Тег: Discussion

What is Wrong With the War, Part 2

Now I will add my own thoughts on the two designated topics: the degeneration of strategy and the disappearance of the willingness to make sacrifices.

What historically constitutes a successful offensive strategy? A sudden start to the war, rapid achievement of predetermined goals, and the political consolidation of success. The greatest strategist of all time and nations is Genghis Khan. A successful defensive strategy: disrupting the attacker’s plans, dealing a convincing defeat, inciting the attacker’s other neighbors against their defenseless rear, and, again, politically consolidating the success.

A failed offensive strategy is either a crushing defeat at the operational level or, having exhausted the potential of surprise, becoming embroiled in a war of attrition. A failed defensive strategy is allowing the enemy to decapitate one’s centralized management structure or failing to avoid the demoralization of the defense forces.

When a clear division emerged in the world between the club of great powers and all other countries, it quickly became apparent that offensive strategies among great powers toward one another had ceased to work: even a clearly defeated party was unwilling to accept defeat, and other great powers were even less willing to accept the defeat of a great power. As a result, for a long time, this manifested as purely colonial wars, where European offensive strategies generally worked perfectly.

But after the Second World War, a general democratization of world politics began. Countries gained formal equality, a dogma on the inviolability of borders was adopted at the interstate level, and new large interstate alliances were formed—and as a result, the era of territorial conquests, and with it the era of corresponding strategies, ended. Now, as a surrogate for conquest strategy, the strategy of supporting political instability in the target country and bringing to power a group that would subsequently declare its country an ally of the supporting state prevailed. Aggressive war became a task for special forces, and a successful army became de facto a conglomerate of tools for various special operations. The only exception remained Israel, which emerged after the Second World War through war with all its neighbors and has continued to successfully expand its territory at their expense for decades—until it receives diplomatic recognition from a particular neighbor, which allows it to fix a piece of the border.

Thus, the only successful strategy for territorial seizure became the long-term nibbling of a neighbor’s land—provided that it is possible to ignore the pressure of the global community to return to the pre-war status quo until such a return becomes unthinkable. In principle, this is exactly the strategy that Putin is currently implementing.

As for defensive strategies, they developed largely in mirror image to offensive ones. Will the enemy destabilize your political regime? A successful defensive strategy consists of completely purging the domestic political field of any seeds of opposition. Will the enemy ignore the global community? Then the global community must scream in your favor so loudly that it cannot be ignored, and primarily, the opposition in the aggressor country and its key allies should handle this. Does the enemy lean toward special operations and is not ready for a war of attrition? Then one must develop immunity to decapitation strikes and prepare to engage in partisan warfare.

It should be added that all these strategies leave no room for benefit for the people of the country whose government implements either an offensive or defensive strategy. For people who do not derive direct benefit from political maneuvering, any war is inherently loss-making. Therefore, it does not matter much whether it is a hipster accustomed to high earnings and a wide variety of smoothies, or some tire repairman accustomed to moderate earnings and a wide variety of beer—they will not become the political support for any pro-war clique. Hence the tendency of aggressive governments toward the lumpenization of their subjects, in order to strip them of sybaritic habits and make the state their only hope for survival.

Summary: both Sonya and Sperry, while generally correctly identifying the trends, exaggerate them somewhat. Strategies have not completely degenerated, although they have changed significantly following the change in the nature of wars—and it is generally possible to compel people to go to war in the interests of the government, but the entire political regime must work meticulously toward this. From this comes my main conclusion: states have not yet exhausted themselves as a systemic factor of external aggression, but they can achieve this only at the cost of a sharp increase in internal aggression, which is incompatible with long-term economic growth. Those forces within states that are interested in economic growth will restrain pro-war sentiments in governments.

The Montelibero Association, my view

The channel is still on vacation, but the largest investor of Montelibero stopped by for a visit, and I had an evening to chat with him, so it felt strange not to publish my reflections on this.

My previous overview of Montelibero concerned tokenomics. Now I want to examine such a mysterious entity as the Montelibero Association. I first mentioned it in the sixteenth (and apparently final) news issue — since then, I no longer write about Montelibero as a whole, only about specific aspects.

