Тег: Forecasts

The Problem of Cartel Collusion in the Sphere of Protection under Ancap

Mancur Olson, in “The Logic of Collective Action,” proved that small groups with concentrated interests always win the coordination game against a diffuse majority due to the free-rider problem. Three CEOs will agree over dinner; a million customers never will, because each rationally waits for others to take the risk first.

What specific mechanism in ancap prevents a cartel agreement between two or three of the largest protection agencies to divide territories?

Konweni

This is a question that also concerned David Friedman. In the chapter “The Mechanics of Freedom,” concerning economies of scale, he reasons that in the law enforcement market, there seems to be a more pronounced positive economy of scale than he initially thought, which in turn increases the likelihood of a cartel agreement.

It seems to me that the cause of this excessive pessimism is the overestimation of the importance of direct armed protection in the security market. Literary descriptions of the security market under ancap are filled with some kind of universal protection agencies that are responsible for security in general across the most diverse aspects and scale easily. Of course, such an initial monopoly, already given in the problem statement, leads an honest analyst to conclude that such agencies will tend to grow significantly and enter into cartels, and their impact on people will be completely total, making the sale of such security services terribly dangerous for clients, as it is only one step away from total enslavement.

But where will these protection agencies come from? Who will be their clients, and what services will they buy from them?

Suppose I don’t live in peaceful Montenegro, where every house has a legal shotgun plus a couple of black guns left over from the war, but, say, in some place like Brazil. I have reasons to fear street attacks, car theft, and break-ins at my home. And then, a startup opens in the city that is ready to serve me, even if I wander into the favelas. What does such a startup need, within the technologies relevant at the time of writing this post? To reach an agreement with the company that owns the lamp posts to place cameras on them, as well as landing pads for drones with a charging function. Then, AI tracks suspicious actions, such as breaking into a house door or a car; a drone takes off from the nearest pole and demands a justification for the legality of the actions. In the case of an aggressive response, it applies measures of influence to the suspect, for example, firing a taser, after which it calls a live squad to process the detention. Similarly, in the case of an attack on a person: it flies in, demands they stop, reasons with those who ignore the instruction, waits for the squad, and returns to the nest. And then comes the court proceeding regarding how much to recover from the aggressor.

After working in this market for six months, the startup is surprised to find that its services are becoming less in demand because the city has become noticeably safer. And what, should they now start harassing me clandestinely so that I renew my subscription? No, of course not; they will simply make the subscription cheaper, and the drones that spend most of their time idle will be used, for example, for delivering pizza.

And what about peaceful Montenegro—do I not need protection agency services there at all? Of course I do. I need it so that when I break my leg while hiking in the mountains, brave rescuers in a helicopter fly to me and pull me out of that hole. Or pull me out of a car that flew off a cliff. Or find me in the sea when a storm carries me far from shore on a SUP board. Or get a cat down from a tree.

You realize that a Brazilian security startup won’t be able to enter the Montenegrin market because that market is completely different? Protection agencies are doomed to locality due to the local nature of threats, and are also doomed to a small size because the nature of threats also tends to change. It is harder for a large company to change, which means inefficiency, and inefficiency means saying goodbye to market share.

But surely there are functions for protection agencies that would be in demand globally? Of course there are, but these are specialized functions. For example, to find someone anywhere on planet Earth who owes me a vast amount of money and refuses to return it. Or a person who killed my mother and knows that I would like to burn him on her funeral pyre because she will need a servant there. Such agencies will not sell a subscription for service; they will have to take on rare one-off orders, as this market is too specific. It is impossible to build global dominance with the prospect of bending anyone to your will and subjecting them to your sinister market power based on this.

And what about the prospect of an external armed invasion? Shouldn’t private military companies be the backbone of any respectable social order if it wishes to call itself ancap? Shouldn’t such companies unite into a mega-cartel dictating its will to all of humanity? To the great regret of the adepts of this branch of human development, in peacetime, the peaceful average citizen is not inclined to finance the military. He doesn’t need war; he doesn’t buy it. An invasion army can only be equipped if you establish taxation on your territory. However, a militia for protection against an invasion army organizes itself in the presence of a free market—quickly, efficiently, and not too expensively, as shown by the experience of at least the Ukrainian war.

On Futurism of War: Discussion

Atomic Cherry uploaded a four-part article cycle for his paid subscribers titled “On the Futurology of War”, and he sent me the drafts in Word. There was a brief discussion afterwards, but I’ll have to prepare a short overview of the cycle, where I partially restate the author’s opinion and partially supplement it.

The cycle briefly describes how a professional army, with the invention of nationalism in the 19th century, mutated into mass conscripted armies, and during the Cold War, due to the second demographic shift, there was a renewed trend towards professionalization. It also describes changes in military doctrines, from competition about who can outmaneuver the other, to the idea of a general battle, and then to total war, from which offshoots of information, hybrid wars, etc., later detached themselves.

