Тег: Boundaries

Do you want to close borders? Start with your yard!

We frequently observe an epic battle between frogs and snakes. On one side – conservatives who are horrified that their comfortable neighborhood is transforming into a small ghetto with foreign culture, loud music, and unfamiliar customs. They turn to a local criminal for bans, deportations, and a border wall. On the other side – liberals who welcome everyone in, completely ignoring the dissatisfaction of taxpayers funding lavish social events. And we, libertarians, stand in the middle, picking up rotten tomatoes from both sides. Because we advocate for freedom of movement (borders are evil), but oppose the state forcing its neighbors upon us.

Why do we all argue over migration? The “newcomer” problem only exists where there’s “public space”—that is, no man’s land. Streets, parks, and squares in ordinary cities belong to the government. Consequently, officials decide who can use them, disregarding public comfort unless it threatens their position. Ordinary people become frustrated because they cannot simply refuse entry to someone into their yard. Their only recourse is to beg Leviathan to institute visas and close the country’s borders. This is like amputating a limb to cure a blister—foolish, cruel, and ineffectual.

How do we address this issue? The answer, as always, lies in private property – specifically, gated communities (“gated communities”). Imagine: you don’t live in “City N,” but within a closed village. You have a contract. The contract outlines the rules. You and your neighbors are shareholders of the district. You hire security guards. And miraculously, you control who enters your territory yourselves! You don’t need the state to deploy machine gunners at national borders. A polite gatekeeper at your village entrance is sufficient.

This is termed discrimination—a profoundly disturbing word. However, within libertarianism, private discrimination (choosing whom to associate with and not) is a fundamental right of ownership. Let’s examine some global practices similar to this.

In the United States, it’s a classic example. Consider Florida or California. Vast territories governed by HOAs (homeowners associations). These are essentially miniature states based on contracts. In locales like The Villages (Florida), crime rates approach zero. There are no “random” individuals. Simultaneously, nobody prohibits hiring immigrant gardeners. They simply come to work; they do not impose their orders onto the playground. It’s a symbiosis: the labor market functions, and the cultural code of residents is protected by a fence rather than federal law.

Alternatively, consider Brazil. In São Paulo, there’s the Alphaville district. It’s literally a city within a city. It boasts its own schools, offices, and roads. Enveloping it are high levels of street crime, whereas inside, everything is calm and quiet. Residents of this area do not demand to close Brazilian borders; instead, they restrict access to their neighborhood. This proves remarkably effective!

And what about in Russia? Even here, a kind of impromptu Ancapistan for the rich already exists. Look at the Moscow suburbs – cottage developments like “Millennium Park,” “Agalarov Estate,” or simpler options. This is the realization of a libertarian dream in miniature (with the caveat of Russian realities, of course).

How is the “migration issue” resolved in such places? Entry is only by passes, so no “undesirable element” can just come and sit on a bench. At the same time, labor migration is welcomed. Residents happily hire migrants for construction, cleaning, and lawn care. But they are not free from responsibility. If the neighbor’s worker starts to get rowdy, the administration of the settlement fines him, and the worker is expelled by a security firm (ЧОП). Fast, without courts or investigations, purely according to the terms of the residence agreement.

And notice: residents of these settlements are completely indifferent to things like the introduction of new migration policy for 2026-2030 with biometrics and other means of tracking migrants. They have their own rules that work better. They’ve created a safe environment without the need to jail someone for not having a passport!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

How to safely cross the border for a person with “incorrect” views from the state’s point of view

The crossing of a state’s border with a repressive regime is not just about buying tickets and collecting the necessary things for life in a suitcase. For those who might have once spoken out against its policies, retained unfavorable materials, or, even more so, engaged in active opposition activities directed at a stationary gangster – it’s primarily a conversation about digital footprints. Phones, laptops, flash drives – all of this is a source of risk. Therefore, we should consider a number of practical recommendations that will help reduce vulnerability and maintain safety for ourselves and others.