The reason for the Association’s appearance was that the Montelibero community had accumulated problems:

  1. Goal setting. The stated goal of the Montelibero project was initially libertarian transformations in Montenegro. However, those coming to the country are somehow more concerned with issues of their legalization in this state, earning a living, increasing the quality of that very life by developing internal culture within the community, and so on. Ancaps do not want to build an ancap for others; they are perfectly satisfied building an ancap for themselves, plus some minimal costs to keep the state from getting in the way.
  2. Lack of activists to create public goods. Who will build the roads is not a particularly acute problem, because it is easy to outline the circle of main future beneficiaries of road construction. But who (or rather, for what incentives) will write the wallet code for our tokenomics, who will organize a large annual festival and many smaller intermediate activities, who will pay for hosting, who will handle the filling and promotion of information resources — and so on? Administering the collection of small targeted contributions for any such trifle would be too expensive; it is more profitable to aggregate administrative expenses somehow.
  3. Insufficient clarity of collective decision-making mechanisms. For example, who and how will decide whom to send to deliver a report at a conference if the conference organizers contact one of the Montelibero participants and invite some representative of Montelibero?

One could simply dismiss such problems, claiming that the “market” is meant to solve them. But the “market” is precisely a generalized name for the entire sum of voluntary private initiatives. And so, one such initiative sounded roughly like this:

Since a loose community without fixed membership responds poorly to such challenges, let’s create an organization with fixed membership from its participants, gather activists into it, implement liquid democracy there, and within the framework of the association, they can engage in creating various cool infrastructural things for the entire community, as well as make collective decisions that can then be communicated to the whole community.

Half of last summer, the Association was at the stage of preliminary discussion. It was officially created at the festival. Now it has slightly over a hundred people in its membership. I will try to briefly list its main achievements:

  1. Creation of a mechanism for identity verification of its participants and a standardized blockchain record of this fact
  2. Creation of a court, which has already managed to consider several cases
  3. Creation of an open standard for the blockchainization of relationships — personal, property, collaboration, and the like
  4. Creation of a competition commission to select the organizing committee for the Montelibero festival in 2024
  5. Creation of internal factions united by a common direction of interests (creates associations with secular Civil Society)

Even at the stage of preliminary discussion, the Association faced serious difficulties, and some of them became even more apparent after its activities began.

Firstly, the very idea of officially joining something, obeying the decisions of a collegiate body, and so on, proved alien to many ancaps. A working group around a specific project — as many as you like! Membership in a club — by all means! But the Association, by design, looked like something too similar to a political party, and therefore was rejected regardless of the arguments in its support.

Secondly, the Association has internally contradictory goals. On one hand, to engage in constructive activity, it needs a high concentration of activists. On the other hand, to communicate legitimate decisions to the entire large community, it must be as numerous as possible. On a third hand, principled opponents of the association perceive any attempts by the Association to communicate its decisions externally as encroachments on their freedom and try to delegitimize them in every way.

Liquid democracy deserves a separate mention. The Association’s council, to simplify the model slightly, consists of twenty of its participants with the highest number of votes delegated to them by other members of the Association. This creates an incentive for those wishing to enter the Council to campaign for their own sympathizers to join the Association, preferably passive ones, so that all their activity in the organization boils down to joining, verification, and delegating their vote.

As a result, a contradictory situation has emerged.

On one hand, the Association carries out some useful activity. For example, the court it created resolved several conflicts that were previously in limbo. However, in one of these conflicts, the defendant (a member of the Association) did not recognize the jurisdiction of the court over them, thus questioning the claim that the Association is a contractual jurisdiction. A potentially even more useful project is the development of a standard for the blockchainization of relationships. Finally, it is the Association that plans to carry the festival on its shoulders.

On the other hand, all this looks like an attempt to create a monopoly out of nowhere, combining completely diverse activities under a single brand, even to the detriment of efficiency. For instance, the development of the blockchainization standard and its accompanying toolkit requires a compact working group, not a bureaucratic structure. To create a tradition of resolving conflicts in court, examples of successful conflict resolution are needed, not attempts at forced court appearances under threat of loss of Association membership. Cumbersome democratic coordination procedures repel enthusiasts rather than attract them. Attempts to inflate the prestige of membership through economic incentives for Association members and restrictions for non-members lead rather to the opposite effect: any anti-statist knows that if someone tries to impose a certain free service on you, threatening sanctions for not using it, you should run as far away from such gifts as possible.

Now my conclusions.

