Тег: Law

Tell me everything about inheritance under ancap

How will the order of inheritance be distributed without a will? What if there are no heirs? And if my debts exceed the inheritance and there is no guarantor/insurance, will they pass to someone else?

Neprizivnoy

Ancap implies the decentralization of dispute resolution procedures, which automatically means the absence of rigid rules imposed from above regulating the issue of inheritance. Therefore, I cannot say exactly how a particular piece of property or debts will be divided, but I can speculate on how this issue will be resolved locally in substance.

Rights are claims that have been accepted. Upon the death of a person who owned certain property, various people may raise claims to that property. Who eventually gets the property and in what shares depends primarily on who accepts the corresponding claims and how easily. In the most obvious cases, for example, if the deceased had a bitcoin wallet and their household members also had access to the keys, it is unlikely that anyone would be able to contest their claims to own the bitcoins. Similarly, if the deceased lived in their own house, their household members automatically become the factual owners of the house after their death, and contesting their rights to this inheritance would mean putting forward a claim to evict them, which requires extremely strong grounds. It is likely that relatives or friends of the deceased living separately would find it difficult to justify their rights to any share in something where other people were already factual co-owners with the benefactor.

But what about property that the deceased owned solely and to which their cohabitants have no direct access? For example, they owned a company. The keys to the company office are held by the cleaning lady, but it is unlikely that her claims to seize the office based on factual access to the premises would be taken seriously by anyone. Nevertheless, if none of the deceased’s relatives took a direct part in the business and no instructions regarding the property were left by the deceased, it would not be surprising if the company were stripped by its employees or misappropriated by someone in management — either individually or in cooperation with some colleagues. This would simply mean that the property rights to this business were poorly established. Of course, the more established the surrounding market, the less likely such a situation is, and most likely the ownership of the company has long been tokenized, and the rules for the transfer of tokens to other hands were described, including taking into account the possible death of the owner. For instance, the Montelibero Foundation and the entire tokenomics developed around it are only a year and a half old, and we already have such possibilities fixed in certain agreements — after all, predictability of rules is a very important element of the investment climate.

Finally, let’s talk about debts. Of course, a creditor’s claim for the return of a debt is quite strong. Therefore, it is clear that in conditions of a developed market and properly recorded obligations, it will not be difficult for the creditor to recover a share of the deceased’s property toward the debt. If the amount of debts clearly exceeds the amount of divisible assets, then we have a bankruptcy case. In this situation, all claimants to the property will have to agree on who gets how much, and if an amicable agreement cannot be reached, then recourse to a court will be inevitable — they cannot exactly go to war, after all.

In general, I want to note that ancap is not only anarchy, but also capitalism, meaning developed market relations. All existing legal findings, especially from the sphere of common law, will not disappear, and in various disputed cases, they will certainly be appealed to. Foolish litigation, reducing to a competition of whose lawyer is more expensive and who paid the judge more, is unlikely under ancap due to the decentralized nature of law enforcement. But the desire to assert one’s rights itself will not disappear, which means that work for lawyers will not vanish.

Why is the right to property a freedom, and not a restriction on the freedoms of others?

Anonymous question

Of course, the right to property is precisely a limitation on the freedoms of others. The right to property is a claim to dispose of a certain object and to prevent others from disposing of it. Their freedom to dispose of a privatized object will logically decrease.

At the same time, of course, completely different procedures for exercising such claims may be practiced in different societies, including in relation to different classes of objects. These could be procedures such as “if you want to use it — take it, use it, then put it back so that others can take it.” There could be procedures like “if you want to use it — take it, but provide others with a replacement that they will not object to.” Or “you may take it as long as there are enough objects of the same quality left for others.”

But still, we speak of property when the order of using objects is determined by more exclusive rules, such as those outlined in my book in the corresponding chapter. Of course, even in this case, it is not at all necessary that any object acquired as property ends up in the full and undivided disposal of the acquirer. Practices such as using one’s property to the detriment of others will still encounter quite natural resistance.

The question arises: if property rights are nothing but limitations on freedoms, then why do we suddenly claim that a society where they are observed is a free one? Free from what? First and foremost, of course, from the war of all against all. Knowing that you have the right to this item, and others respect it, you will not spend a vast amount of resources on second-by-second readiness to defend your power over the item in a struggle with other claimants; this frees up resources for more pleasant activities, thus increasing freedom. Knowing that you do not have the right to this item because it belongs to another, you will not seek ways to seize it directly, but will focus on increasing your opportunities for market exchange. This increases the wealth of possibilities, which, again, means freedom.