The main rule is not to take anything superfluous across the border. Especially if there are data on devices related to any activism or criticism of authorities. Ideally – don’t take your primary phone and storage media with you where this information was stored. Even “remote” files can often be recovered, especially with the resources available to the FSB (or intelligence agencies of other countries). In serious risks, it is better to pre-transfer data to a protected cloud storage, and format and discard/sell the devices where they were stored. This is particularly important for people who were in an area of heightened attention or engaged in serious activism.

Before traveling, you should seriously prepare. Collect important contacts, documents, photos, backup password copies, crypto wallet files, and other critical data. Pack them into an encrypted archive (e.g., using 7-Zip) or create a file container (e.g., via VeraCrypt) for further upload to the cloud. Use a long and unique password that, at the same time, should differ from your cloud password by at least several characters. It is critically important to come up with a good association for this password so you don’t forget it even in a stressful situation.

After creating the archive, upload it to several independent cloud storage services. When doing this, use accounts that are not linked to your activism or your real identity. Also, be sure to download and verify that the archive opens, as you certainly don’t want to lose everything due to some unforeseen technical error. Make sure you accurately remember the passwords for the container and the clouds. Some people also prefer to use paid and more private services, such as Proton (of course, with a new account created specifically for this purpose). At the same time, it is safe to upload your data only to cloud storage in hostile jurisdictions for your government authorities. For citizens of Russia this is almost all of Europe and America, you can use Google Drive, although we recommend paid protected services like Proton Drive, Filen, Sync, MEGA, Internxt, NordLocker. Pay exclusively with cryptocurrency, preferably Monero (XMR) or Bitcoin via a mixer.

The ideal strategy is to cross the border with a “clean” device, on which there are no unnecessary apps installed, no sensitive correspondence, and accounts of social networks you want to hide have never been logged into. The device should also never have had SIM cards inserted that were used in undesirable activities (the security services can easily detect this simply by knowing the IMEI of the device, which will shine together with all the phone numbers used on it in operator databases). Of course, it is desirable to have some old activity on the device so that excessive cleanliness does not also arouse suspicion. However, even with such, you can say that the old device was simply stolen, lost or broken, and therefore had to be replaced.

Intelligence agencies have the resources to carefully analyze your devices and media, so digital hygiene is simply a necessity for survival. Preparatory work before crossing the border gives you control over the situation and peace of mind, which means a lower risk of suspicion from security forces. And this, of course, will ensure the safety of you and those with whom you have business dealings.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Fences under ancap

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.

Defining freedom from the position of ancapism?

анонимный вопрос

I really like the definition of freedom given by the writer Alexander Rozov:

Freedom is the opportunity to openly do what someone else dislikes

A. Rozov, Deportation

For clarity, I would perhaps add one more word to it: “openly and with impunity”, but this is, in essence, simply a clarification of the term “opportunity”.

But this is a general definition that allows one to understand the degree of a person’s freedom in any society, even a totalitarian one. However, the question concerned ancap specifically. And in ancap, there is an important limitation on freedom called the non-aggression principle:

No one has the right to initiate violence with impunity

NAP formulation by Ancap-chan

Thus, the definition of freedom for ancap can be reformulated as follows:

Freedom within ancap is the opportunity to openly and with impunity do whatever one wants, except for the initiation of violence, even if someone else dislikes it.

It remains to clarify that from the perspective of ancap, violence is interpreted as unauthorized damage to property.

Of course, property boundaries, as well as the boundaries of acceptable property damage, can only be defined with some finite precision in any society. Therefore, interpretations and discrepancies are possible regarding specific manifestations of freedom under ancap. For example, the freedom to listen to music, starting from a certain volume level, turns into the freedom to cause damage to third parties, meaning it goes beyond the scope of freedom under ancap. At the same time, determining a threshold volume level in advance is pointless; the clarification of the current boundaries of freedom occurs through the resolution of emerging conflicts.

The boundaries of the acceptable are the fruit of long conflicts

How will the fire service, police, and ambulance service work under ancap?

Ancom-kun (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.00030360 BTC)

The question is long, so I will break it into parts.

1) Will there be a single emergency number? Remembering a bunch of three-digit numbers is difficult, but it is also difficult to reach a consensus, given that there will likely be many mobile operators seeking only their own profit, and moreover, they will be limited very little in a stateless society.