  1. The creation of the Association was a response by a small active part of the community to quite real challenges facing the community.
  2. This solution is unsuccessful by design and is quite naturally rejected by part of the community.
  3. Attempts to infiltrate the Association from the outside for the purpose of correcting its design flaws are harmful: it is a sin to try to replace the market with politics.
  4. Attempts to destroy the Association for the purpose of returning to the past are counterproductive, since even if the price seems acceptable, as a result, the community will still have to solve the same problems that the Association tried to solve.
  5. The only strategy that seems reasonable to me: ignore its very existence as some unified entity, without rejecting the people who are part of it in any way. Membership in the Association is neither good nor bad; it has no more meaning than an earring in the ear.
  6. As for the little problems, they will have to be solved by our own efforts; no kind uncle will come and help, and no evil uncle will come and hinder. He doesn’t exist, this collective uncle.

The 2008 Crisis: Now a Direct Answer to Yesterday’s Question

Yesterday, responding to a question about the libertarian interpretation of the 2008 crisis, I used the question more as an opportunity to talk about my own topic. This left some commenters bewildered, especially given that the corresponding disclaimer did not fit within the limits of the Telegram post and is only found in the full version of the post on the website.

Fortunately, in the Facebook comments, Valery Kizilov provided a link to his own article from 2008, written in the immediate aftermath of that crisis, where he explains the Austrian theory of the business cycle very clearly and concisely. He also recommends a book for a more extensive study of the topic, where everything is explained in much more detail: Jeffrey Friedman, Vladimir Kraus. Man-Made Financial Crisis: Systemic Risk and the Failure of Regulation. M., IRISEN, 2012.

The mind is kind, but very narrow

I am not very fond of the genre of public spats, but in this case the resulting discussion seemed like a good opportunity to articulate some considerations.

There is a channel called Dobroum, led by the respected Alexander Elesev. It is positioned as philosophical, and a great deal of attention is paid in it to the problem of overcoming adverse childhood experiences.

For a libertarian, everything here is relatively simple. Violence against children is violence against people. No one has the right to initiate violence against people with impunity. From there, one can talk about the specific mechanisms through which violence against one’s own children, not to mention others, becomes a dangerous practice, despite the relative defenselessness of children.

Alexander, however, devotes a lot of attention to demonstrating how adverse childhood experiences negatively affect adult life. I do not know why he chose this particular tactic of dripping into people’s brains, nor am I particularly eager to find out. It does not matter to me whether it is because he lives in a country where therapists are piled on top of therapists, or because he adopted this idea from a book that impressed him, or because something happened in his own childhood that led to this result. I am almost entirely certain that there is no single reason, because life in general is a complex and multifactorial thing where there are no simple cause-and-effect relationships between two isolated events: isolated events are merely conceptual models, whereas life is actually a continuous flow of impressions.

As a result, it turns out that for Alexander, any peculiarities of someone’s behavior begin to signal some childhood traumas. Even an avatar that one of my readers from Bulgaria ordered for me became a reason for him to talk about my childhood experience. I imagine that for a fitness trainer, my condition would be just as ironcladly linked to a training regimen, for a nutritionist to a diet, and for a political scientist to the political regime in the country.

In my book on ancap, I deliberately did not engage in justifying the initial principles upon which all subsequent logic was built. Factually, the principles of libertarianism are such because that is what we want. We like it that way. It seems right to us. Of course, this may correlate with certain facts, certain childhood experiences, books read, a popular streamer heard by chance, and so on.

Yes, narrowly specialized arguments work well on some people, including arguments along the lines of “if a child is beaten in childhood, they will grow up to be a stupid loser.” But that is no reason to obsess and dump these arguments on everyone and everyone, for they will by no means work on everyone.

On my channel, I have my own little “dobroum” named Bitarch, who has also become obsessed with the single theme of the total elimination of violence. Unfortunately, the comments he gathers are more often mocking in nature, and this suggests that his target audience does not overlap much with mine. I seem to be powerless to influence such cases of monomania, and this fills me with sadness.

I hope that if you see signs in my own writing that I have been seized by some single overvalued idea, you will signal this to me.

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Republicanism, continued

After my yesterday’s post about republicanism, I received a detailed comment from @evgenii_pavlovich, which I thought it would be appropriate to publish.

I suggest watching the lecture where Rodion explained his views more clearly and fully. Much of it overlaps with what you considered in the video from St. Petersburg.

How to find balance?

Although I wasn’t asked, I will allow myself to answer.

