Property is, as is fashionable to explain nowadays, a bundle of rights. Moreover, an awful lot of these rights can be invented: the more complex the legal relations in society, the more of these rights there are, the harder they are to distinguish, and the more they intertwine. For example, I can visit a friend and sit down to work at a computer that he rents along with the apartment using his parents’ money, where I pay for access to the computer with a kiss. I use a pirated operating system and type the text of an article promised to a client, for which I have received an advance payment. In this regard, can the friend’s parents, the owner of the apartment with the computer, and the employees of the operating system manufacturer also demand a kiss from me, and exactly what share of the kiss? Can I, instead of a kiss, send the guy to my client so that the client can kiss him himself, since he has such an urgency that I have to work anywhere at an odd hour? The answers to these questions seem obvious only if we have some roughly similar notions of what is proper in our minds.
But notions of what is proper depend quite heavily on context. If I kill an opponent in a computer game, and the game implies the possibility of looting the corpse, then the transfer of the deceased’s property to me causes no particular dispute. If the same rules apply in a live-action role-playing game, then my ownership of the killed person’s property can also be quite legal. Finally, if I participate in such an unpleasant variety of role-playing games as a real war, then the appropriation of weapons, ammunition, and various souvenirs from the body of the killed person there also does not cause misunderstanding among those around.
Moreover, military booty may not be limited to things from a corpse. If tomorrow Navalny kills Putin, he could well claim to inherit the presidential post in Russia, and show me that strange person who would dispute this. Prescribe him a triple dose of fantasy.
But as soon as we move into a context where murder is not considered a way of resolving conflict, it ceases to be a legitimate way of acquiring the property of the killed. After that, the entire bundle of rights for the killer will shrink to the factual possession of what he managed to take from the killed, and only for as long as it is not taken away.
Madam President, please choose the dish upon which to place your trophy during the inauguration.
What is the situation with animal rights under ancap? Unlike humans, they have no means of self-defense
Hate-monger against moskalyaks
I have nothing to add to this issue beyond all my earlier texts on the subject, so I will take this opportunity to simply refer to them.
Libertarianism and environmental protection. Here I recommend a video by Svetovsky about how, if we want more animals, let’s eat them and benefit from them in every way. Plus, I mention Ostrom, who shows what to do with the tragedy of the commons as applied to wildlife.
Zoophilia. This discusses the legal status of animals, morality as the main regulator of the relationship with animals, and unexpectedly, a cat named Stubbs pops up.
Animal Rights. Here is one of my first clumsy formulations stating that a right is a claim that is tolerated, and advice is given for fans of ancient Rome.
On the killing of animals in the zoo. I start with mosquitoes, go through the case of one unlucky monkey, and end with a bright prediction of how the Earth will be swallowed by virgin nature.
On the rights of sentient non-humans. I demonstrate approaches to establishing legal relations with non-human intelligence—using a parrot as an example.
Generally, when composing another question, I highly recommend first checking the navigation page and using the search for the likely keywords of your question. It is quite possible that you will get a fairly comprehensive answer to your question from already published materials.
For some, the girl from lofi radio, and for some, an illustration of an animal’s right to lie on the bed
Another, very tiny, chapter of Mechanics of Freedom is being published, The Conservative Error. In it, Friedman lumps together immigration, global warming, fracking, GMOs, and various other same-sex marriages, asserting that the rejection of human development in these respective directions is rooted in one simple cognitive bias. Moreover, this bias is characteristic of both those who call themselves conservatives and those who call themselves liberals (referring to the US coordinate system, of course). The bias consists of the assumption that one can stop a beautiful moment. No, you cannot.
The translation of Mechanics of Freedom is nearing completion. Parallel to this, I have finished organizing by chapters and posted on my website the English text of Friedman’s 2019 book about legal systems that are very different from ours. Vladimir Zolotorev has so far released translations of three chapters, all of which are duplicated on my site, and I intend to continue in the same vein. If you want to encourage the translation, send donations to Vladimir. But if he gets stuck for long, I will take the initiative.
While recently answering a series of questions in a blitz format, I touched upon the topic of the responsibility of the person who orders a crime, and this sparked a discussion in the Facebook comments. So, I will try to reason through this in more detail.
Let’s consider a sequence of situations.
1. The client demands that the perpetrator commit a crime, threatening sanctions in case of refusal: causing harm to the perpetrator themselves or to some hostages. The perpetrator does as required, thereby avoiding the threat.
2. The client demands that the perpetrator commit a crime, threatening sanctions for non-compliance and promising a reward for completion. The perpetrator does as required and receives the reward.
3. The client asks the perpetrator to commit a crime, offering a reward in return. The perpetrator carries out the request and receives the promised reward.