Providing a simplified interface to facilitate access to a multitude of complex and diverse services is a high-demand task. On one hand, it is more convenient for users to remember one single most convenient method of communication—provided, of course, that the intermediary works quickly and reliably. On the other hand, it is also convenient for service providers for someone to take on the trouble of finding out all the necessary details from the client and issuing the assignment in a formalized form, without emotions and scandals. In this way, they save on the call center, and therefore it is more profitable for them to pay for their connection to an aggregator.

Most likely, there will also be several aggregators. One might hold, for example, the number 911. A second provides a mobile application in which placing an order is even more convenient than by phone; most of the information is entered from the screen, and only non-formalizable details are communicated by voice. A third, say, sells a bracelet with a single emergency button, or one that reacts automatically to spikes in heart rate and blood pressure. As for some other mechanisms for ordering services, it is difficult for me to even imagine them now; let the market offer and the people try.

2) What happens if the owner of a territory refuses access to rescuers? It is their territory, and entering it without consent would be a direct violation of the NAP.

In general, everything depends on who called the rescuers and why, without ensuring their access to the rescue object, and whether the contract provides for the rescuers’ obligation to ensure this access themselves.

2.1 For example, a person falls ill with a dangerous and severe disease, but their religious, obscurantist relatives recognize only folk healing methods and refuse to let a medical team into the house.

If a person needs medical assistance but third parties are holding them on their territory and preventing them from receiving help, then that person should call not only doctors but also the police. Or simply state the circumstances via the aforementioned single phone number, and then the aggregator will attract specialists to solve the described problem. Blood relation is not an indulgence for a criminal, and the fact that they are in their own home is not either. Holding a person against their will is kidnapping.

2.2 I came to a party with alcohol and drugs to have fun, but at the height of it, I—a thin and weak youth unable to protect myself—had the misfortune of being in one room with a drunk host who began to threaten me with a knife or a gun over some minor quarrel. Or the same thing, but instead of the host, one of the drunk guests is threatening me, and the host himself is passed out and by definition cannot give consent for police officers to enter.

It is the same here. A person has the right to call for help wherever they are, and the costs of ensuring access to the object of assistance can be compensated later. You simply pay the sobered-up host for a new door to replace the one that was broken down.

2.3 Something catches fire on a person’s territory, but they hope too much to extinguish the fire themselves and refuse to let firefighters in, despite the fact that they store flammable and/or explosive substances—meaning that if they do not trust the professionals, then besides their own house, all surrounding buildings belonging to other people will catch fire or blow up.

Since the firefighters have already arrived, it means their work has been paid for; all that remains is to let them do it. Even if their task is to save neighboring houses and the burning object is not their area of responsibility, they will be forced to extinguish the fire there as well to protect the object that is important to them. Why might they be stopped?

First, if it is a high-hazard facility, it is possible that it needs to be extinguished differently; a regular fire crew may not have the necessary tools, while the owner of the facility does. Then it is quite logical for them to politely ask the outside crew to stay away and ensure the surroundings do not catch fire, while a specialized team arrives. I am not technically proficient enough to describe the specifics, but everyone understands firefighting at the level of “do not put out live wiring with water”; there are surely other nuances.

Second, the owner of the burning object wants it to burn down completely to hide something important.

Third, they are overconfident and believe they can extinguish the fire themselves with less collateral damage to the object.

Who makes the decision on whether to intrude on the territory to extinguish the fire? The firefighters, of course. If they decide to intrude without the owner’s consent, the owner can subsequently sue them. If the owner interferes with their intrusion and as a result neighboring houses are damaged, their owners can sue the owner. If the firefighters do not dare to charge in with axes and hooks, then they are clear.


3) How will they deal with schoolchildren, drunk and mentally ill people, or simply ill-wishers making deliberately false calls, or simply uselessly occupying the line, saying stupid things and insulting the operator, if it is not always possible to track them down even now, and blocking numbers is too cruel since even they might need real help from rescuers? Would it be fair to dump all the costs on those who can be identified, or to block the ability to call from other regions?