The key contradiction that led to the crisis of modern wars, the author sees in this dilemma. On one hand, nationalism is still quite strong, and it intensifies even more when an invasion takes place, so it’s relatively easy to mobilize a large, motivated contingent for defense. On the other hand, most countries have already undergone the second demographic shift, have negative demographics, and gathering a motivated army of aggression is difficult. Thus, nationalism inevitably dictates that the aggressor follow the doctrine of total war, but demographics don’t allow them to draw an endless supply of human resources. Moreover, international humanitarian rhetoric forces them to be shy about blatant genocide, if, of course, the war is on the front pages of international media.

In light of this dilemma, the author describes several scenarios.

  • In countries where the second demographic transition has not yet occurred and a lack of industrial power prevents conducting a total war in the manner of the World Wars, low-tech genocide is taking place. Examples are primarily focused on Africa.
  • If the aggressor has overwhelming technological superiority, we have a war in which it destroys the enemy’s military and civilian infrastructure remotely, and the phase of ground operations either follows after complete suppression of resistance or does not occur at all. The most successful example of such a war is the bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo conflict, when bombings alone were enough to bring the enemy out of the war and convince it to change its political regime.
  • The aggressor may also solve the problem of a lack of motivated living force by outsourcing military tasks to private companies. This has been actively used in the Middle East and continues to be applied in Africa. However, the loyalty of mercenaries is tied to the economy, and the feasibility of their use is largely determined by the economic tasks they solve, so it often comes down to nothing more than power control over objects generating income.
  • Finally, in a situation where opponents are comparable in strength but cannot ensure a full-scale total war of the scale of Korea, positional confrontation occurs, examples of which are the Iran-Iraq and Ukrainian wars. The latter is particularly interesting because it is a war of states that have already undergone the second demographic transition.

Discussing the articles, I noted that they somehow focus on the fact that total war remains the only way to resolve interethnic conflicts by force, while there is also another way – eliminating the ruling elite of the enemy. To this the author replied that Hamas’s leadership had already been destroyed several times and it didn’t help. It seemed to me, however, that for countries with a negative demographic, such a method should still be relevant. Understandably, he was referring to removing Putin: the regime is quite personalized, the population is sufficiently apathetic, therefore eliminating the first face should, in my opinion, make the regime much more willing to negotiate. Atomic Cherry argued that the Russian regime is not so personalized, and that a no less frozen character will come to Putin’s place, who will continue the same policy, and in the worst case there would be many such frozen characters, they would arrange a full-scale civil war, and then it would be like with the Soviet Union, which calmed down after the citizen and went to seize the world.

Well, of course, then the Maduro takeover happened, a regime that wasn’t particularly personalized – and the country is obviously experiencing depopulation. So we’re both thrilled to observe this natural experiment: will this methodology work or won’t it? Will old-fashioned nationalism prevail, or postmodernism? If the latter, then a total war looks like a viable alternative, and that’s definitely a plus. And the next important precedent in the history of wars will be the forceful elimination of a nuclear dictator. I, of course, am betting that this won’t lead to a nuclear war, and that the world is almost ripe for this revelation.

Murray Rothbard and the End of Socialism

I was approached by the founder of the “Molinariy” project, for whom I had already translated one of the chapters of “Evenings on Saint-Lazare Street,” written, in fact, by Gustave de Molinari, the author of the key idea of anarcho-capitalism—namely, the private production of security in a free competitive market, similar to any other consumer services. Molinariy consists of a Telegram channel, which at the time of this publication has 70 subscribers, a Substack with a whopping six subscribers, and a YouTube channel with 1.13 thousand subscribers. This asymmetry is due to two factors. First, YouTube promotes channels through a suggestion system, while Substack and Telegram do so far less effectively. Second, the primary content of Molinariy is video content, while the auxiliary text channels are used to store additional materials and alternative formats for delivering the main content. Thus, we come to the essence of the request. I was asked to give my opinion on the Russian translation published in Molinariy of a 1989 lecture by Murray Rothbard regarding the global political agenda of that time, primarily the collapse of the socialist camp.

The video is posted on YouTube, while on Substack and in Telegram, a transcript of the speech and comments on it are provided.

Rothbard begins with a brief overview of the history of socialism: how it appeared in Europe in the 19th century, how and why it gradually gained popularity, how liberals toward the end of the 19th century felt a sense of doom because socialist ideas had completely seized the masses, and how in the 20th century socialism finally had the opportunity to be embodied in practice. He then notes a phase-shifted movement of ideas: people in the socialist bloc countries were fed up to their teeth with this collectivist system and dreamed of capitalism, while Western intellectuals managed to maintain an untouched admiration for socialism throughout the decades because they had not truly tasted it in practice.