4. There is a highly competitive market for crimes where many perpetrators compete to offer their services. The buyer chooses the perpetrator who offers the service that is optimal in terms of price and quality, and purchases it.
5. The perpetrator commits a crime, reports it, after which interested parties pay them donations for it.
I have tried to arrange the situations in descending order of the client’s degree of responsibility and ascending order of the perpetrator’s degree of responsibility—from the full responsibility of the former to the full responsibility of the latter.
In a situation where the perpetrator faces a serious threat for failing to fulfill the order, we can de facto consider them a mere tool. That is why, for example, it is quite logical to completely exempt conscripted soldiers from responsibility for participating in a war if they acted within orders and it is customary in that army to execute for desertion or failure to follow orders.
But in a situation where the perpetrator of a crime has the opportunity to resign, or to stage a work-to-rule strike by demanding written instructions for every unlawful order—but does not do so—they share responsibility with their superiors for all crimes committed. This is the case of the Belarusian OMON, for example. In conditions where those who resign can also count on the support of society, the responsibility of those who did not resign naturally increases.
At what point can we confidently assert that the client should bear no responsibility at all? Clearly, this is only possible in cases where the perpetrator acts entirely voluntarily, but is it so in all such cases?
Any voluntary exchange is based on the division of labor. I do not do everything I need myself; instead, I exchange a part of what I need less for something that is difficult for me to obtain on my own. The purchase of an illegal service is the exact same division of labor. But since the labor is divided, so is the responsibility for the damage that this labor caused to someone. Logical? Logical. And what if we continue to complicate the division of labor?
One studied the target’s daily routine. A second purchased the equipment. A third planted the bomb. A fourth sent a text message at the right moment, and the bomb blew up the victim along with the car and three random passersby. A fifth negotiated with the client and coordinated the group’s work. The sixth is the client himself. The seventh is the primary beneficiary in whose interests the client acted. And let’s add payment schemes. And let’s add explosives suppliers. And someone else bought these guys donuts…
A court in the wonderful Ancapistan of the future will have to assess the level of awareness of each person involved in the offense, the degree of unlawfulness of the actions they were directly involved in, the possibility of backing out, cooperation with the investigation, and so on—everything we already see in our usual boring reality. Except that the idiotic practice of imprisonment for the sake of imprisonment will be mostly replaced by monetary compensation or their in-kind equivalents.
Knowledge of principles will not provide a precise solution for all cases in life. It only allows one to have something to be guided by when evaluating a given situation in all its complexity. Therefore, please do not turn the non-aggression principle into a dogma; it doesn’t work that way.
Here you have the direct perpetrators, the filming of a video for the report to the client, and a whole chain of decision-making behind the scenes. The division of responsibility is the most typical practice in the modern state.
Under a state, practically no one ever jams signals from radio stations or telephone towers, because the perpetrator would be found instantly (this is a very simple task) and then forcibly compelled to pay fines, compensation, etc. (it is difficult to deny that this is fair).
Under ancap, however, such actions by this perpetrator would essentially not violate the NAP, would not infringe on someone else’s property, etc., which means, logically, they would not face punishment. But that is surely unfair.
Anonymous question (accompanied by a donation in the amount of 0.00047976 BTC)
As it happens, I have already answered a very similar question in great detail regarding how property rights to radio frequency bands are established under ancap, so first, please read that answer, and we will continue the discussion.
Having analyzed the principle of using radio frequency bands, I stated that in an economic sense, this is a scarce resource, and therefore it can be converted into property. Moreover, as you yourself note, the violation of property rights (unauthorized use of a reserved band) is quite easily recorded. In an ancap environment—that is, a developed market decentralized legal order—such disputes are easily taken to court. The grounds for filing a lawsuit are obvious: communication collisions lead to quite measurable losses, all logs are kept, so the damage can be calculated with very high precision.
Under the dominance of the state, it happens frequently that, for example, security forces jam communications in a certain area, and usually, these are states of a sufficiently authoritarian nature that they wouldn’t even bother with the issue of compensation for damages. Nevertheless, even under a state, there are precedents for the judicial protection of the right to use radio waves. For instance, a year ago, by a court decision in Sudan, the plaintiff’s access to mobile internet was restored, after the military junta had previously disconnected the entire country. Thus, if it is sometimes possible to restore property rights even under conditions of weak protection, then under ancap, where much more attention is paid to such things, similar problems would be extremely rare.
Lawyer Abdelazim Hassan guarantees: the right to use radio waves is respected even in Africa, let alone under ancap
With some delay, I saw an article by Anton Epikhin on the RLN.Today channel, in which he discusses the idea of absolute NAP voiced by Bitarch. These thoughts seemed very interesting to me, as they appear more practical and illustrate that the same goal, if pursued as a tactical one, requires certain methods, whereas if pursued as a strategic one, it sometimes requires the exact opposite.