From the perspective of republicans, anarchism in itself is not an end value; it is not the final goal, because anarchism is merely a teaching that denies the legitimacy of the state based on certain grounds, simply because the state is an organized crime group (To see/recall the arguments of Spooner and Rothbard on why the state is an OCG. There is no point in retelling them in polite society). That is, in political philosophy, the state as an internally contradictory concept has been dismantled and is dead, but as a phenomenon of political reality, it continues to exist by inertia as a misunderstanding. From this point of view, statists in political philosophy are something like followers of the phlogiston theory in chemistry, and anarchists who today engage exclusively in the negation of the state are reinventing the wheel and solving a problem already solved before them in the 19th century, adding nothing new.

In practice, however, we see that anarchists do not simply remain anarchists, but study how a free society functions and propose all sorts of improvements: Rothbard writes about private security companies as insurers oriented toward natural law, understood as the inalienable right of private property; David Friedman talks about the development of competing legal systems in a free market; our youth in well-known public pages discuss panarchism and create the concept of contractual jurisdictions without appealing to the ideas of natural law; Russian libertarians create a party, call for participation in politics, infiltration into government bodies and an “anti-state dictatorship” with lustration and deregulation. In other words, all these people are engaged in designing and building a republic. While remaining anarchists, they become republicans. For example, agreement between people on the existence of natural law as an inalienable right of private property is a special case of agreement on legal issues upon which a republic is built. Voluntarily concluded contracts are, again, explicitly expressed agreement on legal issues. But, from the perspective of republicans, agreement on legal issues and a commonality of interests may not be expressed explicitly. The main thing is that they exist and you are engaged in a common cause (res publica).

Thus, the balance in fact lies in the fact that anarchists are actually republicans. The only question is what this res publica is, what this common cause is, what it looks like, with which legal norms you agree, and what the commonality of interests consists of, and with whom you share this commonality. Communists also have their own republic and their own agreement on legal issues and commonality of interests. It’s just that their agreement on legal issues differs greatly from the agreement on legal issues of, for example, libertarians.

A few more words on the differences between libertarianism and right-wing republicanism. Our libertarians usually start either from the Rothbardian idea of natural property rights or say that the source of rights and obligations is a contract, and until there is a contract, there are only absolute freedoms. Further, everything depends on how “corrupt” you are and how you understand the word “freedom.” For libertarians, freedom is freedom from violence and robbery. For non-libertarians, freedom is the freedom to commit violence and rob. Further, the issue is resolved, for example, through the physical removal of some by others. That is, in libertarianism, freedom is ontologically primary in political philosophy; it is a natural order, whatever that means. In republicanism, however, judging by what Rodion says in his lectures, un-freedom is ontologically primary: there is no freedom in nature, freedom is a cultural phenomenon, and it is not found in all civilizations, not all people are familiar with freedom, we are not born free, but become so. That is, as I understand it, the initial premises in libertarianism and republicanism are fundamentally different. A possible resolution to the contradiction here is not to mix the “phenomenal world of natural necessity” and the “noumenal world of human freedom,” to use Kantian language. Freedom and good will are exclusively human things in the sense that Rodion speaks of man. The individual as a representative of the biological species Homo sapiens sapiens is part of nature, an animal. If, however, we perceive a human as a project, as a personality, then they must be designed, they must be chosen, they must become: for example, a free person of a free society. And, as is known, man is a free being in the sense that he is capable of acting not only according to nature, but also contrary to it. We do many unnatural things. Sometimes these are actions for the better, sometimes for the worse. So, it is important not to be barbarians and to act for the better: to build a society of free, prosperous people. In answering the question of how such a society is possible, I believe libertarians and right-wing republicans agree, and that is the main thing.

Working with arguments against freedom

In my recent article on ideological diversity, I talked about how ideas of freedom spread and why this is better than direct missionary work within a single rigid doctrine. Now I would like to look at a related problem: what to do with ideas of un-freedom and their carriers.

Why are ideas of un-freedom attractive?

First, they are relevant to the current state of affairs. Today’s world is far from the ideals of freedom both de jure and de facto. Therefore, the desire to think within a realistic approach and not bother with utopias is quite natural. Understanding that the state was born as a purely bandit formation and then evolved into a modern corporate structure for the purpose of even more effective and stable suppression of the dissatisfied, seizing funds from subjects, and capturing new subjects from neighbors, will in no way help in communicating with state structures. What will help is studying the interconnections between these very structures, both formal and informal, making acquaintances with state functionaries, and other real topics that can bring money, influence, and a decent quality of life.

Second, there are many examples of the collapse of state structures and the transition of a territory to a failed state status—and every time it invariably turns out that the territory turns into a bandit enclave, and freedom in it can only be spoken of as the freedom to rob and kill without fearing retribution from the state, due to its absence. In other words, the state obviously curbs the rampage of private banditry, and therefore should be viewed as a blessing, and these “ideas of freedom” of yours shake the foundations, so please pay a fine for extremism and be thankful you aren’t serving a prison sentence.

