Chapter 58, Welfare and Immigration: The Second Part of the Argument, concludes the fifth part, The Mechanics of Freedom. While in Chapter 14, Friedman argued that labor immigration benefits both the migrants and the citizens, he now focuses on the fact that migrants may pursue the simple goal of living on welfare. He asserts that free migration is precisely what gives the government an incentive to reduce benefits, whereas high immigration barriers allow the level of redistribution to remain high. Thus, for proponents of a small state, it is entirely justified to either start by reducing benefits and then open the gates, or start by easing migration, and then the demand for reducing benefits will inevitably emerge.
It seems to me that Friedman relies too heavily on economics here, failing to consider the factor of populism in democratic countries.
And so, having finished the fifth part, I dove straight into the sixth, and first translated the poetic introduction, so the poems in this book are now seemingly dealt with.
I received a small donation for the translation of Friedman; I took the hint, so here is a fresh chapter.
I published Chapter 56 earlier, together with Chapter 34, since their themes are closely related. So those who wish to read in order can refresh their memory on the topic of national defense and then proceed to Chapter 57.
Original appropriation, a brief excursion into moral philosophy. The chapter is dedicated to answering the question of what grounds libertarians can even have for appropriating that which is not produced, specifically, land. Two approaches are explored: according to Brodie (if it cannot be done, but is very profitable, then it can, provided compensation is paid) and according to Locke (by mixing honey with tar, the owner of the honey claims rights to the entire barrel).
By mixing Locke’s argumentation with his own, the author concludes that the resulting product is barely edible, but in principle capable of serving as a libertarian basis for the appropriation of unproduced resources.
While I was fussing with the translation of Friedman, slowly and sadly posting one chapter at a time, Sergei Ankapov completed his own translation, and is now raising money for a print edition. Since my version of the translation is also close to completion, I will, of course, hurry up now, and soon you will have two options to choose from: a free amateur one and a paid official one, with a preface by the author (although, if the preface is worth it, I will also pull it over to my version in time).
That’s how competition works: because of me, it will be harder for Sergei to raise money, and I will simply be ashamed that I didn’t manage within a shorter timeframe, and thus partially undervalued my own work.
To get a vivid idea of anarcho-individualism, I can recommend listening to such an anarcho-individualist as Alexander Tatarkov. He speaks quite a lot about his worldview. As for us, we will discuss the differences with libertarianism.
The main postulate of an anarcho-individualist is that the individual determines for themselves how to build their life and their relationships with others, and any norms coming from the outside have the status of well-wishes for them; they have every right to fulfill them, take note of them, ignore them, demonstratively violate them, and so on. Naturally, the anarcho-individualist agrees that they bear full responsibility for their chosen line of behavior, but reserves the right to avoid this responsibility. The only thing in which an anarcho-individualist limits themselves is that they do not engage in the construction of power institutions; this is a taboo. Violating this taboo turns them into an ordinary Machiavellian.
It is not difficult to see that an anarcho-individualist, without violating their principles, can coexist with others in a state of Hobbesian war of all against all, sit in a lotus position achieving enlightenment, join any cooperative activity, or engage in ancapism as a private entrepreneur.
The main postulate of libertarianism is the principle of self-ownership. A person belongs to themselves, which is quite close to the views of anarcho-individualists. But this also means the recognition of the institution of property, for if property is completely denied, there can be no talk of self-ownership, and if property is partially denied, it implies the permissibility of encroachments on self-ownership, such as coercion. Therefore, a libertarian, unlike an anarcho-individualist, limits themselves not only in the construction of power institutions but also in encroaching on someone else’s property.
Since libertarianism was invented, the phenomenon of property itself has been analyzed and is now usually interpreted as a whole bundle of various rights. A maximalist approach to property, where it is interpreted as an absolute unrestricted right to dispose of an object, is very convenient for drawing caricatures of libertarianism or criticizing it in other ways. There are a vast number of such attempts in the information field; among the most interesting, I would name the text by Laksi Katala, Fundamental Problems of Anarcho-Capitalism.