From the position of prioritizing a radical interpretation of the primacy and absolutization of the NAP, for example, a contract army is clearly better than a conscripted one, and the complete absence of an army is even better than its presence.
However, if the NAP is understood as a project-based direction of movement rather than a religious dogma, it becomes obvious that the existence of a national army ensures collective sovereignty for society. Therefore, it is better that it exists than not, and the presence of mass military conscription, unlike a compact conscript army, distributes power within society by involving broad layers of the population in the defensive function, preventing the repressive apparatus from being concentrated solely in the hands of the government.
Therefore, the optimal defense system for moving toward the NAP would be a ubiquitous, albeit currently compulsory, militia-volunteer force, rather than a purely “professional army,” or even more so, the elimination of the state’s repressive apparatus as such, as this would only guarantee the establishment of someone else’s repressive apparatus that is not subordinate to the local community. Gradually, once they become an accepted norm, the practices of local militias united into a nationwide defense system can become purely voluntary; however, for the NAP, the physical presence of such a militia is more important here than the voluntariness itself.
For a modern person, broadly speaking, it doesn’t matter who their counterparty is, as long as that party performs valid actions. What difference does it make to me whether I buy bitcoins from a person or a bot? I simply create a buy order, and whether a Black man, a gay man, a Rosgvardia officer, a parrot, or a network intelligence responds to it, I don’t care, as long as they send me the bitcoins upon receipt of the rubles.
The same applies to situations where counterparties encounter each other face to face. If one of them asserts their rights, the second analyzes the claim and either recognizes it or doesn’t. What difference does it make who is asking me to give way—a car (autonomous or not), a person, or a dog? If I consider it a reasonable request, I will yield.
The same applies to property rights. If a parrot reacts to an intrusion into its cage with a piercing “Trespassers will be shot!”, I either decide that it understands what it wants to say, or I remain convinced that some ancap simply taught it various funny phrases. When further interaction with the parrot leads me to the conviction that its will, expressed in human language, indeed corresponds to its desires, I will take those desires into account. In the same way, I would have to find a mutual understanding with some cat that does not intend to express itself in human languages, but has needs and is capable of signaling them.
In general, a parrot could fly to the nearest store for food on its own, and it would face no more difficulties with this than a four-year-old child. It likewise cannot open a door, but it can ask adults to do so. And it can likewise hand a crumpled banknote to the seller and ask for a bag of sunflower seeds. For the seller, both the child and the parrot would be legitimate owners of the banknote, which gives them the right to receive the goods.
The same goes for emancipation. A child can declare their desire to live independently, followed by a conversation about whether they properly imagine the consequences and if they are ready for them. Similarly, a parrot can demand not to be held, and if it can convince a human that it can handle an independent life, then it is within its right to fly away. How do we feel about an adult who holds a child against their will? From the moment the child is able to explain this will to outsiders, we view such a thing poorly. Likewise, a parrot that begins to complain about the restriction of its freedom to the first outsider to come within earshot would not add to the society’s sympathy for its owner.
Of course, not everything is so rosy. Until a person becomes accustomed to regularly contacting sentient non-humans, every such non-human will have to explain their rights anew to every person they meet, until everyone in the neighborhood knows that a sentient parrot lives in this park, and entry to the clearing under this tree is by its invitation only.
But which rights of sentient non-humans would face difficulties in recognition? Primarily those that cause danger or serious inconvenience to humans. For instance, people respect the right of ants to have an anthill in a city park, and are even ready to undertake efforts to protect it—but they do not recognize the right of ants to live in wall niches and steal sugar from the table, a non-recognition of which can easily lead to ant genocide on the part of humans.
The question is long, so I will break it into parts.
1) Will there be a single emergency number? Remembering a bunch of three-digit numbers is difficult, but it is also difficult to reach a consensus, given that there will likely be many mobile operators seeking only their own profit, and moreover, they will be limited very little in a stateless society.
Providing a simplified interface to facilitate access to a multitude of complex and diverse services is a high-demand task. On one hand, it is more convenient for users to remember one single most convenient method of communication—provided, of course, that the intermediary works quickly and reliably. On the other hand, it is also convenient for service providers for someone to take on the trouble of finding out all the necessary details from the client and issuing the assignment in a formalized form, without emotions and scandals. In this way, they save on the call center, and therefore it is more profitable for them to pay for their connection to an aggregator.
