Тег: Debates

Right of Way

I listened to the debates on the subject that took place on August 10th on the “Gorbushka Istorii” channel. Boris Strannik, who defended his invented concept of the right of way, and Alexei Sherstnev, who opposed him, were the discussants.

I will admit my bias right away. I like Boris. When he was in Montenegro for a few months, we met; he stayed at my house for about a week. It didn’t go beyond kissing, but nevertheless, he left me with the most positive impression. I dislike Alexei. He used to be rude and dogmatic, so I removed him from my echo chamber quite quickly, especially since there was no ideological novelty in his views, meaning there were no reasons to tolerate his tone. Therefore, I will not comment on who was more convincing in the debates.

Next, I want to note one point in the debates, simply because I was mentioned there. One of the listeners asked the opponents what “right” (pravo) is. Alexei formulated a rather confused idea of right as a spontaneous order of human interaction, clearly drawn from Zolotovrev (I prefer to operate with a narrower concept of right as a spontaneous order of conflict resolution, to separate it from morality as a spontaneous order of entering into conflicts). Boris, however, began to speak not about “right” (law/pravo) but about “rights” (prava), and quoted my definition: “rights are claims that have been accepted.” Only he said it in the singular. And, naturally, when the moderator summarized his impressions of the debates, he said he was appalled that Boris gave some irrelevant slogan instead of a definition. Here we have a banal misunderstanding related to the features of the Russian language, in which “right” and “law” are expressed by the same word “pravo.” The debaters understood the question differently, and the moderator didn’t even grasp what was happening. Well, it happens.

I will not say more about the debates; you can listen to them yourselves and form your own impression. I would rather reflect on the concept of the right of way itself.

After Montenegro, Boris visited several other countries and is currently living in South America. In Uruguay, he saw countless latifundia enclosed with barbed wire and realized that, although the country is not small, one can effectively only walk along the roads—no cozy paths through fields and woodlands. He began to reflect on this within the framework of libertarian ideology and reached certain conclusions.

Originally, the entire surface of the earth is unowned. When someone, according to the homesteading principle, appropriates a plot of land for use, they acquire the right to the resource they use for their economic activity—but not an absolute property right to everything located in the area of space limited by rays from the center of the Earth passing through the boundaries of the land plot and extending to infinity (this is the purely geometric approach to drawing land property boundaries that Alexei Sherstnev defended in the debates). But by acquiring the right to dig in the soil, he does not automatically acquire the right to forbid anyone from moving across that land. At most, he can insist on a certain penalty for the destruction of crops and similar specific measurable costs. The right to move in space belongs to every person according to the same homesteading principle—simply by the fact that they love it, know how to do it, practice it, and cannot exercise their self-ownership without it. A ban on movement is traditionally called deprivation of liberty, so why on earth does some latifundist deprive people of liberty? These are roughly the arguments in favor of the existence of an unconditional right of way.

What proposals does Boris make next, having presented arguments for the existence of such a right? In essence, it is about changing the defaults. If existing legal systems that provide for private land ownership assume by default the owner’s right to impose a ban on movement across their property, and then specify certain exceptions where the owner must still provide the right of way—then now a reverse scheme is proposed. By default, the landowner does not have the right to prohibit passage through their territory, however, they can present various grounds why in a specific case a ban is nonetheless appropriate.

Boris is quite radical, stating approximately the following: yes, a landowner can physically enclose themselves with a wall, but they cannot thereby steal from other people the right to pass through the wall-enclosed area: they can climb over the wall and continue moving. If the space is covered by a roof, then that’s great—the traveler will simply move across the roof; thus, their right of way is not infringed. And whatever is under the roof is already fully private. Generally speaking, exactly such a legal system existed long ago in the Neolithic settlement at the site of present-day Çatalhöyük: houses are built tightly together, and the roofs of the houses are public space. Thus, Boris’s legal intuition finds direct reflection in history.