It turns out that there is only one way to prompt people to abandon an externally attractive but false idea: let them try to implement it and wait until the idea is discredited. However, even in this case, the abandonment of the idea will most likely not occur until the first generation of its carriers physically dies out.

Here, a mischievous question occurs to me: could the same happen with ancap? Perhaps it will gradually win over minds, a certain critical percentage of politicians will be permeated by it, and then everyone will be more or less unanimous that it is finally time to let people realize this bright idea. And then, when the first generation of those who dismantle the state in favor of the free market begins to physically die out, the idea will lose its sincere carriers, and in the eyes of the next generation, it will already be discredited. And if at the end of the eighties of the last century, the rulers of the socialist camp countries bewilderedly asked such clever Western experts if there were any reliable ways to carefully abandon excessive state regulation and transition to a free market, then in a hundred years, will free participants of a spiraling libertarian society bewilderedly ask how to carefully find those who are ready to take responsibility for people and start managing them, rather than complaining, “Why on earth would I want to do that?”

Life, of course, has shown that the world is more complex than the picture Rothbard saw at the end of the eighties, but overall his view was quite correct. For instance, he correctly grasped that in American society at that time, people were tired of high government spending under Reagan, and soon under Clinton, the national debt began to decrease. But the momentum did not last long, and now it is growing at unprecedented rates. He identified the problem of “too big to fail” financial institutions, and this problem eventually triggered a global crisis. He correctly noted that China would have problems with a market economy if it were not accompanied by general liberalization. And indeed, thirty years later, China’s economy eventually faltered due to a lack of freedom and an excess of state regulation, but by then it had managed to become a superpower. Finally, Rothbard noted that now that the Cold War between superpowers has ended, this would not be a reason for the US to demilitarize; instead, the government would frantically seek any excuse to fight with anyone or anything.

Rothbard also harshly criticized the Libertarian Party, which practically failed to notice that liberalism had won over socialism and in no way took advantage of the fruits of this victory, focusing instead on its own internal administrative squabbles. In fact, this criticism applies to any libertarian party in any country at any time: libertarians are especially vulnerable to the bureaucratization of their institutions. This applies not only to parties but also to scientific institutes or projects like Mont Pelerin. The thing is, a volunteer comes to an organization for a result, while long-term institutions work for the sake of the process. As a result, enthusiasts burn out and leave, leaving behind those for whom routine is comfortable, and work results are measured by the number of meetings.

And finally, I want to leave hanging the key prediction Rothbard made in his lecture: that the 21st century would be the century of freedom. Of course, compared to the 20th century, in very many aspects and in very many countries, people have become noticeably freer. But regulators have not been idle, and many freedoms that people enjoyed at the beginning of the 21st century are now unthinkable in its second quarter. However, I want to note an interesting pattern here: modern enslavement is not total. It exists only where the state maintains its monopoly. For example, it has turned air travel into a sophisticated mockery. But in the field of money transfers, people endure the mockery only where the transaction must be shown to the state. But if it needs to be hidden, everything is done in two clicks. And so in many industries. People are learning and getting used to bypassing government desires, and they seem to stop longing for a boot over them. Perhaps freedom really is arriving? I want to believe it.

How do you feel about feeding neural networks all the content from the internet, disregarding copyright and without anyone’s consent?

M1inki

It has long been no secret to my readers that the copyright law appears to me as an entity that is hopelessly obsolete and extremely expensive in terms of enforcement, and therefore will immediately wither away as soon as the state ceases to carry out this very enforcement. However, with the appearance of large language models, all grounds have emerged to believe that copyright will wither away even and significantly sooner than the state.

There are various arguments in defense of copyright. There is the utilitarian one: if everyone takes someone else’s content for free, the incentive to compose this content will vanish, and that is the end of progress. There is the objectivist one: a person has a right to the product of their mind, and damn it, because that’s what Ayn Rand said. There is the ethical one: labor must be paid for.

And then it turns out that to train another, more advanced version of a large language model, it needs to be fed the entire corpus of texts ever created by humanity, and it will devour them and ask for seconds. If this is not done, then a promising direction of information technology development will hit a dead end. Those training the model are not concerned with the artistic merits of the text. For them, whether it is the Bible or a Harry Potter fanfic—it is simply text possessing a key quality: written by a human. Knowledge of the Bible is more important for a language model, but only for the reason that, firstly, it is more voluminous, and secondly, references to it are far more frequent in other texts and in user queries.