Anarcho-individualism is a convenient basic framework in which a person acts when building their relationships from scratch with an unfamiliar environment where the rules are unknown to them, or where rules have not yet been developed.
Libertarianism is the next logical step toward building a peaceful, prosperous society, where people generally recognize each other’s legal capacity, and thus can develop frameworks for determining property rights and their transfer.
I should note that libertarianism is not entirely synonymous with anarcho-capitalism. To understand the differences, I refer the reader to the corresponding chapter of Friedman’s Mechanics of Liberty: Is Anarcho-Capitalism Libertarian?
The new chapter of The Machinery of Freedom, Default Rules, Economies of Scale, and the Stability Problem, is a more in-depth analysis of the possibility of a stateless society’s collapse compared to the first edition of the book. Forty years ago, the author’s mood was more overconfident, but later serious objections were raised against the proposed model, and he had to make a number of clarifications.
The key clarification was the idea that regardless of whether a state exists or not, the social contract is simply a peaceful agreement on which distribution of rights will not provoke people’s desire to violently change the status quo. This echoes, in some ways, my formulation that rights are claims that are tolerated. Then, Friedman adds the apparatus of Schelling points used in several previous chapters and shows that a stateless society is indeed susceptible to the danger of collapse during its formative stage, but if the rules become more or less settled, the resulting inertia will then provide the necessary stability.
I present the translation of another chapter of The Machinery of Freedom, Anarchy and Effective Law. Here, Friedman recalls his description of the legal system in a free market and applies a standard economic efficiency analysis to it. The conclusion is that in the market for law, the benefit of law providers and its enforcers is not always precisely linked to the benefit of the clients of the respective agencies. In other words, ancap does not lead to one hundred percent justice for all, and the field of private law is also subject to market failures (which Friedman analyzes in detail in the previous chapter). Nevertheless, attempts to establish legal norms through political mechanisms are subject to similar failures to a much greater extent, so overall, the market still decides.
The translation of Friedman was recently encouraged by a donation, so here is another chapter of The Machinery of Freedom.
The most common argument in favor of the state from economists is the assertion that external coercion is useful for solving the problem of market failures. Some ancaps, such as Vladimir Zolotorev, simply deny the existence of the phenomenon itself in response, pointing out that if something is not being done, it means it wasn’t wanted that much. Friedman suggests not arguing with the economists, but simply redirecting their argument against the state, showing that it is precisely because of market failures that the state causes so much completely inevitable harm.
By the way, I was recommended a story by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge The Uncontrollables, written in 1985 under a serious influence of The Machinery of Freedom. It presents a textbook plot of “the state attacks Ancapistan.” In general, I enjoyed the author’s style. The story turned out to be part of a larger cycle; I will read it in full in my spare time.
As I promised, I am moving over the two chapters of David Friedman’s new book, Legal Systems Very Different from Our Own, which have already been translated under the editorship of Vladimir Zolotorev. At the same time, I am gradually typesetting the English original by chapters; I will complete this meditative process in a while.
In Chapter 52, A Positive Conception of Rights, David Friedman, using the conceptual framework introduced in the previous chapter, develops the idea of Schelling points and claiming strategies from a model microsociety of two people to a society of arbitrary complexity.
In fact, Friedman introduces more extensively and with more justification the very definition of rights that I regularly use in my texts: rights are claims that are tolerated. It is not surprising that we found such a parallelism in thinking: if it hadn’t existed, I would hardly have undertaken to translate his book after reading literally a couple of chapters.
In the chapter Bargaining in Anarchy, the author analyzes how, in a Hobbesian state of nature where there are no means to compel each other to abide by agreements, these very agreements can arise and be observed at all. In other words, how people exit the state of war of all against all without any state. To explain this, a rather curious concept from game theory is introduced: Schelling points. I don’t know about you, but for me, the material was completely new, so I sincerely enjoyed the process of editing the text.
