There is a new commissioned translation on the site, the article “Tulipmania: The classic story of the Dutch financial bubble is largely false“. It is 2018, the Bitcoin bear cycle, and there are once again talks that all this crypto of yours is just a new version of tulipmania; so, the article, without mentioning Bitcoin a single word, instead explains that everything with the tulips was not at all like it is in popular economic anecdotes.
I watched the conversation between Grigory Bazhenov and representatives of the European University on the topic of inequality.
I didn’t do this immediately after the video was released because the topic seemed boring and leftist to me; it is obvious that if inequality is caused by redistribution through plunder (for example, taxes) and coercion (for example, regulations), then one can oppose the consequence, but it would be more useful to eliminate the causes. And if inequality is caused by the fact that people voluntarily give more money to Alice than to Bob, then one can only be happy for Alice and reflect on whether something can be adopted from her practices so that we can get more too. But then I had a bit of free time, took a look, and didn’t regret it.
The part where it was listed that there is income inequality, wealth inequality, and inequality in the number of limbs was not very interesting. I was struck by one specific strong take that I would like to discuss—regarding inequality caused by the difference in time preference.
Its content is approximately as follows. If one economic agent has a lower time preference, and economic agents can lend to each other at interest, then, all other starting conditions being equal, in the long run, he will plunge all economic agents with a higher time preference into debt bondage, with the further prospect of starving to death. This is, obviously, a mathematical model; however, I immediately recalled historical precedents.
Ancient Athens was formed by a union of Ionian tribes settled in Attica, with an initially fairly high level of equality. Over time, however, the stratification between citizens increased, and some gradually fell into debt bondage to others. This led to civil unrest, and as a result of Solon’s reforms, all old debts were forcibly forgiven, land was redistributed, and debt slavery was prohibited. In other words, the market—due to the difference in time preference—led to extremely unpleasant consequences, which were then corrected by purely etatist methods.
The emancipation of the peasants under Alexander II in the Russian Empire provided roughly equal starting conditions for all members of any given peasant community. However, again, the difference in entrepreneurial abilities and time preference over half a century led to stratification from kulaks to hired laborers, with the latter losing their means of production and often finding themselves in credit bondage. Then there was a civil war, followed by a complete redistribution of property and the writing off of old debts.
The question is: what can free-market anarchism oppose this mechanism with under modern technological conditions? Because if we answer “nothing,” it will mean the unviability of the anarchic model—it will inevitably be replaced by something much more leftist, after which, at minimum, property will be redistributed and debts written off, and at maximum, successful entrepreneurs and their heirs will be hanged from lamp posts.
Let’s look at what mechanisms the free market provided to counteract the mentioned effect in the two previous examples.
Becoming landless, selling one’s household members and oneself into debt slavery was not the only possible development for a landowner with a higher time preference or someone less competitive for some other reason in the ancient polis. Furthermore, as such people accumulated, the polis established colonies. There, land-poor colonists received much larger plots than in their homeland, and with them, a new chance for prosperity. This extensive path to solving the problem of inequality led to the colonization of the entire Mediterranean by the Hellenes. Subsequently, a division of labor arose between the colonies and lively trade began. Now, instead of farming a small patch of land, our Athenian could engage in, for example, molding amphorae or sewing sails—this also gave him a new chance for prosperity.
Similarly, becoming a hired laborer was not the only option for an unlucky peasant in the Russian Empire either. He could become a colonist and move to Siberia, or move to the city and become a worker. Under the conditions of a freer market in the USA, urbanization absorbed a huge number of former farmers without any revolutions, and those who remained began to cultivate much larger areas using much more serious equipment, supplied to them thanks to the much higher-paid labor—compared to that of a hired hand—of their former poor neighbors.
So I believe that an anarchic society under a free market will be able to avoid the scenario embedded in the mathematical model with different time preferences but unchanging market conditions. If the emergence of new markets is not legally restricted, then those with a higher time preference will actually strive to take advantage of new opportunities and obtain windfall profits—while those with a lower preference will stay in a reliable but relatively low-margin business, and everyone will be relatively well off. The second factor weakening intertemporal inequality is personal freedom. You are not a member of a community. You are not the property of the head of the family, who can sell you into slavery to pay off a debt. You are self-owned; you have your own time preference, your own inclinations and talents. You won’t perish. In any case, you are not doomed to perish, and let the scary mathematical model not frighten you.
In the series of essays on the state, Vladimir Zolotorev describes the origin of this institution from the perspective of a theory that differs slightly from the well-known stationary bandit theory, although it is certainly based on it. The difference lies in the point that stability is given to early state formations by the characteristics of the landscape: only where there is nowhere to run are the enslaved forced to stay put and submit to the conqueror.