And that’s it, we have immediately lost the utilitarian argument, because it is precisely for the sake of progress that texts need to be fed to the neural network. In exchange, we have acquired very wealthy lobbyists for the abolition of copyright, since companies developing large language models can quite well compete in terms of capital size with digital publishing houses. Moreover, even if for particularly widely circulated texts the rightsholders manage to defend the right not to acquaint LLMs with them, who wins from the fact that in response to “summarize such-and-such story by Stephen King” the chatbot will answer “I don’t know a single work by this author, let me instead summarize such-and-such story by David Friedman”? Surely it won’t be Stephen King’s publishers nor Stephen King himself who will benefit from such a thing.

How will content for training neural networks be obtained? Very simple. Content is usually already physically present on the web in free access; it just has a “pirated” label, and therefore law-abiding companies have to pretend it doesn’t exist. However, this is too flimsy a little fence, and it won’t stop those who consider themselves entitled to step over it. The only person a neural network won’t get is some Rodion Belkovich, because he in principle does not post his books on the web, even for money))) This is a huge loss for the future interlocutors of intellectual chatbots, but what can be done, humanity has lost many valuable texts throughout its history, shit happens.

War under ancap

I recently came across an interview of Evgeny Volnov by Mark Solonin.

Briefly: it describes the organization of a business process for the decentralized volunteer production of consumables to supply the army. Toward the end, Solonin inevitably reflects on libertarianism, so it’s worth me reflecting a bit as well.

The question that concerns me is: can an ancap community already provide all the necessary ingredients for conducting a full-scale war?

Volunteers are capable of mass-purchasing everything necessary for logistics, nutrition, and daily living on the free market and delivering it to the combat zone. The production of small arms and explosives are developed civilian industries. In the absence of government orders, they will not wither away, and in conditions where the state is not getting in the way, they are capable of responding to increased demand by increasing production. Distributed production, similar to what was described in the interview, is capable of saturating the army with light combat mechanisms. Heavier specialized mechanisms can also be produced by volunteers; it’s just that 3D printers on a balcony will no longer suffice—small workshops will be needed instead. The Ukrainian war demonstrates to us that this is also not a problem. Such mechanisms also include long-range drones, including high-speed ones.

Private entities already know how to provide communications and satellite intelligence data excellently.

What about people? Volunteer units are performing excellently at the front and, compared to their state counterparts, demonstrate far fewer problems finding people willing to join them. The better the unit’s reputation, the higher the competition.

Coordination between units is also showing results at least as good as state chains of command, and authoritative commanders are capable of rapidly expanding their sphere of influence, taking responsibility for increasingly larger areas of work.

What private suppliers are not ready to provide today is manned combat aviation. However, today a combat aircraft is de facto a platform to lift a radar and missiles into the sky, and then to ensure that the pilot sees the radar data and launches missiles accordingly. A pilot is no longer needed to perform high-level aerobatics during an aerial dogfight between planes. Given a stable communication channel, the pilot can actually be on the ground, and a stable communication channel can be ensured if there are many planes in the air forming a relay network. A plane’s radar is something comparable in complexity to a Starlink terminal—it also needs to track multiple satellites and somehow make sense of a jumble of signals. That is, a private entity can produce it without an exorbitant price tag. Consequently, under ancap, a combat aircraft looks like a plump propeller-driven carrier of several missiles and many drones, flying in swarms that hover in the air around the clock, analyze the situation a couple of hundred kilometers from the swarm’s perimeter, and clear out everything interesting they find—and as fuel and/or ammunition are exhausted, they fly back to base in automatic mode, calling for a replacement in advance. However, this is still an unrealized fantasy.

Two questions remain.

First, motivation. States are breeding grounds for patriotism, and patriots are precisely the fuel of war. Will an ancap community be patriotic enough to organize large-scale resistance against a state? The example of the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine shows that the chances are quite high: the primary resistance to the sudden attack in areas where hostilities had not occurred since 2014 was mainly volunteer-based, and at the very least, it thwarted the blitzkrieg.

Second, economic sanctions. Sanctions are an insult to the element of the free market. They are imposed by states, and states monitor their compliance, while the market ensures that sanctions work poorly. It can be stated with considerable confidence that sanctions as a tool for influencing an opponent under ancap will have an extremely weak effect, representing isolated examples of refusing deals for moral reasons. Simply put, some will be actively donated to and worked for out of conviction, while others will be provided services only for good money. Since each side may have a quite diverse composition, there will be both volunteers and mercenaries on both sides. And victory will go to the side that is more effective in this resource confrontation. But in the long run, efficiency will be determined by how many ideological and talented people work for the victory of one side or another. And this, in turn, will depend on whose side the majority believes justice lies.

How would private military companies act under anarcho-capitalism?

Mauser

Anarcho-capitalism is a free market plus the decentralization of power. A private military company under ancap is a company operating in a free market to solve military tasks—that is, tasks arising from conflicts where people are willing to kill.

