Suppose someone you know or a business partner has taken offense at something and has begun to threaten you with the leviathan. Let’s say the laws are also on their side, and they are demanding money or something else from you. You disagree with these demands and believe you are in the right, and you would prefer to ignore state laws, but it is profitable for your counterparty to use them against you. What should you do?
If your kind word does not have enough persuasive power to resolve the conflict privately, there is nothing terrible about threatening to also turn to the state on your part. Its laws are written such that everyone is guilty before it, so your threat is something like resorting to the doctrine of mutual nuclear deterrence.
Describe to them in vivid detail all the problems that you both will face if you start official disputes; tell them that you are ready to go to the end, but would gladly avoid all this mutual disgrace if they, following your lead, show consciousness and refuse to use the state against people.
It doesn’t matter at all what you threaten with. The state will roast one person for unauthorized apartment redevelopment, another for paying staff under the table, and a third for swearing in a public place. Something will definitely be found.
Isn’t it wonderful when even your own minor disagreements can be turned into an act of defiance against the regime!
His idea is that the state in the form of bureaucrats is bad (he agrees with me on this). However, his solution to the problem is different. What if it weren’t bureaucrats, but a computer that would calculate everything perfectly? A computer is not susceptible to corruption. His argument against capitalism is that under capitalism, resources are spent inefficiently, which hinders the development of humanity. He says that in a market economy, scarcity is built-in as a motivational mechanism. That is, there is a shortage of something—this stimulates entrepreneurs who try to satisfy the demand for the scarcity and profit from it. I think this topic needs to be analyzed, if it hasn’t been done already.
анонимный вопрос
There is a common point of view that any IT specialist would prefer to replace any bureaucrat with a single simple script. In a free market, this is exactly what happens: artificial intelligence is replacing various mid-level professionals, mainly those who work with their heads rather than their hands: journalists, lawyers, stock traders, designers, and so on. So technically, there are no problems with abolishing bureaucrats, but there is a reluctance among bureaucrats to be abolished, because the state bureaucracy is the strongest union on Earth.
Therefore, if one implements state administration using artificial intelligence without first abolishing the bureaucrats, it becomes an extremely resource-intensive task that is not even close to the ideals of Jacques Fresco. They will surround the implementation process with a mountain of bureaucratic approvals, demand a certificate with a wet stamp for the execution of any e-government command, and will certainly ensure that everything runs on domestic hardware and domestic software with backdoors for the secret services.
It is far more effective to first abolish the bureaucrats, and when a shortage of administration services arises, the market economy already knows how to solve this task—after all, in a market economy, scarcity is built-in as a motivational mechanism. Thus, entrepreneurs will quickly satisfy the market demand for implementing artificial intelligence to solve coordination tasks.
To be honest, in my view, Fresco is something like an Anti-Keynes. Keynes says that the way out of a crisis is through increasing consumption via state regulation; Fresco echoes him: no, people must renounce their unnecessary needs thanks to state regulation, then resources will be in abundance, and our resource-based economy will thrive! Well, it’s simply Escobar’s axiom in its purest form. But it is not necessary to tell all this to the supporters of Jacques Fresco; it is enough to suggest a sensible market way of realizing their dream, as described in the previous paragraph.
This is approximately how an electronic bureaucrat should look from the point of view of current bureaucrats: an analog interface for signatures, stamps, handshakes, taking bribes, and putting on handcuffs. And dressed according to the dress code.
Human cloning is a long-known natural phenomenon, the consequences of which most of us have encountered without experiencing any undue difficulties. Clones, due to their peculiarities, are loved in fiction—so much so that introducing a clone into a plot is becoming a sign of a certain cliché. Cloned people are actively used in psychological and other medical studies when it is necessary to exclude the influence of genetic differences and focus on environmental factors. In short, the fact that human clones exist is as commonplace as the existence of albinos. So what if they are monozygotic twins; have we never seen identical twins?
At the end of the last century, advanced biotechnologies made it possible to clone adult organisms. Theoretically, nothing prevents cloning humans in a similar way. How would clones obtained from adult humans differ from clones obtained at the zygote division stage? Only in the fact that they would be of different ages. In other words, the social consequences would be significantly fewer than with natural twins—at least those can be mistaken for one another, although, for example, their fingerprints already differ—whereas it is much harder to mistake twins of different ages.