Of course, supporters of full private property have their own arguments: the right of way is too easy to abuse. Once you allow the possibility of moving across someone else’s territory without permission and without compensation, tomorrow you could organize a flash mob on the lawn in front of an unpleasant person’s house, trample the flowerbeds, and so on, not to mention the constant stomping on the roof. But since rights (claims that have been accepted) are merely a generalization of principles that allow for the implementation of right (a spontaneous order of conflict resolution), constructive compromises are entirely possible between those who defend the right to prohibit trespassing and those who defend the right of way. They boil down to the landowner agreeing to a limited right of way if those passing through minimize the inconveniences caused to the landowner, and perhaps even compensate for them. The landowner, in turn, takes measures to simplify passage across their land: by laying paths. Why? First, a path organizes the flow of people, reducing the load on the rest of the territory. Second, the landowner’s appeal to the fact of providing a path is a strong moral demand in favor of limiting passage to the path specifically, and in some cases—in favor of charging a fee for passage (more often for driving).

However, for such practices to spread more widely, it is indeed necessary to change the presumption from “forbidden by default” to “allowed by default,” and here Boris is likely right. I will add that changing presumptions in this direction also prepares the ground for a future ancap, where all land becomes private. Just as the abolition of state social welfare forces people to be more responsible regarding the prevention of life’s difficulties, the abolition of the concept of state-owned public land will force people to approach the issues of freedom of movement more consciously.

The Debate Between Kagarlitsky and Kapelyushnikov

I listened with great pleasure to the debates between Kagarlitsky and Kapelyushnikov on SVTV.

Of course, Kapelyushnikov’s position was closer to me from the start, so I didn’t expect anything particularly interesting from him, but I was wrong: there were many witty phrases that could be broken down into quotes. It was known that Kagarlitsky is a strong polemicist; he proved himself to be a strong polemicist here as well. The most amusing thing to me was that his position largely echoes the position of Ekaterina Schulmann expressed in the program Status, when she was talking about Hayek:

Essentially, put your liberalism in the background; democracy is more important.

Of course, if one strictly follows the terms of the “two chairs” problem, both options are bad: both an authoritarian ruler who first liberalizes the economy but gradually turns to bronze and goes mad, and a democratic big state acting as a means for everyone to parasitize everyone else, and thus falling into a positive feedback loop.

In the debates, Kagarlitsky actively pushed for democracy instead of state planning; his interlocutor was not prepared for this, and as a result, there wasn’t much room for the critique of democracy in the debates. However, there was one good take regarding the fact that decentralized democratic planning would simply bind private initiative with others’ plans even more tightly than if it were centralized, and practicing pure economics without politics would prove simply impossible.

And yet, I didn’t quite understand: if both participants in the debate were not thrilled with the topic they were discussing and considered the subject of the discussion to be outdated by about seventy years—then what topic could they have argued about with more sense and pleasure, and what stopped them?

The Litreev and Milov Debate

On January 23, debates between Alexander Litreev and Vladimir Milov will take place on Alexander Plyushchev’s YouTube channel regarding recent events in the USA and various ideological interpretations of what is happening.

Alexander Plyushchev is an Echo of Moscow presenter who recently organized debates between Mikhail Svetov and Maxim Katz on the same topic at an absolutely abysmal technical level, and now, apparently, wants a rematch against the multi-person streaming software.

Alexander Litreev is an Estonian IT entrepreneur known for creating the Red Button mobile app and the Vee VPN service. He is a member of the Tea Club, with whose technical support the debates will be conducted, so I hope that Plyushchev will be able to focus on the show rather than fighting with the audio.

Vladimir Milov is an economic commentator for the Navalny Live channel, and also runs his own YouTube channel. He is a former Deputy Minister of Energy. Co-author of the report Putin. Results and several others, as well as the economic part of Navalny’s presidential program. A fan of Barack Obama, and based on this love, he is ready to love even the late Joe Biden, who served as Vice President under Obama.

The reason for the debates was a tweet by Milov stating that Twitter is a private company, so why, he asks, are libertarians outraged by Trump’s blocking. Litreev replied that Twitter is fully within its rights, while we are all within our rights to be outraged by the blocking from a moral standpoint. Vladimir countered with a question as to whether he would have the right to kill Alexander if he headed a monopoly private military company, while the rest would be left only to be outraged by this from a moral standpoint. Alexander was stunned by such a distortion and invited Vladimir to a debate. The latter initially declined, citing the fact that it didn’t go very well with Svetov, but then changed his mind and agreed. And when Svetov, in turn, began asking to go instead of Litreev, Milov replied, “get in line, young man”.