The failed state argument: shaken foundations in the background

Third, there is a simple and clear principle: if it works, don’t touch it. Supporters of the status quo will always prefer the current, more or less understood situation, and even if they clearly see the flaws of the system, they will prefer to put up with them rather than choose the uncertainty of the future. If a potential reformer does not have a clear, realistic, step-by-step plan with which the opponent fully agrees at every point, that opponent will always prefer to touch nothing.

How to work with this?

With supporters of living in the real world, everything is quite simple. As soon as they see real-world examples that some free technology effectively handles and withstands the blow of the state, they simply incorporate it into their picture of the real world. For instance, any realist knows for sure that nothing can be blocked on the internet; it is a simple, clear, and easily observable fact. And the realist will themselves laugh at the naive dreamers from some Roskomnadzor, in whose fantasy world adding a resource to the register of blocked resources immediately destroys the corresponding information or service. Similarly, for realists, it is beyond doubt that the state is unable to block Bitcoin transfers, and therefore they logically perceive the complex of anti-money laundering legislation as a set of poorly working spells that should not be taken to heart. So just feed them facts from life, and after some time, they will themselves ridicule the naive etatists who rely in any way on this pathetic seventeenth-century rudiment, the so-called state.

It is also not difficult to find an approach to the adepts of the “don’t touch what works” idea. In general, they are psychologically ready to support a concept such as “everything new is free.” They can be shown how a certain endeavor worked and developed wonderfully after its appearance, and then the state came along and started “fixing” what was working. After that, it usually started working worse. This applies to attempts at state regulation of the internet, the enslavement of the electronic transfer sphere, KYC regimes in banks and exchanges, and all sorts of platform services like Uber—everywhere the principle of “if it works, don’t touch it” was violated specifically by the state. In the same way, it tends to interfere in any voluntary transactions. Finally, one can provide numerous examples of how the state “fixes” already working mechanisms directly related to the functioning of the state. Citizens learned how to achieve a relatively honest vote count in elections—the state changes the election law, making it harder for citizens to control falsifications. A danger arises that a district might go to the opposition—the state engages in gerrymandering or removes the opponent from the election. In short, the state itself so actively violates the principle of not fixing what works that suggesting one should not touch the state because it works turns out to be, at the very least, inconsistent.

All that remains is to deal with the failed state argument. Here, the main counterargument is that this state arises not because people strove for ancap. A failed state always arises after a dictatorship. If the dictatorship ignored reality, made external and internal enemies, and accumulated critical vulnerabilities in the system, then eventually the state broke, leaving citizens poor, fragmented, and incompetent in matters of peaceful cooperation. This created the failed state situation, where people trust only the strongest social ties, the crudest arguments, such as the threat of weapons, and the shortest-term strategies, since under conditions of strong uncertainty, there is no point in long-term planning.

Accordingly, if citizens are already learning to trust weak social ties, plan for the long term without including state handouts in their plans, and do not base their wealth strategies on robbery—then the more of them there are, the less likely a failed state will appear when the next dictatorship collapses. A number of countries that failed to overcome their dictatorship nevertheless did not collapse into a failed state after the dictators died, but began to build something more decent. Spain and Portugal serve as good examples. It turns out that the more actively the supporters of the dictatorship uproot civil society in the country, even if it is disloyal to the dictator, the higher the probability that it will end in a failed state. So they are simply fighting the wrong battle.

With such a civil society, for example, Europe’s penultimate dictatorship is no longer threatened by a failed state

Blockchain Registries, Continuation of the Discussion

Alexei Konashevich

Thank you for your comment. I bypassed the issues of the political arrangement of the system, and the presented concept is described in the language of the current system. But the architecture is much broader. I developed these protocols with fervent crypto-anarchists who saw the idea of a “filter as a jurisdiction” as their advantage. They are applied to self-organized communities, meaning that central governing bodies are not needed; delegative democracy can be abolished, for example, and direct e-voting can be implemented on the same blockchain.

One of the problems I pointed out is that it is mistaken to believe we can do without third parties. It’s just that right now the main third party is the state in the form of a registry holder. But the registry itself no longer needs to be “held.” Blockchain performs this function. All that remains is to replace registrar officials with a decentralized system of validators in various fields. But the most important thing is the resilience of this model to all kinds of oppression. In my scientific work, I describe how it is possible to resist a potential digital dictatorship.