It is very easy to imagine the activities of private military companies during a society’s war of liberation against the state. Something similar to how this looks could be observed in the initial stage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in those areas where the state was practically inactive, yet defense tasks were nonetheless being solved. What is characteristic of such a war? The emergence and decentralized coordination of numerous startups focused on three types of tasks: direct combat operations, supplying those on the front line, and crowdfunding to finance the first two. If the war drags on, the supply task becomes more complex, and a separate industry emerges for the development of new means of warfare.

But once ancap dominates the world, all this flourishing complexity is a heroic past. The grandfathers fought their wars. Military tasks become much more local; the duration and frequency of military conflicts decrease. Thus, private military companies under ancap will operate in survival mode. They will have to exert significant marketing efforts just to justify why they still exist at all, and many will prefer to liquidate instead, since there are many peaceful tasks on the market that will bring a much more significant income with far less effort.

Believe me, you wouldn’t want to work as a PMC employee under ancap. No romanticism, no heroism, very few actual tasks, existing merely as a formality, in conditions where people look at you askance and wonder why you even exist, and if you wouldn’t accidentally like to create a new state, because you seem kind of aggressive—maybe you need a little injection. So, I fully admit that almost no military companies will remain at all under ancap. There will be gamers. There will be reenactors. There will be some kind of brutal sport. There will be fans organizing into teams to vent aggression on one another under the pretext of supporting sports teams. There will be various book theorists imagining what war could be like under current material and technical conditions.

The production of specialized military equipment will inevitably be shut down. Old stocks will be gradually disposed of, and those that make no sense to dispose of will eventually become obsolete anyway. Cheap mass-market items for the civilian market can be adapted for war using blue electrical tape if necessary, but engaging in this—and especially starting to produce more serious military tools—will only happen in the event of a real war whose duration exceeds at least a couple of months. And where would this real war come from?

A mass war under ancap would require a combination of two factors. First, the appearance of a sufficient number of sweet summer children convinced that war is a fun festival of courage. Is this possible under ancap? Of course it is, and it is even inevitable. And second, a talented psychopath is needed who can convince them that the world is rotten to the core, society has lost its purpose, and it is time to shake up these bloated pigs so they scream in terror. Is this possible under ancap? Of course it is; you can’t assign a Bitarch to every psychopath.

As for what happens next, that is also generally clear. There will be bewilderment. There will be distrust of news channels, claiming they are creating hype out of nothing. There will be helpless attempts to counteract this by service agencies involved in maintaining order and security. Then, more and more people will begin to realize that they are actually being fought against. Mostly, they will simply flee far away from the danger zone after receiving insurance payouts (if policies still imply coverage for civil unrest risks). But entrepreneurs will emerge who begin to solve the arising problem. And then the market will do its work, and it will be the hour of glory for private military companies. They will emerge from nowhere, attract all the necessary resources, deal with the war, and disappear again.

Such a boring story.

Do you think it is possible in the future for technologies to emerge that will divide humanity into superhumans and serfs, for whom this will not be accessible?

For example, through gene editing, mind uploading, immortality-granting drugs, etc. Where will this lead? Does libertarianism have any original answer to this?

Will such technologies spell the end of the ideas of freedom?

For instance, Mises believes that tyranny collapses precisely because, due to nepotism, the mediocrely capable oligarchs are replaced by their untalented children, leading to such inefficiency that the state becomes unable to perform even the role of a bandit. How do we fight tyrannies in the future if imperfect mortal bandits are replaced by perfect and immortal ones?

Nenavision

Suppose that our technology provides only individual, non-heritable non-aging, and no other superpowers. Simply, there is now an option for an insane amount of money to ensure the absence of age-related degradation of the body.

Let us also assume that access to non-aging is granted only by money. If there were some actor capable of denying access to the technology, one could speculate about a ban on immortality for dictators.

Finally, let us assume there is some factor that prevents the technology from becoming significantly cheaper over time—meaning the proportion of non-aging people in the population will grow very slowly. Otherwise, we would have to consider a rather short transition period before moving to a completely immortal humanity, but the question is about something else entirely.

So, we have a non-aging Putin, and a hundred non-aging billionaires across the rest of the RF. Will much change in the style of governing the country? No. The degradation of politics, and subsequently the economy in the RF, is caused not by Putin’s physical degradation, nor by the shortening of his planning horizons, but on the contrary, by the consolidation of his power and the centralization of all decision-making processes in himself. A dictator may rise on a wave of fighting a certain crisis for which he is most competent, and may even beneficially influence the situation in the country, but other crises require other competencies, and without the rotation of power, the state will quickly lose the early achievements of the dictatorship. Well, except perhaps that the dictator will not lose his passion for feasts and harems over time, so he might become less interested in playing tank games and reading Ilyin.