What is the point of cloning an entire adult human? Practically zero. Making ordinary children is much easier and cheaper. What is actually capable of bringing benefit is tissue cloning. An organ grown from oneself will graft much better during transplantation.
About the horror stories
I will immediately dismiss the religious ones, since groundless fantasies can be absolutely arbitrary, and it is impossible to analyze them all.
People will be cloned, grown, and then sliced for organs. Well, guys, that’s like claiming that cars will be assembled and then dismantled for spare parts. Growing a less differentiated cell culture is much easier and cheaper.
Rich people will copy their consciousness into their clones. We are currently further from consciousness copying technologies than we are from a manned flight to the edges of the Solar System. We can at least plan the flight with existing technologies, but there are not even any approaches to consciousness transfer. When such technologies appear, it may turn out that clones are completely unnecessary there, and that people have mastered rejuvenation procedures in general.
I have been asked repeatedly how fundamental science will develop without the state. Well, cloning is precisely an example of how the state directly prohibits science, so without the state, it will at least be able to develop, whereas now, in a number of areas marked with red flags, it is forced to move forward along strange detour paths.
In short: the point is that some people deny the Russian Federation the right to exist on the grounds that it was created in violation of the legislation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And since the USSR was not correctly dissolved, it therefore never went anywhere, and the RF is some kind of illegitimate fly-by-night operation, and a decent person should have nothing to do with the whims of its employees.
I will not dwell on legal hair-splitting because, of course, it is completely unimportant how correctly the state was formed according to the documents. Hello, we are talking about a state; a state is a bandit, what legitimacy? A state exists in heads; it is the willingness of people to submit to coercion because it is carried out in the name of something more important than a human being. It is difficult for people to simply cast the state out of their heads by stating plainly that there is nothing more important than a human being, and therefore there are no grounds to tolerate coercion in the name of various abstract entities. Therefore, they invent another abstract entity—and it takes the place of the acting formal sovereign.
Sometimes I exhibit a certain faint-heartedness and say that I am willing to stop the dismantling of the state at a kind of ultra-minarchism, where states still exist but represent nothing more than names. I know that the state of the Russian Federation is located on this territory. What follows from this in legal terms? Nothing. There is simply such a geographical object, an additional name to designate a place. But at the same time, no other state can just come along and declare that from now on, there will be a state of the Siberian Khanate here, and every subject of the khan—that is, anyone living in such-and-such a territory—must transfer ten thousand satoshis monthly to the khan, otherwise their property will be liquidated. No, dear, there is already an established state here, back off. Here are its borders, here is its capital, and here is its diplomatic mission selling souvenirs.
Will the sect of USSR witnesses collapse the Russian Federation? Very unlikely. But they will contribute their share of doubt as to whether the existing state has any right at all to give people orders. So let these funny guys continue to troll the current authorities, although, of course, if they start using their tools to violate private contracts, it will be an abuse of the unspoken convention on the boundaries of trolling, and that, of course, will not lead them to any good.
Statists often say that the state helps solve the problems of the tragedy of the commons. In reality, of course, it only creates them. The most large-scale of these, capable of leading to the collapse of civilization, is the sharp decline in the birth rate. Indeed, why should a woman spend many sleepless nights changing a baby’s diapers, when it’s far more interesting to go to a club to party with friends and post photos of fashionable clothes on Insta! And what will happen in old age? Absolutely irrelevant — the beloved state will not leave her without a decent pension, and if she votes correctly, it will even provide a free caregiver.
This is a clear tragedy of the commons. For an individual woman, from a resource perspective, it is more profitable not to give birth at all (she will still receive a guaranteed pension in old age, but will not spend resources on raising children). If all the residents of a country do this, tax revenues will fall along with the population of that specific country, and the state will be forced to increase its plunder. Taxes are already at historical highs; accordingly, any further increase will guaranteedly lead to a decline in the entire economy, the departure of business both from the country and “into the shadows,” and ultimately — the collapse of the state.