At the blockchain level, a digital dictatorship will not be able to prevent anything. People can write anything into blockchains, whether it is legal or not—it doesn’t matter, it is simply a repository where all facts are recorded. As I explained, above the blockchains, we have a system of “filters,” meaning that what we consider legal goes into the general pool—into the current registry of property rights and civil status. But no one holds this database. Since the protocol is the same for everyone, anyone who wishes to look into the database (there may not be one general one, but many specialized ones: civil registry, land cadastre, etc.) downloads the bundle of blockchains and applies this protocol on top of them.

As long as we trust the authority, we use the protocol, apply it on top, and all of us, independently of each other, receive the same database locally on our PCs. Legitimatization occurs through the voluntary acceptance of the protocol. Elements of the protocol (smart laws and court decisions) are also recorded in the blockchain. But if the authority oversteps, this entire superstructure can be demolished, and the data in the blockchain will not be affected in any way (all facts, whether legal or not, are recorded there, including illegal decisions by officials and courts). And as a result of a reboot of power, a new image of justice and law can be applied to all those old records. If official Bob seized land from Alice, then after the overthrow of the authority, the new government simply wipes out the old database, creates new filters, and rescans the blockchains with the new filters. Under the new rules, Alice is restored to her rights by simply declaring the record of the seizure of the plot invalid.

Continuing the theme, here is a short video about CBDCs and central bank cryptocurrencies, which are not cryptocurrencies at all, but a complete lie.

https://youtu.be/bVFmpHaoBDA

The main mistake of ancaps

Bitarch’s Column

In her recent post, Ancap-chan wrote that she is not convinced by my arguments regarding the necessity of an absolute NAP. Unfortunately, such a misunderstanding of facts and inconsistency of positions is constantly encountered among many libertarians. Since Ancap-chan was not convinced by the real threat of a global catastrophe (the example with the virus), she should be convinced by a stronger threat in the understanding of any libertarian — the impossibility of realizing a free society (panarchy and ancap) without the adoption of an absolute NAP. Without it, ancap is indeed a utopia. Here is why:

1) The study by Jack Hirschleifer on the stability of anarchy, recognized in the scientific community, mentions, among other things, the scenario of the emergence of a “military hegemon” (which is nothing other than the appearance of a stationary bandit — the state) when the uniform balance of violence potential (BVP) in society is disrupted. And where a uniform BVP exists, coercion through physical violence is impossible by definition.

2) If someone in society can be forced through violence to pay compensation, then similarly, they can be forced to pay taxes — technically, there is no difference at all! And where there are taxes, welcome back to estatism! Mikhail Svetov understands this perfectly, which is why he repeats on every stream: we must get rid of bad tools, destroy the “One Ring” (which is nothing other than the ability to apply aggressive physical violence for one’s own benefit regardless of the goals — it is simply a tool, moral categories play no role here).

3) Everyone’s understanding of justice is different. For a member of the “Socialist” ECU, organizing a strike is a heroic act; for the “Classlib” ECU, it is a crime. Suppose a worker — a citizen of the “Classlib” ECU — organized a strike, the employer sued, and he was sentenced to pay an unaffordable compensation, which essentially means being sent into slavery. He asks the “Socialist” ECU for protection, and they agree. What are your actions?

(a) If you recognize the absolute NAP, then all is well — at most, businesses from the “Classlib” ECU will no longer deal with him.

(b) If you do not recognize it — you are a corpse yourself, even if you have nothing to do with this case. “Classlib” sends security forces to the defector, “Socialist” security forces counterattack, “Classlib” launches missiles at military targets and the main office of “Socialist,” and they respond using WMDs. You will be very lucky if it is only tactical nuclear weapons. But nuclear weapons are complex and expensive, so most likely, a global pandemic of a truly serious virus with 30-50% mortality breaks out, and the virus tests the immune system already inside your body.

4) Before the appearance of WMDs and the doctrine of deterrence (John von Neumann’s M.A.D.), such a conflict between ECUs (“protection agencies,” tribes, phratries) always led to the formation of the state familiar to us, with giant extensive borders like those of Russia. Although I dislike many of Robert Nozick’s arguments, he was right here. You don’t recognize the absolute NAP — welcome back to the state!