The same applies to business empires. Will Buffett suddenly understand the power of Bitcoin if he physically strengthens and no longer fears death from old age? No, he will still have his set of time-tested criteria for asset evaluation. Business empires will practically cease to be inherited—well, that means the children of their creators will immediately look for themselves in something else. Perhaps this will even be for the better if the son of a successful investor becomes a talented musician rather than an unsuccessful investor.

In general, I assume that the appearance of such technology will lead to the division of humanity not into superhumans and serfs, but into societies where there is political dynamics and societies where there is none. This division already exists, but currently the border between them fluctuates actively: yesterday’s dictatorship democratizes, yesterday’s democracy slides into shitty putinism. It will become more static: Putin’s Russia or Saudi Arabia will remain stable abscesses, while political regimes with a rotation of power will value their rotation much more.

The same goes for ancaps. A conditional Mikhail Svetov, upon achieving immortality, will not become a more effective conduit for libertarianism; he will inherit all the qualities that limit his effectiveness already now. The attractiveness of libertarianism as a system of views will not change much just because a few chosen ones are able to ensure their immortality. Although, perhaps, ambitious guys might become more intolerant of left-wing ideas because of this, because the more the state takes away, the further away that coveted immortality becomes. Therefore, the attractiveness of economic growth and the investment climate may increase relative to the attractiveness of egalitarian ideas.

Now, if we endow our immortal being with a bunch of other superpowers, then, of course, the changes will be far more serious

40 years ago, SEK3 wrote in the New Libertarian Manifesto that California is ahead of the entire planet in the transition to libertarianism and agorism.

Right now we observe that California is a top statist socialist state in the USA. How did it happen?

L29Ah

I avoided this question for quite a while because I didn’t understand how to provide a detailed answer without falling into a tedious chronicle, which is not so much useless as it is meaningless on its own. Every tax increase and every tightening of regulations had its own unique reason, and digging into them is not the level of a popular channel.

To put it very briefly, California became “Commifornia” because its voters wanted it. It remains in this status now largely despite the will of the voters, but that is usually how socialism works: people try this drug because it is trendy and advertised everywhere, and then it turns out that it is easier to die than to get off it; thus California (as a system of effective resource management for the territory to improve the territory in the interests of its residents) is dying.

It seems possible to get off this drug—the example of Thatcher’s Britain shows this. But relapses are also extremely likely, as shown by the example of modern Britain. Anyway, let us leave the medical metaphors and the abuse of holistic constructs alone. I would like to draw attention to another point.

Generally speaking, Konkin did predict the crisis of the state, because if people had the opportunity to use political methods for the constant and irreversible reduction of state interference, there would be no need for agorism. At the same time, Californian crypto-anarchists indeed seriously pushed humanity toward the implementation of useful agoric technologies, so Konkin’s notion that California would play an important role in the struggle was also justified to some extent.

Thanks to open borders between states, many agorists and libertarians found it easier to bail out to tiny New Hampshire rather than try to turn the tide in massive California; therefore, those who wish to focus on business and legal politics rather than survival naturally leave the leftists alone with the governments they chose, heading where their efforts will bring more benefit. For some reason, Konkin warned against such tactics as a kind of simple and wrong solution, calling it anarcho-Zionism. On the other hand, he also predicted the emergence of certain agoric ghettos where people could effectively resist the state’s attempts to regulate them into oblivion, thanks to the fact that their concentration there would be higher, making it difficult for hostile agents.

In short, Konkin was hardly concerned with the fate of a specific state that was one way or another in the hands of statists, and nitpicking that his territory is not the current locomotive of agorism is like nitpicking Ayn Rand for the absence of Rearden Metal based on an iron-copper alloy in our lives.

What does the AES offer as a replacement for the Central Bank and the dollar?

Anonymous question

There is no consensus on this issue.

There are hardcore supporters of returning to the gold standard with 100% reserves. The arguments of this camp were well articulated by Javier Vernón Cortés (de Soto) in the book “Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles”. In short: there are time deposits, where a person deposits money for a specific term, and the bank has the right to invest it wherever it deems necessary, paying interest for this; and then there are demand deposits, where a person deposits money for safekeeping, retaining the right to withdraw it at any moment—in this case, the person should pay for the convenient service, and the bank has no right to do anything with such deposits other than store them. If demand deposits are lent by the bank to someone as a loan, then this is fraud, and divine wrath shall descend upon the bank owners. Thus, based on this strictly legal approach, supporters of the gold standard demand the return of monetary gold circulation, as well as gold-backed banknotes and gold-backed settlement accounts—then the credit expansion carried out by central banks will end, and humanity will have a single deflationary currency, as it did for a relatively short time in the 19th century, and developed quite well.