For my part, I will note that the state solves this tragedy of the commons simply: by paying child benefits. In this way, the birth rate increases among those for whom the amount of the benefit matters. So, from the state’s perspective, nothing terrible is happening: childless wealthy citizens pay for the poor and fertile; justice triumphs. The state is an entire conglomerate of special interest groups, and any challenge coming from the outside world, or even just a fabricated one, can be used as a pretext to increase the size of the state: whether it be high birth rates, low birth rates, high immigration, low immigration, warming, or cooling…
History shows that over a long period of time, the “size of the state” (the volume of resources it controls and the degree of influence over the lives of its subjects) constantly grows. This applies to all forms of government—liberal democracies, republics with census-based democracy, ideocracies, theocracies, and even monarchies. Some states were initially created on the idea of minarchism (“limited government”), such as the USA, where the founding fathers understood the possibility of the state’s growth and tried to prescribe mechanisms to restrain this process in the constitution. In all cases, this did not work, and even the “smallest” governments grew to gigantic proportions.
So why does this always happen? There are many versions, but the most plausible seems to be the idea expressed by Pavel Usanov in his recent lecture “Spontaneous Orders as an Alternative to the State”. Growth occurs because every official is interested in redistributing rent (resources taken from the population through taxes) in their own favor. If they do not do it themselves, one of their colleagues will. A constant temptation arises to engage in populism and invent new functions for state intervention in areas related to the interest group that put this specific official in power. For example, officials from a state social insurance agency are interested in INCREASING the number of unemployed and poor people, as they can then “secure” more funding for themselves and, accordingly, increase their salaries, hire their friends, or award themselves bonuses.
You know, one could trivially answer that the state is unnecessary because — and then follows a long list of problems it causes. One could refer to the fact that the smaller the scale of state intervention, the more the economy flourishes. But values are subjective, and one cannot answer for everyone that the state is unnecessary. There are plenty of people who love having a boot in their backside right now, and many demand that it be shoved even deeper. Minarchy isn’t enough for them; they want socialism; they were taught in school that under socialism there is liberty, equality, and fraternity, or at least order and security.
voluntarily and with a song!
Nevertheless, such an approach doesn’t work as an argument either. There is always a high percentage of conformists in society who will approve of the status quo, no matter how strange it is, so claiming that the majority sincerely and actively desires the state—to the point that they would come out to defend it—would also be rash.
Asking state representatives whether the state is necessary, and how about shifting a bit here to free up a small plot for ancap — well, that would be completely naive.
So, to get a correct answer to the question of whether the state is necessary, one must first achieve the appearance of a normally relatively pure ancap somewhere, and then let the market decide via migration and monetary flows. If people wishing “to make the state great again” consistently appear under ancap, then the state is necessary. For example, simply because one needs to have someone to grumble at. But if after a generation of living under ancap, the state is perceived as a strange, ancient, barbaric institution like trial by ordeal or some other omerta, then it means the state as such is not needed by humans; it’s just that it happens to exist now, and many put up with it.
As economic theory teaches us, values are subjective. Therefore, the question of “what is better” should always be accompanied by a clarification: better for whom. To avoid writing a long-winded essay, I will proceed from the assumption that “better” should be for the person in whose interests the army fulfills its primary purpose.
In modern international law, private warfare is prohibited, so a private army can primarily operate as a subcontractor for a state army. At least, if we are talking about a classical army using live manpower armed with lethal weapons. Thus, it is clear that a private army is better than a state army for those tasks that the state prefers to outsource. In essence, the only thing a state army would not want to outsource under any circumstances is the embezzlement of budget money. And a state contract army most willingly outsources those tasks that it handles worst: protecting civilians.
Due to the very mechanisms of its funding, a state army acquires quite typical traits, which is why state armies are, to a certain extent, very similar to one another. Private armies perform market tasks in a wide variety of niches, and therefore can differ greatly from each other. In some places, the market needs cheap light infantry capable of dying in droves without stressing the taxpayers, and a conditional Wagner comes to the rescue. In other places, the market needs the protection of communications, and it is helped by slightly more technological guys skilled in communications and logistics. Somewhere, it is necessary to wage cyberwarfare, and a private troll factory is opened for this task. Somewhere, the market needs intelligence data for publication, and a company like Bellingcat appears.
You might ask, what do the last two cases have to do with war? With equal success, one could ask what Shahed explosions have to do with war. By the way, these are also an excellent example of private armies: they are inexpensive and work effectively. It’s just that their task is rather specific: supporting the advertising campaign of a terror sponsor.