5) Suppose we admit that violence cannot be used against an ECU, but why can it be used against one person? And why not against 10? Where is the line?! In panarchy, the ability to create your own ECU and leave the jurisdiction of the previous one is the basis of the model’s existence; without this, panarchy is impossible. Just as in ancap, there is “individual sovereignty”: one person equals one state in the modern sense. And sovereign states, as we well know, do not use violence against each other, otherwise they are not sovereign at all.

6) The world of “John Wick” will not appeal to the majority of the population. Whatever you say, even to me, a moderate state like Sweden seems a more attractive option than living in such a hell under the mafia. For most people, even more so; accordingly, the attractiveness of such an “ancap” is zero!

7) Finally — the proof of history itself. Thus, the examples of ancap in the past loved by many libertarians — medieval Ireland and Iceland — did not end their journey because of some typical ancap problems that are constantly discussed (roads, courts). But for a banal reason — they were conquered. But this did not happen by chance and was quite expected. If these societies had been ideologically voluntarist, they would have purposefully fought against aggressive violence, created cultural works, methodologies, and technologies for this purpose, and most importantly — carried these values to the whole world. In that case, the English themselves would have expelled Cromwell from society at the first attempt to initiate aggressive violence in his youth, and Ireland would still be ancap today.

By the way, in some societies, women’s rights sometimes appeared spontaneously, but then disappeared when conquerors or a new cruel leader arrived. Globally, however, women’s rights became a new normality, a given for all, only in the 20th century after the directed activity of suffragettes. It is the same with ancap — for it to become a reality and not disappear in a second, directed activity to combat aggressive violence is needed; i.e., the absolute NAP must become the new normality of life.

Money, a continuation of the discussion

I am grateful to Grigory Bazhenov for continuing the discussion about the future of money. Cross-posting on Telegram is a somewhat autistic format for conducting a conversation, but what can you do—it’s a quirk of the platform.

Consumer inflation in the USA.

Here is my quote from our discussion in the YouTube comments:

If people are sitting at home in quarantine, then the production of consumer goods and services will decrease one way or another. Meanwhile, governments are proposed to subsidize people’s lost wages, meaning they will have money to go to the store, but goods will appear there in smaller quantities. In other words, either the government regulates prices, as already announced in Russia, and gets a shortage, or it doesn’t regulate, and gets price increases.

After some time, I read in a post by the authoritative Americanist Dudakov:

The forecasts of economists, who predicted that after the epidemic the USA and other Western countries would experience a jump in consumer inflation for the first time in 40 years, are coming true.

The spike in meat prices served as an illustration there, but the problem is much broader. I had not read the economists’ forecasts mentioned by Malek, and I made my own forecast based on the simplest logic. To be fair, I thought governments faced a dilemma—regulate prices or accept their growth. It turned out that Trump resorted to a third option—direct directive management of production.

However, the assumed rapid recovery of developed economies will most likely lead to the fact that prices for temporarily underproduced consumer goods will return to values close to pre-crisis levels. So, on this relatively unimportant issue, I see little sense in debating for long.

The role of Bitcoin

My original question to Grigory was formulated as follows:

How will an economy behave in which money created in a fractional reserve banking system and money that does not provide for fractional reserve circulate in parallel on comparable scales?

I am not an economist, and I was interested to know the opinion of professionals about how the behavior of a system with the proposed parameters would look. Alas, instead of an answer, I received assurances that Bitcoin’s capitalization today is too small, its volatility is too high, it cannot be used as money, it is poor as a hedge asset, and so on. In short, I was told about today’s Bitcoin, not about a hypothetical situation in which its capitalization has already reached values comparable to the money supply of global reserve currencies, or at least gold.

Well, for now—yes, I fully agree that Bitcoin is more volatile than gold, that it is a poor hedge asset, and that its liquidity is lower than that of the dollar (although on the global market, Bitcoin’s liquidity is much higher than that of the Russian ruble). Today, the role of Bitcoin is less an instrument for short-term speculation and more an instrument for long-term investment. For someone who bought Bitcoin five years ago, it doesn’t matter much how much today’s rate jumps, because they have been firmly in the green for a long time. Similarly, for today’s buyer, it doesn’t matter much at what price they buy if they intend to hold Bitcoin for at least five years. They will be in the green anyway. If Grigory disagrees with this statement, it would be interesting to read his arguments.

However, even in that unlikely situation where the long-term trend of the BTC/USD currency pair turns from growing to horizontal or even falling, Bitcoin retains its significance as digital peer-to-peer cash—that is, value that can be passed from hand to hand via communication channels without using unreliable intermediaries such as state-regulated banks or transfer systems. However, my question to Grigory concerns only that hypothetical situation where the capitalization of BTC and the volumes of trade in it have already grown significantly—not the current picture, which we already know.