There are supporters of free banking. They argue that the main thing is to abolish central banks and overall regulation of the banking sector; let the banks decide for themselves what money to emit and how to back it, and then let the market decide which currencies are actually more convenient for people. This idea was defended in slightly different forms by Friedrich Hayek in the book “The Denationalization of Money,” and David Friedman also touched upon this theme in “The Machinery of Freedom” (although he does not belong to the AES). The forecasts of free banking supporters also differ slightly. Some argue that everything will eventually come back to the same gold standard with 100% reserves, because those who want to defraud will quickly find that their reserves begin to melt as trust in their currency is lost. Others say that 100% reserves are not needed by anyone, and if a currency offers convenience of settlement and reasonable emission rates, then no one will worry about bank runs.

Finally, there are the prophets of hyper-bitcoinization, among whom I mention Saifedean Ammous and his book “The Bitcoin Standard.” He argues that due to the gradual growth of the network effect, as well as the stock-to-flow ratio, Bitcoin will become the global measure of value. Further, again, there are options. The first—there will be nothing but Bitcoin, the great and luminous, except that it will operate in different protocol layers according to several different rules. The second option—alternative means of payment will persist, but the basis of their value will be backing by Bitcoin reserves. The reserves might be 100%, or they might not. The main argument in favor of this particular scenario is that here, no one is abolishing central banks by any decrees; they will supposedly wither away on their own.

What will happen if Mikhail Svetov wins the 2024 elections and becomes the president of Russia?

〇人三厂 (question accompanied by a donation of 0.00002602btc )

Before answering the question of what would happen in the event of a victory, it is important to understand under what conditions such a victory could occur at all.

Part 1. Before the elections

One could devise many scenarios of varying degrees of implausibility, but they would all share one common premise: both Putin and Navalny are physically removed from the race before the elections. That is, they do not simply decline to participate for one reason or another, but they have no possibility of influence whatsoever. Simply put, they die. Let us assume a rather crude scenario: Navalny dies in colony from COVID, and Putin dies of a stroke. Thus, we are not inventing any terrorist organizations or lone wolves, but leaving the realization of this historical coincidence to the will of Mother Nature. Mishustin becomes the Acting President; he tries to seize the reins, fails, and the Federal Assembly unexpectedly passes a law that explicitly prohibits the acting president from running. Mishustin is smart enough not to veto it.

New elections are announced. They are preceded by a broad public campaign to repeal the law that strips those involved in the activities of extremist organizations of their passive voting rights. The campaign yields no result, and Navalny’s associates, from Volkov to Guriev, find themselves ineligible—some due to extremism, others due to residence permits. The opposition holds primaries, where the remaining old democrats easily drop out, and in the second round, Svetov defeats Yuneman by a slim margin. Putin’s associates also struggle, and they too have to organize primaries in which Sobyanin loses to Shoigu; dirty scandals break out about how municipal workers voted for one candidate in formation, and conscripts for the other. Things are no less dirty for the Communists, where Zyuganov still hasn’t dared to let anyone run instead of himself. To top it all off, Patrushev is nominated for some reason from Rodina, and Prilepin from A Just Russia. Thus, by the time the signature collection campaign begins, the largest systemic parties are in total disarray, huge public attention is fixed on the elections, and the CEC lacks the political will to cut Svetov off at the start. He receives generous funding from both liberal business emigrants, like Chichvarkin, Durov, and Khodorkovsky, and from certain entrepreneurs who did not flee under Putin, starting with Potapenko. This proves sufficient to collect signatures and get on the ballot.

But is such a setup enough for a libertarian to win the presidential election in Russia? No. Therefore, let’s add two more factors. First, extremely successful liberal reforms—for example, in Kazakhstan—which, a couple of years before the Russian elections, provided him with a serious leap, and his successes are currently very well known. Second, Svetov announces a left turn, telling a tale that the super-rich are to blame for all the people’s woes and explaining how he will strip them of their levers of political influence. He also promises to transfer state corporations to a pension fund and pledges to introduce a progressive income tax by abolishing personal income tax for everyone earning less than two minimum wages, while leaving the previous rate for others minus the aforementioned two minimum wages from the taxable base. Furthermore, he announces a 30% reduction in military spending by abolishing the entire conscription system and a 90% reduction in spending on special services—transferring the savings to social budget items. In short, there is plenty of room for libertarian fantasy when writing a radically left program.

Against this backdrop, Zyuganov’s promises of nationalization look not only unconvincing but bland, and reasonable doubts creep in regarding Shoigu’s ability to reduce the army—what stopped him before? To top it all off, for the first time in many years, all candidates participate in debates, and this is where Svetov crushes everyone, demonstrating the highest level of discourse in Eastern Europe. This is how grandmothers on television learn about him, and it secures his victory.