It is unlikely that under ancap DDOS attacks will be fought any differently than they are now. If there is a possibility to find the attacker using available means—they are found and held accountable. If not, they simply increase the channel capacity and filter out false messages. Naturally, there will be attempts to charge the found culprits for maximally inflated costs, but a court is an adversarial procedure, so the amount of compensation will be determined individually in each specific case. If the court issues an absurdly large fine that incorporates losses from many attacks to which the found culprit was not involved, then this may cause dissatisfaction among people who learn about it. This carries the risk that attacks will only intensify, as the risk of being caught is quite small, so excessive severity is also disadvantageous for the companies suffering from such hooliganism.

How will people interact, for example, in a village or in a city where every house is in a different contractual jurisdiction?

анонимный вопрос

Here, it seems to me, the confusion is caused by the claim about contract jurisdictions—that they will replace the state. “Yeah,” a person says, “so every house in the village will belong to a different state; what kind of mess is that going to be?”

What does the fact that a person’s house is in a certain jurisdiction actually mean for them? It means that if the house becomes the subject of a conflict, or if a conflict occurs on its territory, the resolution of that conflict (if the homeowner for some reason decides not to do it themselves) is handled by the jurisdiction.

The only case where a conflict arises with such an approach is a boundary conflict. For example, there is a dispute over who owns the fruit from a branch of a tree growing on one plot that overhangs another plot. In this case, both jurisdictions would have to be involved, and it becomes their task to agree on how to resolve the conflict.

And, obviously, if a client is not satisfied with how their contract jurisdiction handles conflicts, they look for one that presumably will do it better and enter into a contract with it. In general, fundamentally, nothing here differs from buying home insurance or a contract with a provider for connecting a home to the internet, gas, water, or electricity. Except that changing a jurisdiction is much easier than changing a gas supplier.

If the apple example seems trivial, what would you say about a boundary conflict over an oil field?

Restrictions on rights

1. Imagine a situation: a local epidemic of some infection suddenly breaks out in a hospital, and the doctors forbid you from leaving the quarantine zone. But in doing so, they are restricting your right to freedom of movement. How would such situations be resolved under ancap?

2. Consider this situation: in the summer, a child is lying/sitting in a car, crying, possibly suffocating from lack of air and heat; the parents went somewhere on business and forgot about them, and a passerby sees this and wonders what to do. Can they or the police break into the car or smash a window without permission, if the car is private property (which is inviolable under ancap)?

3. Is it permissible to cause damage to a person’s property that clearly threatens other people? Examples: a car with the handbrake on starts rolling toward another car, a tower leans due to age and is about to collapse onto neighboring buildings, etc. The nuance: there is no contact with the owner of the threatening property, or there is no time for it (the car is rolling).

I decided to combine three similar anonymous questions into one to avoid writing three similar answers.

In the first case, it turns out that exercising your right to freedom of movement could lead to significant harm to third parties, so you are asked not to insist on its exercise until it can be ensured that the threat has passed. In the second and third cases, causing damage to private property prevents harm to a third party. In all cases, you are simply presented with the fact of your rights being violated.

Where do rights come from? Rights arise from the interactions of some members of society with others. Some people agree to tolerate certain behavior of other people because they believe that those people have a right to such behavior.

Doctors believe they have the right to restrict your movement; they only need to convince others of this, and for this, they can use various methods. The most obvious and correct one: when you are admitted to a hospital, you sign a contract that outlines various boundaries, including force majeure situations like quarantine. Again, to ensure quarantine, doctors usually bring in specialists specifically for enforcement. Who will pay for this? As already mentioned in the post about epidemics, the most obvious interested party is insurance companies. They are the ones interested in ensuring the epidemic is prevented and the volume of insurance claim payouts is minimized; for this purpose, they can pay both those who enforce the quarantine and those caught in the quarantine—as compensation for the inconvenience. Or the insurance company may decide that the danger is small and will not introduce restrictions—those are its risks.

A passerby believes they have the right to encroach upon your private property to save a person; they only need to convince others of this. This is quite simple: they only need to demonstrate the rescued child to other passersby, and they will join the rescuer’s sincere indignation toward the jerk who left the child in the car, and perhaps even help in searching for the car’s owner.