Unsecured obligations and fractional reserve

Separately, there is a post by Artem Seversky stating that money is an anti-commodity, and that issuing loans from own savings is inefficient, and it is much more sensible to issue loans with money created out of thin air. I see no reason to forbid anyone from giving others unsecured obligations; it is quite enough for me that secured and unsecured obligations cannot be confused, and beyond that, let market mechanisms work.

For example, I can use Bitcoins in settlements, and if I receive a Bitcoin loan, it is only because the lender actually had those Bitcoins on hand before kindly lending to me. Or I can issue my own ancap-tokens, tie their price to a single commissioned article—and sell tokenized obligations for creating texts to anyone willing in exchange for consumer goods. This would be an unsecured obligation, but what does fractional reserve have to do with it? Fractional reserve is if someone buys a hundred of my tokens and issues a thousand of their own, with an obligation to exchange them for mine upon first demand.

Franklin looks at the gypsy physical Bitcoin as an unsecured obligation

Libertarian Ethics of Coronavirus

Evil Pechenka

Original publication on tjournal.ru

An attempt to understand why quarantines and lockdowns are needed, how this looks from a libertarian’s perspective, and what to do in all this mess.

What happens if the epidemic is not contained?

Currently, there is a COVID-19 epidemic, the WHO has declared a pandemic, many countries are closing for quarantine (“Lockdown” — a ban on movement), and the economy is losing money. Many are asking: is this actually necessary? All these inconveniences, restrictions on freedoms, damage to companies, extra power for governments—is it justified?

Let’s look at what would happen if absolutely nothing was done.

According to our estimates, in the absence of interventions, COVID-19 would lead to 7 billion infections and 40 million deaths worldwide this year.

“Global impact of COVID-19 and mitigation and suppression strategies“, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London.

So, 40 million will die, 7 billion will fall ill (almost the entire population of the Earth) — this means something like 0.57% of the population will perish. That’s a significant figure, but it’s not 80%, not 50%, and not even 10%.

Who are these people?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics

We see that these will be, predominantly, elderly people.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics

And also those with comorbidities: cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, cancer, hypertension.

So what does that mean? Sick elderly people will die, and the economy will not be particularly affected? Yes, that’s roughly how it works out.

Then why is quarantine needed?

It’s very simple:

If a suppression strategy is applied at an early stage (at 0.2 deaths per 100,000 population per week) and maintained, then 38.7 million lives can be saved.

“Global impact of COVID-19 and mitigation and suppression strategies“, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London.

That’s why. There is no vaccine, effective treatment is impossible, so there is such a measure — limiting contacts, which at the early stage of spread will help save nearly 97% of sick elderly people, according to the developed model.

So let’s understand — restricting movement is not about the economy, it’s about saving elderly people, most often those with comorbidities. The economy will not notice their absence.

What should libertarians do?

Libertarianism is not about ethics. Therefore, when we say “libertarian,” we are saying nothing about ethical norms or morality. On the other hand, we can expect a certain attitude toward the epidemic from libertarians.

Libertarianism suggests that each individual takes responsibility for themselves and their own life, rather than handing it over to a “rational government that knows best”; therefore, a libertarian is more independent and takes more measures on an individual basis.

A libertarian will likely make the necessary financial savings for a crisis, stock up on food, and purchase personal protective equipment in advance. This is very rational in order to ensure the safety of the object of responsibility — oneself.

Perhaps a libertarian will participate in various social initiatives: helping other community members, spreading truthful information, protection methods, and hygiene rules. Society is the area in front of the libertarian’s house, and like a good homeowner, they want to keep it clean and orderly.

It is quite possible that a libertarian will oppose attempts by the state to introduce stupid restrictions or excessively expand its powers, for example, banning marriage registrations or introducing total surveillance.

Will a libertarian follow a quarantine or lockdown? Most likely, they are already following it, as they don’t wait for “mom to say what is and isn’t allowed,” but make decisions themselves. And despite the fact that a libertarian opposes the form of communication “government ordered — people complied,” nevertheless, these bans changed nothing in their life.

Can a libertarian say “let the elderly die, the economy is more important”? Theoretically, they can; libertarianism is not about ethics. But such behavior is dangerous to the lives of others. In the event of causing harm, they will bear the burden of fines and other types of compensation, not to mention the reputational costs.