A more convoluted but detailed explanation of how property rights ensure freedom in society can always be read in David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, in the chapter In Defense of Property.

branilac slobode

What will happen to abandoned buildings under ancap?

1) Youth often sneak into an abandoned building, which displeases many city dwellers: you never know what might happen. Can they, and in what way, organize its security, fence it off, or demolish it entirely? Would the installation of a fence by a concerned public be a restriction of the freedom of urban exploration enthusiasts?
2) A group of squatters has settled in an empty cinema, arranged their own electricity (finding people on the free market who agreed to connect them), and lives there, organizing non-conformist concerts right in the cinema hall and inviting hitchhikers for overnight stays. Some believe this negatively affects property values in the area. Can anything be done about them?
3) A developer saw an unfinished business center and wanted to complete it and put it into operation. The last owner of the unfinished building is either unknown, unresponsive, or has already been dissolved as a legal entity. What should the developer do?
4) An initiative group of citizens wants to demolish an abandoned building and create a park in its place; many district residents have signed in support of the idea. However, the squatters living there do not want to move. They appeal to the right of the property they have acquired and the lack of rights to it by outside citizens, while the activists appeal to the illegality of the squatters’ settlement and their lack of any rights to such housing. Who is right and what is to be done?

Stalker

So, we have a city, which is a fairly dense settlement where the rights of its inhabitants to certain spatial objects are complex, mutually conditional, mutually overlapping, and constantly enter into minor collisions, and this is perceived as the norm. A person pays for developed infrastructure not only with money, but also by the fact that they are constantly bothered to some extent by their neighbors. Sometimes collisions become significant, and then they require a resolution.

Let me remind you of the principles of legitimate acquisition of property rights under ancap: homesteading, exchange, restitution, production. How can sufficiently clear property rights to an abandoned building be acquired in the complex conditions described above? Squatters quite logically apply the first method and occupy an empty building simply because no one before them used this method. What will protect them from indignant neighbors appearing on their doorstep tomorrow, waving the Lockean proviso? Only the other three methods of acquiring property rights.

  1. Voluntary exchange. Squatters can agree with other city residents on what specific benefits they will provide in exchange for the recognition of their right to the squat. For example, organizing those very concerts, providing shelter for the homeless, maintaining the neat appearance of the building, or paying utility bills.
  2. Restitution. Squatters could stand on the threshold of their new property with guns and declare that those who contest their ownership can only take it from their cold dead bodies. The willingness to bear the costs of war to protect one’s property has always been a very strong argument in favor of recognizing property rights, provided that someone else’s rights do not appear more compelling (and in the case of an abandoned building, no one has more compelling rights than the squatters). Squatters could also announce that as restitution for seizing the property (and thus for taking away the right to seize the same property from other potential claimants), they are ready to donate a certain amount to a city improvement fund. Agreement to accept the money would mean recognition of the legitimacy of the squatting.
  3. Production. Squatters can begin converting the seized building for their own needs, and then anyone who might claim an alternative use for the abandoned building will calculate that if they had, for example, forcibly evicted them a month ago when they first moved in, and the squatters had sued, they would have received at most the price of a hostel rental for a couple of nights. But today, they would already be demanding reimbursement for all the effort and resources invested in the squat.

I have outlined what the squatters should do. But what should the citizens do if they really do not want abandoned buildings to end up in the hands of just anyone? Simply avoid their formation whenever possible. For example, utility service contracts could include a clause stating that if the owner of the serviced object loses their right without terminating the service agreement, then until a new owner takes possession, the provider continues service at the latest applicable rates as a loan secured by the object. Thus, squatters find themselves in a situation: this house belongs to no one; it is collateral for the companies providing water, electricity, internet, sewer services, and waste removal. If any one of these companies needs the house, it will squat it itself (but it will have to negotiate a buyout with the others). And if none of them need it, they will all be happy with anyone willing to take the building on their balance sheet and pay off the utility debts.

I have provided only one possible mechanism, but there could be any others, including a city fund for abandoned buildings, to which citizens donate funds so that it can be the first to squat abandoned buildings, create groups for discussing their best use, search for investors, and so on. And if people who do not inspire enthusiasm among the citizens have already moved into a particular abandoned building, this same fund could act as a negotiator to change the format of the squat’s use or pay the squatters a buyout to move out.

Legal systems that differ greatly from ours. Translation of the chapter on Jewish law.

Having had my fun with Iceland: The Age of Sagas, I continued the translation of Friedman’s book on legal systems that differ greatly from our own, proceeding in order, so the fourth chapter is next. It is perhaps the longest in the entire book, as it is dedicated to the law of the chosen people, who have accumulated an absolute abyss of various legislative material throughout their long history.

