when they are attempted to be deprived of this asset entirely, but not when some information they possess is copied. Even if someone copies the private key to their bitcoin wallet, that is not yet theft. Theft is the use of the key to move bitcoins out of that wallet.
I just cannot understand who will act as the guarantor of compliance with the rules? What happens if some hypothetical Ramzan Akhmatovich in the role of a night watchman decides not just to guard the peace, but to start explaining a bit how people should live?
Noob
Any gatekeeper is inclined to increase their significance at the expense of those they are supposed to serve, i.e., the residents of the guarded facility. The only argument that can bring them to reason is the threat of monetary sanctions, and ultimately, dismissal. For the threat of dismissal to be real, there must be Ivan Petrovich, Ravshan Jamshutovich, Jet Li, and Sigurd Olafson standing behind the gates waiting to be hired. That is exactly why panarchism looks like a more sane idea than minarchism in terms of the possibilities of limiting power.