Thanks to the Tea Club for asking to promote the event; I went into Twitter to figure out where it all came from, and it was fascinating, but where do you get so much time to be in it constantly?

How Mikhail Svetov Dug Himself In

Miss Liberty

After Zalina Marshenkulova on Svetov’s show got drunk and just chatted about life instead of having a proper discussion, I didn’t expect her to prove herself to be a good debater, but I hoped for the best. But, my Goddess, how wrong I was! Of course, over three years, Zalina has become better at conveying her thoughts, and instead of wine, there was now water on the table in front of her, but the main factor in her success at the debates was still Svetov himself. It was enough to let him speak freely, and he dug his own grave, much like Rudoy did in the debates with Prosvirnin.

I consider the subject of the debate itself to be Svetov’s strangest and stupidest mistake. The title was promising: “Feminism: a struggle for rights or privileges?” But Mikhail didn’t particularly try to talk about the struggle, the rights, or the privileges. Already in the opening speech, I suspected something was wrong when he reduced his presentation to the trivialization of problems by feminists and some flaws in how Zalina managed her Twitter. This wouldn’t have been scary if it hadn’t turned out later that these essentially exhausted all his grievances with Zalina and feminism.

Mikhail came to talk about feminism, but spent the entire debate on how his opponent behaves on social networks; it was petty. Especially since he describes his own Twitter primarily as a private space and explicitly says that his influence on the discourse is greatly exaggerated, otherwise, he claims, we would have lived in a wonderful Russia of the future long ago. As a result of such an approach, Zalina’s rhetoric was often reduced to discussing tweets. As a viewer, I wanted to see a struggle between two points of view here and now, not archaeological excavations of someone’s posts and explanations for their words.

My favorite quote from the past debate:

While women die of anorexia, in the same way men die of melancholy. I absolutely do not want to draw an equal sign here, because both, of course, are tragic

Mikhail Svetov, fighter against the trivialization of problems

The phrase is so funny and wild that I can only address the men: don’t be melancholy, men, you are great!!!

I imagine the scene: a typical anorexic girl, who has spent several stints in psychiatric hospitals, destroyed all her internal organs, ends her fleeting life from dystrophy. And next to her, a man dies of melancholy, like poor Hachiko, because the girls wouldn’t give it to him, an incel, and therefore life is over. May the Goddess preserve you, two victims of social injustice, femine!

Svetov could have tried to return Zalina’s serve about death from anorexia, even with a take about similar problems among men, but not to cite melancholy as an example: no, damn it, men don’t die from torture in prison, their psyche isn’t maimed in the army, they aren’t bullied if they are fat or, conversely, scrawny. Melancholy is the main scourge of men!

Svetov’s story about men who ruin their lives for the sake of building a career looked about as convincing. And this in the context of discussing labor inequality! Like, don’t rush into the labor market, girls, it’s scary here, destinies are broken here, stay home, take care of your appearance. According to Svetov, it turns out that the most terrible male problems are some vague melancholy and their own privileges.

Speaking of privileges, by the way. What a topic for debate was missed! How I would have liked to see a competent analysis of the feminist myth about privileges. It is here that the feminist discourse about the all-pervasive patriarchy and the methods of fighting it is weakest. I would have liked to hear about the harm of legal privileges: Svetov only slightly touched upon the topic of maternity leave, and yes, Zalina answered the question about positive discrimination manifested in the leniency of cops toward girls at rallies. And yet, the struggle for benefits is exactly that part of the feminist discourse that can be most convincingly dismantled specifically from the positions of libertarian ideology.

Alas, the debates turned out sluggish, Svetov looked even weaker than in the argument with Kagarlitsky, and for a conversation at such a level, the high-ranking debating parties had no need to rent a hall — they could have exchanged barbs in cozy Twitter with equal success.