This is the so-called ecological hypothesis, first formulated in the work of Robert L. Carneiro, a staff member of the American Museum of Natural History, A Theory of the Origin of the State, published in the journal Science in 1970. A Russian translation was made for the collection The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogues, published in 2006. I have uploaded the collection to my website, and Carneiro’s specific article can be read from Bitarch on VK or where he dug it up.
I have reviewed it and confirmed that there are no serious discrepancies with our video about the stationary bandit, which is gratifying, as no patches will be necessary. Nevertheless, it is always pleasant to understand which sources the things you popularize are based on, and what additional examples can be used to illustrate your posts.
I helped miss Liberty edit an article on the history of right-libertarian feminism for her channel. It’s very pleasant to switch to a related agenda from time to time, especially since my understanding of the technical details here is quite superficial.
Of course, I’m amused by the abundance of feminitives, but I fully admit that from my side it might look like “right, a lady in trousers looks very strange and almost indecent”.
Still, you were wrong to vote so actively against inviting her to my channel as a columnist: content appears quite rarely on her own channel, but for an author’s column, such frequency would have been just right. But since you supported the separation, then subscribe to each channel individually.
Right-libertarian feminism is often confused with individualist feminism, which emerged much earlier and in many ways laid the foundation for right-libertarian feminism. This should be kept in mind when searching for information about the history of feminism.
At the dawn of anarcho-individualism and individualist feminism, the American Ezra Heywood (1829–1893) made a huge contribution to their formation. He published the magazine “The Word,” in which he featured one of the most famous suffragettes of the time, Victoria Woodhull, wrote about the importance of extending voting rights to women, denounced the slave-like oppression of housewives and female social stigmas, and preached free love. It was for the latter that he was locked up, as his attacks on the institution of marriage were seen as obscenity. This caused mass protests, and President Hayes was forced to sign his pardon. By our standards, Heywood was quite the leftist: he spoke against private property and for rent regulation, against class inequality and for the right to seize unused private lands. However, all early feminists were leftists; nevertheless, their core ideas—that a woman is free to choose the conditions in which she lives and works, free to choose her type of family or not to have a family at all, that she, like men, owes nothing to anyone and must be free from state arbitrary power—are fully shared by modern right-libertarian feminism.
Right-libertarian feminism is a product of the second wave of feminism. Taking much from individualist feminism, it emerged alongside the Libertarian Party of the USA. The party appeared in 1971 as a result of mass indignation over Nixon’s reforms (price and wage freezes, removing the dollar’s link to gold). In 1972, for the first time in US history, the Libertarian Party nominated Theodora B. Nathan, who promoted a libertarian feminist agenda, as a vice-presidential candidate. Tony Nathan was a party activist almost until the end of her life, regularly ran for the Senate and the House of Representatives from the party, and passed away in 2014 at the age of 91. She founded the “Association of Libertarian Feminists,” which began criticizing the third wave of feminism—a leftist and statist movement—earlier than others. Nathan criticized activists for demanding state intervention in private life and labor relations, failing to see the state as a much more serious problem.
Back then, in the 70s and 80s, no one perceived right-libertarian feminism as something surprising or contradictory. Until the left hijacked the agenda, feminism was a natural and organic part of the general libertarian discourse. Now, however, the word “right” is associated with racism and other conservative beliefs, and therefore feminism is considered by many to be absolutely incompatible with libertarian ideology.
Tony Nathan was not the only founder of libertarian feminism. At least two others can be mentioned: Wendy McElroy (a Canadian Zalina Marshenkulova on steroids, defender of porn and sex freedom, supporter of Rothbardian ancap, founder of “The Voluntaryist” magazine) and Christina Hoff Sommers (who has been fighting against the left so actively since the 80s that she is more often called an anti-feminist, although she simply advocates for full equality and against state regulations, showing how reforms pushed by left-feminists harm women).
It was a great surprise to me to learn how powerful the roots of right-libertarian feminism were half a century ago, and how this movement has almost vanished today. I have the feeling that this is related to the specifics of the political agenda in the USA. On one side, there are Republicans, who combine a desire to reduce the state with fierce conservatism and patriarchal values. On the other side, Democrats, with their reverence for freedom of expression, but simultaneously with blatant statism. Libertarians, who tried to take the best from both sides, found themselves in an unstable position, and as a result, split in two. Today, among American libertarians, there are many complete freaks, as well as a very pronounced paleoconservative wing. And now Professor Hoppe lumps gays, feminists, and communists into one pile, stating that they have a low time preference and therefore have a decivilizing effect on society and should be physically removed.
Thus, in the USA, the feminist discourse was almost entirely left to the leftists, who turned the movement for equality into a caricature of itself. But now, when libertarianism is on the rise, can we make libertarian feminism great again? Yes, we can.