Alright, so for which tasks, other than budget embezzlement, are state contract armies actually more effective than private ones? Paradoxically, despite their complete inefficiency in protecting non-combatants, state contract armies are more effective at creating a sense of security for the citizens of the country to which the state contract army belongs. This is precisely what allows them to be so effective at embezzling the budget, since the taxpayer agrees in advance to the high cost of the army, as long as there is no war.
Last Sunday was marked not only by nationwide protests, but also, imagine that, by elections. I would like to talk a bit about why ancaps should pay any attention to elections at all.
Of course, the idea that someone who has defeated their opponents as a result of a complex, multi-stage electoral procedure now has the power to dispose of all the inhabitants of the mandated territory within the powers specified by the office, plus bonuses for audacity, and that this is as indisputable as the requirements of a voluntarily signed contract—does not withstand criticism. Volumes have been written about this; let us not dwell on this banality.
But do you really think that under ancap there is no place for the very phenomenon of procedural legitimation when determining who will exercise leadership?
Democracy is a set of tools for making compromise decisions in collectives. Under ancap, only a fundamental requirement is added: that decisions concern only issues of the management of collective property, but not the private property of the collective’s members. Given this limitation, democratic procedures are quite acceptable, and they indeed contribute to the minimization of conflicts.
Therefore, participation in the state-organized master class on conducting electoral procedures is quite useful. For now, for educational purposes, it does not matter exactly how hypothetical candidates Ivanov and Petrov got onto the ballot, how Sidorov was barred from the elections, or how Popov was removed on the last day. What matters is that the precinct commission properly crossed candidate Popov off the ballot, that every ballot bore a stamp and the signatures of two precinct commission members, that no campaigning was conducted near the precinct, that no pressure was put on the voter at the precinct, that the secrecy of the vote was maintained, that the counting of votes was carried out strictly according to procedure, that the control totals matched, and that the copies of the protocols issued to observers matched the official results for the precinct—all this boring “kitchen” work, where every single point matters.
Can you solve such simple educational problems? Then it will be easier to handle the organization of voting at a shareholders’ meeting, or a homeowners’ association, or the programming of consensus algorithms when creating a new cryptocurrency. Or you can try to make the problems more complex—and strive for the purity of electoral procedures not only on election day, but throughout the entire election campaign. And then, perhaps, it will lead to the practical implementation of a democratic model within the state—meaning not only an electoral model, but the entire system of checks and balances that ensures the adoption and implementation of compromise decisions in large collectives while minimizing violent coercion.
So do not neglect elections, even if there is no practical benefit from the results of the voting at the moment. This is the development of skills as useful as the ability to handle a weapon. Just come to the precincts to, so to speak, practice.
a mass-market scale model of democracy, nothing sacred
You have run out of questions for now, so I will just talk about yesterday’s protests.
It is clear that pensions, in particular, concern very few people. Those who are about to retire suffer from the increase in the retirement age to a minimal extent, because the age is increasing gradually. And for those who won’t retire for a long time, it is such a distant future that in our fast-paced and unstable world, it is completely pointless to make plans for such a period.
But it is the youth who are protesting. What is their motive?
They are simply tired of this state, and here it has set itself up perfectly. You can go out to protest against the government as such, but in the eyes of parents and grandmothers, have an ironclad justification: we were robbed, you were robbed, the state has gone crazy, it needs to be reined in, otherwise it won’t stop.
Right now is such a wonderful period when there is absolutely no point in promoting any legal constructive politicians at the federal level. Duma elections in 2021. Presidential elections in 2024. So, it will be a very long time before people are receptive to the thesis that “the opposition only brings negativity, why not participate in elections with a constructive agenda,” and for now, questions about what the hell is going on with the government’s agenda will land much better. Now is the time to obstruct it, force it to make mistakes, shake its authority, and make any attempts to negotiate with it about anything other than surrender look ridiculous. Time for the thesis “you present us with a fait accompli, and we present you with a fait accompli.” A time when the state can not only be called a bandit, but one can behave toward it exactly as such: place it outside the law and organize a defense. A time when, in response to the words “I am against the state,” people stop pointing to their temples and start wondering what can be done.
From the thesis “the state cannot be trusted with our pension savings,” it is not far to the thesis “the state cannot be trusted with anything at all.” And that means people are ripening for ancap.