Part 2. After the elections

Svetov comes to power, but he is a president without a party. Elections to the State Duma will not take place until 2026, but he needs to show at least some results. By the way, regarding the State Duma. In 2021, a very small cross-factional group of deputies was formed who managed to get in thanks to smart voting and did not condemn Navalny for it, but instead worked, however poorly, for the voters. After Svetov’s victory, their informal influence increases significantly, and they become conduits for a large number of bills that materialize Svetov’s program. Nevertheless, all these bills progress with difficulty and slowly.

On the other hand, measures where the president can rely on his own orders as Commander-in-Chief are carried out very quickly. Thus, Russian security forces begin to leave Donbas even before the Duma approves a new prime minister. By the way, that becomes Dmitry Potapenko—he didn’t start sending money to Svetov’s headquarters first for nothing. Navalny’s followers demand Milov and Guriev in the government. Milov gets the post of Minister of Energy, and Guriev is appointed to run the pension fund. Kudrin triumphantly returns to the post of Minister of Finance, which ensures that the State Duma becomes slightly more cooperative. Ekaterina Schulmann becomes the Minister of Education. There are many ministries in Russia, and even more worthy people; I am too lazy to fantasize about other posts, but one way or another, the government will soon be updated. The president also introduces a bill for broad amnesty for all political articles, as well as for Article 228. The bill stalls, so Svetov simply issues pardons for the political prisoners. The Federal Agency for State Property Management is transferred to the jurisdiction of the pension fund.

What manages to be done in the Duma?

First, changing the election law once again, continuing the good tradition of not holding two elections under the same rules. The bill is written by “Golos” and introduced by the president. Election deposits are restored, the entry threshold for parties is lowered to 3%, signatures for candidate registration are permitted to be collected electronically via Gosuslugi accounts, electronic and multi-day voting are abolished, the rights of observers are expanded, and, of course, lustration norms for convicts, holders of foreign residence permits and dual citizenship, and those involved in extremism are abolished.

Second, the president guarantees a veto on any law passed in violation of regulations. No more accelerated consideration in three readings at once.

Third, the share of secret budget items drops sharply. Serious public battles take place in the Duma over the budget. Reducing the budget for security agencies is only partially achieved, and the savings are indeed redirected to education and healthcare. Spending on state propaganda is radically cut, and this becomes a problem—as in Yeltsin’s time, the president begins to be attacked via private channels, and he counters them with his own streams.

What is not achieved? Naturally, all lustration plans fail. It is impossible to abolish personal income tax for the poor. It is impossible to abolish even the transport tax, despite it being such a small thing, so it would seem.

After this, in 2025, the president dissolves the Duma and announces early elections. About fifteen parties enter the Duma, including one libertarian party. The largest faction belongs to the Communists—twelve percent. The pace of reforms accelerates after this, but only slightly, because the team of reformers effectively has to form their own coalition for every new bill. Towards the end of his first term, Svetov manages to achieve the adoption of a constitutional norm stating that every new federal law or other regulation, except constitutional ones, must contain an expiration date, which cannot exceed ten years. If the norm is not extended or modified before the end of its term, it automatically ceases to be in effect. At the same time, since the constitution is being amended, a second important edit is adopted: from now on, the president may serve for only one six-year term.

What manages to be done in foreign policy?

The issuance of loans to other countries ceases. All troops are withdrawn from abroad. Ukrainians rejoice, Armenians are sad. Crimea is declared a free economic zone, which has the right to choose in any matter which legislative norms to follow—Russian or Ukrainian. Ukrainian citizens receive the right of free settlement in Crimea, with the granting of voting rights in elections of all levels up to the presidential. Ukrainian political parties receive the right to operate in the territory of Crimea. Residents of Crimea with Russian citizenship receive the right to participate in parliamentary and presidential elections in Ukraine. The border between Russia and Ukraine in Donbas is handed over to Ukrainian control. Ukraine receives a long-term headache in the form of former people’s republics, which must be brought back to a human state. Thanks to this compromise, Russia gradually emerges from most foreign sanctions—all except restrictions on the supply of high-tech weaponry. Its own sanctions, of course, are lifted immediately.

The market for external hydrocarbon supplies is liberalized. The buyer purchases them on the Russian exchange or directly from the producer, after which they choose the exact method to ensure delivery. Thus, the volume of oil and gas pumped through Ukraine is now determined only by how competitive the transit tariffs set by the Ukrainian side are.

Results of the rule

Russia entered a peaceful path and stopped acting foolishly in foreign policy. Internal policy was also rid of the dictate of the security forces. A strong left opposition in parliament did not allow a serious reduction in the tax burden and state spending, however, their character changed to be more social. Under Svetov, Russia remained a country with a low level of public debt and a budget surplus.

In 2030, Mikhail Svetov leaves the post of President and in the same year is elected to parliament, where he leads the libertarian faction. In 2035, he leaves parliament, buys a house in Kamchatka, settles there with his young wife, and leads a private life.