Тег: ecology

On the difficulties of mutual understanding with communists

Imagine the following situation. You are the director of the “Ancapistan” insurance company, which governs a certain territory. I am the speaker for the “Ancomistan” commune (we have no leader, but I am usually entrusted with conducting meetings and going on diplomatic trips on behalf of the commune), which also owns a certain territory. We share a common water border on a lake. Ancapistan is on the right bank of the lake, and Ancomistan is on the left. Almost the entire coastline of Ancapistan, except for a single shipping port, belongs to one private individual who uses the water for his chemical plants. You supply us with fertilizers and complex machinery, and we supply you with agricultural products, timber, and metals.

Then, at one fine moment, the aforementioned private individual begins to delay the replacement of filters, and many toxic substances enter the water. Since we share a common lake, several dozen people in Ancomistan (the lake is our only external water resource, whereas you also have a river on your territory) drink water from this lake, and all of them perish. And here is where it gets interesting. In Ancomistan, negligence resulting in grave consequences is punished by 15-20 years of hard labor for the benefit of the commune or by death by hanging. In Ancapistan, it is punished only by compensating the victims for damages. I hold a meeting where I raise the question of how to assess the damages for compensation. 5% of the communards suggest taking money and placing it in the commune’s account at the bank for international trade, 10% suggest sending the private individual to 15-20 years of hard labor, and 85% suggest the gallows, given the cynicism of valuing lives in money. In the end, the commune issues a death sentence and instructs me to send an extradition request. You offer to compensate for the damages, but I show you the paper with the commune’s resolution and continue to insist on extradition. Upon receiving a refusal, I state that in this case, the commune will completely stop supplying resources to Ancapistan and stop buying from it. If we sever trade relations, Ancapistan will lose one of its markets for selling and buying resources. Besides Ancomistan, the only other raw material territories nearby are in Anprimistan. You can sell finished products to them, but due to their poverty, they will not buy your products at the high price we pay. Also, due to the higher complexity of resource extraction, they will not sell you resources at the low price Ancomistan provides.

Ancomistan itself will simply drill water wells and sign a trade contract with Transgumistan, which sells and buys products at almost the same price but is located slightly further away than Ancapistan. As a result, you will have an economic crisis, while our standard of living will practically remain unchanged. Question: will you extradite the private individual to Ancomistan and thereby violate the NAP regarding him, or will you lose one of your markets for buying and selling resources and find yourself in a deep crisis?

Ancom-kun (question accompanied by a donation in the amount of 0.00023397 BTC)

Thank you for this long and interesting story, which demonstrates the problems a territorial commune may face. Fortunately, Ancapistan is merely an insurance company. We insure lives, real estate, transport, risks of industrial disasters, and so on. The fact that an insured enterprise failed to change filters on time and we did not find out about it (although non-compliance with technical regulations by the insured party is grounds for terminating the contract or revising the premium size due to increased risk) means only one thing: our employee was negligent or was bribed by the insured enterprise. Naturally, this means we fire our agent and revise our own regulations to prevent this from happening again. We also refuse to pay insurance to the insured company and sue it for fraud—they did not perform the procedures required by the regulations but did not inform us, thereby saving on insurance premiums. If other clients approach us for insurance due to the lake pollution (for example, fishermen or travel agencies whose activities are affected), we will have to pay them premiums, after which we will file claims against the enterprise for reimbursement of our losses.

Additionally, it seems we insured the life of the enterprise owner. This contract remains in effect, and we are obliged to prevent attempts on his life within the limit of expenses agreed upon by the insurance premium. So, we either take him under protection or provide him with a comfortable shelter and give him the opportunity to safely negotiate with Ancomistan to settle the claims.

Furthermore, Ancomistan takes a principled stand and insists on executing the businessman who offended them, refusing all his offers of financial compensation, even the transfer of the plant to the commune’s ownership. Therefore, the businessman continues to stay in the shelter and manage the plant from there. When the time comes to renew the insurance contract, we face a dilemma: either refuse the renewal or set an exorbitant price, because we are effectively acting not as an insurer, but as a security company. In the end, we reach an agreement: he continues to pay the bills, and we continue to protect him.

After this, Ancomistan begins to blackmail our other clients, threatening them with the termination of contracts if we do not hand over the criminal. We realize that further protection is impractical and finally terminate the contract with him. The former client, not being a fool, immediately signs a contract with another security company operating in the middle of nowhere, and they organize his evacuation. Then, being physically several thousand kilometers away from the vengeful commune, he continues negotiations with them, because he does not wish to wake up one fine day with an ice pick in his head. But his negotiating position becomes stronger, as it is more difficult for the commune in this situation to pressure his new security company. Therefore, most likely, after some time, you will reach some compromise with him.