As usual, I will deal with the translation of the footnotes and the final formatting of this chapter for e-books later; for now, I want to present what I have to your attention as is, without polishing it. As usual, I am transparently hinting that it would be nice to donate.

Next up is Islamic law, and I am curious in advance what place well-known practices, such as apologizing without trousers, hold within it.

Legal systems that differ greatly from ours. Translation of the chapter on Iceland during the saga period.

I read my first saga by mistake when I was about twelve. I was sure that this plump volume would contain tales of gods and heroes, something like the legends and myths of Ancient Greece. Everything turned out to be completely different and far more interesting, and it clearly influenced why ancap seems like a perfectly natural and reasonable system to me. David Friedman also relied heavily on the material of the sagas when constructing his proposals for a stateless system of law under capitalism. And finally, in his book about legal systems that differ from those we are used to, he also began specifically with the section on Iceland.

Therefore, when it became clear that simply translating this book as a commissioned work at a fixed rate didn’t work out, I decided to continue the translation using my traditional donation scheme, and to perk myself up, I grabbed a chapter out of order, and the most delicious one right away.

I will finish the chapter notes later; that’s already a bit tedious. In the meantime, I will be very glad for your money, by the volume of which I can judge how interested you are in this specific translation and how briskly I should tackle the next chapter.

On Boosty, I created a separate goal for this translation, but you are, of course, free to use all the other tools listed on the donations page. By the way, there is another innovation there: since we have developed all sorts of local tokenomics here in Montelibero, I will gladly accept donations in our own internal tokens.

Is flying an aircraft over territory belonging to another person trespassing under ancap?

Do you need to ask them for permission before flying? Is it necessary to somehow amortize the risk of the aircraft falling on the property of people located beneath it, and how to compensate for the noise of the engines/propellers? What is your personal/Montelibero/Montenegrin position on this issue?

L29Ah (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.012345678901 Monero)

I like how David Friedman analyzes this and many other questions (sorry for buzzing your ears with him so much). He analyzes the topic in great detail in the book The Machinery of Freedom. I have managed to get through about a third of it so far. Much more concisely—in one of the chapters of The Machinery of Freedom. There, economic analysis of law is also used as a basis for reasoning. This often allows for a fairly clear generalization of those specific answers that I have to give from time to time.

To put it very briefly, the lower the transaction costs for proposed deals to purchase rights to actions that violate others’ interests, the more convenient it is to recognize the owners’ right to prohibit such actions. If necessary, the potential trespasser will buy the right of passage. And the higher the transaction costs, the more convenient the procedure of judicial settlement of such cases becomes through claims for damages. No one defines a specific threshold altitude at which one can fly over someone else’s property, but if the flight caused damage, it will have to be compensated in court. Flights over someone else’s territory at a sufficiently high altitude (so as to at least not crash into terrain irregularities in normal mode and not frighten people with the wild roar of engines) are clearly the second case; obtaining permission to fly from all owners over whose territory it may occur is an unrealistic task.

Specifically in Montenegro, there is state licensing for the import of drones into the country, certain weight restrictions, a ban on flying above a certain altitude, and other highly sophisticated restrictions, some of which can be bypassed, while in others it proves too expensive, and it is simpler to accept that a certain application of drones is too troublesome to engage in systematically. Naturally, we in Montelibero find the complete repeal of all these regulations desirable, because drones can at least be used to take beautiful photos, which is useful for promoting the project. But, of course, the drone owner must be prepared for the fact that if their expensive toy falls on someone else’s plot, they may well lose it. The plot owner is not responsible if a cow steps on the fallen drone, or if his underage son decides to break something off this unexpected gift. He is not even obliged to let the drone owner onto his territory—here, the right of prohibition applies, because the transaction costs for purchasing the right of passage are small.

Here we filmed our plot with a drone, but this required flying over the neighbors as well

There can be no rights and freedoms to violence

Voluntarist, Bitarch

To the question of whether a person has the right to commit violence, we have only one answer — they do not! No single person in the world should possess the right to initiate an act of violence against another person. But some people (most often supporters of authoritarian-conservative views and force-based methods of solving problems) may say that this is a restriction of freedom. Freedom to commit violence is a freedom like any other, which means we are contradicting ourselves and are authoritarians ourselves, wanting to forcibly impose a single life scenario on everyone.

This is a rather inadequate manipulation in essence, which ignores the fact that violence leads to people being deprived of their freedom. That is, when one person initiates an act of violence against another person, they thereby deprive them of their freedom. Accordingly, violence is non-freedom. The right to violence is the right to deprive people of their freedom. However, the elimination of violence, the striving for its complete eradication as a phenomenon as a whole, is the elimination of the factor that leads people to non-freedom. And no verbal manipulations will change the essence of the phenomenon of violence!