General principles emerge from the generalization of private practice. They work well for typical situations and allow for the saving of mental effort. When two conflicting general principles collide in one head, a mental effort must still be made. It’s nothing terrible; the ability to think is always useful.

What do you think about Mikhail Pozharsky’s article

“The Conservative Owl and the Libertarian Globe”

anonymous question

I have already touched upon this topic approximately in the post dedicated to the dispute between Mikhail Svetov and Vera Kichanova.

Then I was asked to clarify Svetov’s position regarding borders with peaceful and prosperous countries—does he really propose closing off from them as well? I had to devise a logical twist that makes Svetov’s proposal relatively acceptable for a minarchist society, and quite universal in the sense that no official is given the right to rank countries: these ones are good, and we are welcome to no one from here.

Mikhail Pozharsky’s article from July 1st is clearly inspired by the same dispute, but he dug deeper, while also addressing Hoppe’s concept that the transition from monarchy to democracy is social regression and a departure from libertarian ideals. Of course, the democratic state is terrible, as is any other state, but the claim that autocracies are generally healthier reveals Hoppe to be a person not very familiar with life under an autocracy.

I would bring another party into this dispute—political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, who has repeatedly mentioned in her presentations such a characteristic of society as the degree of citizen involvement in decision-making.

If we plot the volume of redistribution carried out by the state on one coordinate axis and the degree of citizen involvement in decision-making on another, and map existing states onto this grid, we will see that the resulting cloud of points is fairly uniform; that is, movement along each axis is generally quite independent. Therefore, both the demand for a reduction in state redistribution in the most direct democracy and the demand for the democratization of authoritarian states are equally justified. There is no need to necessarily link the reduction of taxes and regulations with a transition from democracy to authoritarianism; this assumption seems unfounded.

conservative owl

Raising the same topic for the third time, I begin to remind me of that very Ekaterina Schulmann, who also sings seemingly the same thing, but always in a different tune. And yes, here is my usual chorus about donations: 1A7Wu2enQNRETLXDNpQEufcbJybtM1VHZ8

Misha Svetov’s position is that borders should be closed, but will this apply to developed countries like the USA, EU, Japan, etc.? With them, it is actually profitable to have the easiest borders possible.

anonymous question

As I have already written, in the dispute between Svetov and Kichanova, I am more on the girl’s side, but I generally understand Misha’s position, and I think I will be able to clarify the issue that concerns you.

Mikhail defends the visa regime as a protection of freedom of association. That is, entry for anyone is prohibited by default (this is a manifestation of the freedom not to associate), but if there is an invitation from a citizen of the country, the visa must be issued unconditionally; otherwise, this is again a violation of the freedom of association. The inviter shares responsibility for the behavior of the invitee along with the invitee themselves—this is a standard institution of suretyship. Thus, the right to decide who to let into the country and who not to let in is held not by an official, but by a specific citizen, and he is the one accountable to other citizens for how he exercised this right.

I don’t recall Mikhail publicly stating his position exactly in this form, but this seems to me the only interpretation that does not contradict libertarianism. In general, such rules of access to the territory of a country would not be shameful for even a state that has firmly set itself on the path of minarchist reforms to adopt as a temporary solution.

awaiting suretyship

By the way, who under minarchism will decide how many migrants to let in and on what terms? The democratic majority? Whoever pays more?

Already(web)

Regarding state borders, under minarchism, the state retains the function of protecting borders from armed invasion, as well as negotiating with other states regarding where these borders actually lie. Therefore, if foreign armies are viewed as a type of migrant, their presence on the state’s territory will be determined by intergovernmental agreements, which, in turn, will be based on the opinion of those who hired that government. In a democratic minarchist state, this will be the democratic majority.

As for all other migrants, the regulation of their movements does not fall within the state’s sphere of competence at all. How many labor migrants, tourists, or refugees to let into a minarchist state is decided by the owners of the infrastructure used for their movement. How many to let across the threshold of an establishment is decided by the owner of the establishment. How many to hire is decided by the employer. And so on.