The question of your sanctions against my insurance company remains. We protected our client within the framework of the contract, and as for what “extradition” is, we don’t understand it at all, because in our language it is called “kidnapping.” Refusing to protect is one thing, but kidnapping a person and handing them over to some bandits for subsequent execution is something entirely different. Nevertheless, we bear part of the responsibility to the commune because we poorly monitored our agent who was tasked with overseeing the compliance of technical regulations for our client. We offer Ancomistan compensation, and since there is no question of direct guilt in this case, we will most likely reach an agreement. After this, I have a claim against our former employee, but that is a completely different story.

Someone here is asking for trouble…

How are ecological problems solved in an anarcho-capitalist society?

I was arguing with a buddy; he says that in the PRB (Beautiful Russia of the Future), you can’t just take and distribute state land (which is 92% of it) as homesteads, because people will take it, cut down all the forests, sell the wood to China, and then leave. How realistic is this? Will an ecological catastrophe occur?
How are environmental problems solved in an anarcho-capitalist society? I heard there are several books on this topic.

Anonymous Ancap (question accompanied by a donation of 0.00021605 BTC)

If state land were distributed in modern Russia, then after some time, those who invested enough in this land and built a profitable business on it would start having that business squeezed out of them. Foreseeing these obvious consequences, people would be interested in squeezing as much as possible out of the obtained land as quickly as possible, and conducting more or less intensive farming only on a very modest scale, below the radar.

If the same were done in the Beautiful Russia of the Future, where judicial reform has already been carried out, property rights are protected, and there are several precedents of the successful protection of these rights, then it’s a different story. One could clear part of the forest, selling the logs to China, and use the proceeds to purchase wood processing equipment, gradually scaling a normal business, without forgetting to plant new forests to replace those cut down.

Thus, the optimal strategy for an entrepreneur will depend on their planning horizon, which is further the greater their confidence in tomorrow. Confidence, in turn, is strengthened by the presence of institutions that protect property rights.

Now about environmental problems. Ecology is a complex of knowledge and technologies for organizing a comfortable living environment for humans. The greater the solvent demand for such an environment in a specific territory, the higher the probability that the owner of the territory will prefer to invest in increasing the ecological attractiveness of the plot, even to the detriment of the existing business on that plot—because the demand for ecology also allows one to make money.

As for emissions, there is no fundamental difference between a simple garbage dump on someone else’s plot and, say, releasing harmful substances in the form of smoke into the atmosphere. This activity will meet opposition from neighbors, which will be more pronounced the greater their desire to have a healthy ecological environment right here. Were the polluter’s business somewhere on the internet, they could avoid responsibility for a long time, but land cannot run away; it is a large, stationary target. Therefore, anyone who, at their own risk, sets up a smoking factory that bothers the neighbors risks soon being left without a factory, and realizing that it is cheaper to install a filter on the smokestack, they will do so.

One might object, saying that in Africa, the compliance with environmental standards by enterprise owners is not very good. This is because the balance of violence there is not very stable. As long as it is cheaper to protect a factory from an attack than to re-equip it according to the latest word in ecological science, the owner will invest in protection. But in the absence of a state, under conditions of a sufficiently stable and sufficiently wealthy local community, the balance of violence can be maintained for a very long time, which means everything will be OK with the ecology as well.

How will things stand with the environment under ancap?

Environmentalists love to blame capitalism and businessmen for polluting the environment and advocate for market regulation. But are there any normal pro-market environmentalists? What about the implementation of the sustainable development concept under ancap?

анонимный вопрос

I let this question simmer for quite a while, but then by complete chance I had the opportunity to provide an interesting example of a pro-market approach to ecology. Vladimir Zolotoryov, a well-known Kyiv ancap, published a translation of an article by Joaquin Bukay regarding a market-based approach to reducing risks from climate change.

To generalize, the approach looks roughly like this. There are certain risks that depend on some external factors. If these are systemic risks, then information about the risks can be aggregated, and then the possibility to insure them arises. The wider the insurance market for this type of risk becomes, the more money is invested in ways to reduce them, because any insurance company is interested in paying out less on insurance claims.

And, in general, it doesn’t matter at all whether we are talking about the risk of becoming disabled in old age, or the risk of suffering from a hurricane caused by climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. If the risk is real, people will pay for insurance. If it is contrived, the insurance will sell poorly. Many people are willing to buy insurance against a poverty-stricken old age (many states in the 19th-20th centuries realized this and monopolized the pension industry). Those who fear unsustainable development, climate change, and the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano also have a fairly large community.

Imagine the profit: a bunch of people insured themselves against disasters caused by climate change, and then climatologists go and prove that it was a false theory and there are no risks from carbon emissions—that’s it, the collected money doesn’t have to be paid out, beauty! You can invent a new scary story to sell. But the main thing is that everything is completely voluntary, no taxes. That’s how the magic of ancap works.

See those people? Each and every one of them could be insured against Yellowstone starting to erupt right during their tour!