Legal systems that differ greatly from ours. Law of the Chinese Empire.

I continue translating Friedman’s latest book. This time, I’ve gone in order. I translated the introduction and the first chapter, regarding law in the Chinese Empire. An attentive reader may notice that I haven’t fully completed the work, and about half of the footnotes are missing from the text. That is the case; I got exhausted. Tomorrow, I plan to quietly upgrade the text—both for online reading and in the ebook. I also still hope that someone will take on creating a Russian-language cover for the book.

What I like in the book are the constant comparisons: look, here’s how it was for the Chinese, exactly like in modern America. And this—just like in 18th-century England. And then there are attempts to show for what purpose the legislation was made exactly this way, what worked, and what didn’t quite.

Legal systems that differ greatly from ours. I am taking over the translation relay and presenting the chapter on Ancient Athens.

I hope you didn’t miss me too much while the channel was on pause for a while — I have been very busy.

More than a year ago, as part of his Liberty Education Project, Vladimir Zolotorev began posting a translation of David Friedman’s 2019 book Legal Systems Very Different from Our Own — an extremely detailed answer to the question of how courts could operate not only under ancap, but in any conceivable conditions. For my part, I posted the original and published the translated chapters on my page. In November 2020, however, the translation stalled after the publication of four chapters.

And recently, Dima Kovalenko, who translated those four chapters, contacted me and suggested that I continue the work in his place. I gladly agreed. To get started, I took a relatively short chapter on the legal system of my favorite Athens during the time of classical democracy, and now I am happy to present to you the translation of this chapter. I have also formatted all five chapters into an epub and posted it on my page as well. Footnotes for the four old chapters are currently missing — apparently, they were not translated. I will add them in time. Please test whether the book reads normally for you — I tried formatting it in the newer epub3 format, but if it turns out that it is not sufficiently supported by your e-readers, then there is no point in overcomplicating things and it would be better to return to epub2; the book does not contain complex layout for which the new format would be absolutely necessary.

I would also be glad if someone would take on creating a cover for the book — for now, I am using the original English one, but the final edition will clearly require something else.

A joke question

If there is no state, and my wife cheats on me, would it be lawful to throw her out the window if I live on the second floor of a building owned by a homeowners’ association that has opted out of insurance services, but has an oral contract for territory security with a private security company (PSC) registered in a territory where a state exists, of which our joint daughter is a citizen, and who, under their law, is obliged to look after disabled parents—a category that includes stateless persons, which my wife is, having applied for a residence permit that was formally accepted due to the difference in time zones?

Topotushka

This question, if I recall correctly, was cited by Alexei “Komendant” Tereshchuk as an example of how even non-trolls—but quite enthusiastic ancaps—can be intensely interested in the most minute details of a completely hypothetical stateless society of the future, falling into the deductive heresy of deriving any, no matter how subtle, specifics from a few general principles.

But no. In order to derive specific consequences from general principles, one must add additional information to the general principles regarding the conditions to which we are deriving those specific consequences. The more assumptions the initial data rely on, the more unstable the result of such reflections becomes.

Does this mean that the deductive method is useless? Of course not. It simply means that to obtain reliable results, you need to take the general principles and bring them as close as possible to the local environment to which you will be applying them.

Now, let us return to the joking question and provide a serious answer to it.

The question of the lawfulness of throwing a cheating wife out the window can only have a positive resolution under conditions where cheating is considered a legal offense. Can cheating be considered a legal offense in the absence of a state? It can. Let us note that in our hypothetical society, marriage is officially considered a property relationship—at least, Topotushka’s “ownership” over his wife.

Moving forward. The homeowners’ association’s refusal of insurance services means that causing harm to the health of one of the association’s residents does not constitute a tort against the association.

The fact that the PSC is fulfilling an oral contract for territory security means that oral contracts are recognized in our hypothetical stateless society.

If the PSC operating legally on the protected territory records damage to the adjacent territory caused by the fall of Topotushka’s wife, I find it difficult to imagine a legal construction within which the responsibility for the damage would be placed by the PSC on the wife rather than on the Topotushka who threw her. Thus, we can state that since throwing a large object out of a window entails a risk of damage to the adjacent territory, it is an unlawful act, and we have obtained an answer to the original question without even delving into the intricacies of time zones. Moreover, according to the oral contract, the PSC may be obliged to prevent even the throwing of cigarette butts on the lawn, which are viewed as litter; therefore, Topotushka’s arguments that his wife is quite compact and did not cause any significant damage are unlikely to hold weight. Littering under the windows is an unlawful act, period.

Recording an offense