Most likely, there will also be several aggregators. One might hold, for example, the number 911. A second provides a mobile application in which placing an order is even more convenient than by phone; most of the information is entered from the screen, and only non-formalizable details are communicated by voice. A third, say, sells a bracelet with a single emergency button, or one that reacts automatically to spikes in heart rate and blood pressure. As for some other mechanisms for ordering services, it is difficult for me to even imagine them now; let the market offer and the people try.
2) What happens if the owner of a territory refuses access to rescuers? It is their territory, and entering it without consent would be a direct violation of the NAP.
In general, everything depends on who called the rescuers and why, without ensuring their access to the rescue object, and whether the contract provides for the rescuers’ obligation to ensure this access themselves.
2.1 For example, a person falls ill with a dangerous and severe disease, but their religious, obscurantist relatives recognize only folk healing methods and refuse to let a medical team into the house.
If a person needs medical assistance but third parties are holding them on their territory and preventing them from receiving help, then that person should call not only doctors but also the police. Or simply state the circumstances via the aforementioned single phone number, and then the aggregator will attract specialists to solve the described problem. Blood relation is not an indulgence for a criminal, and the fact that they are in their own home is not either. Holding a person against their will is kidnapping.
2.2 I came to a party with alcohol and drugs to have fun, but at the height of it, I—a thin and weak youth unable to protect myself—had the misfortune of being in one room with a drunk host who began to threaten me with a knife or a gun over some minor quarrel. Or the same thing, but instead of the host, one of the drunk guests is threatening me, and the host himself is passed out and by definition cannot give consent for police officers to enter.
It is the same here. A person has the right to call for help wherever they are, and the costs of ensuring access to the object of assistance can be compensated later. You simply pay the sobered-up host for a new door to replace the one that was broken down.
2.3 Something catches fire on a person’s territory, but they hope too much to extinguish the fire themselves and refuse to let firefighters in, despite the fact that they store flammable and/or explosive substances—meaning that if they do not trust the professionals, then besides their own house, all surrounding buildings belonging to other people will catch fire or blow up.
Since the firefighters have already arrived, it means their work has been paid for; all that remains is to let them do it. Even if their task is to save neighboring houses and the burning object is not their area of responsibility, they will be forced to extinguish the fire there as well to protect the object that is important to them. Why might they be stopped?
First, if it is a high-hazard facility, it is possible that it needs to be extinguished differently; a regular fire crew may not have the necessary tools, while the owner of the facility does. Then it is quite logical for them to politely ask the outside crew to stay away and ensure the surroundings do not catch fire, while a specialized team arrives. I am not technically proficient enough to describe the specifics, but everyone understands firefighting at the level of “do not put out live wiring with water”; there are surely other nuances.
Second, the owner of the burning object wants it to burn down completely to hide something important.
Third, they are overconfident and believe they can extinguish the fire themselves with less collateral damage to the object.
Who makes the decision on whether to intrude on the territory to extinguish the fire? The firefighters, of course. If they decide to intrude without the owner’s consent, the owner can subsequently sue them. If the owner interferes with their intrusion and as a result neighboring houses are damaged, their owners can sue the owner. If the firefighters do not dare to charge in with axes and hooks, then they are clear.
3) How will they deal with schoolchildren, drunk and mentally ill people, or simply ill-wishers making deliberately false calls, or simply uselessly occupying the line, saying stupid things and insulting the operator, if it is not always possible to track them down even now, and blocking numbers is too cruel since even they might need real help from rescuers? Would it be fair to dump all the costs on those who can be identified, or to block the ability to call from other regions?
It is unlikely that under ancap DDOS attacks will be fought any differently than they are now. If there is a possibility to find the attacker using available means—they are found and held accountable. If not, they simply increase the channel capacity and filter out false messages. Naturally, there will be attempts to charge the found culprits for maximally inflated costs, but a court is an adversarial procedure, so the amount of compensation will be determined individually in each specific case. If the court issues an absurdly large fine that incorporates losses from many attacks to which the found culprit was not involved, then this may cause dissatisfaction among people who learn about it. This carries the risk that attacks will only intensify, as the risk of being caught is quite small, so excessive severity is also disadvantageous for the companies suffering from such hooliganism.
A discussion arose in the Libertarian Band patrons’ chat regarding an incident in the USA, which has led to riots accompanied by looting for nearly a week now.
Could an episode of police brutality occur under ancap? Absolutely! The “gatekeeper syndrome” operates under any regime. A petty fraudster pays with a fake check, the store calls security, they detain the thief—and then an excess occurs, and the head of the security team begins to strangle the detainee. The partners are stunned: on one hand, it is a clear abuse of authority; on the other, it is the firm’s honor, and staging a public quarrel is unprofessional, so they simply try to calm the crowd. What happens next? The director, a floor manager, or even just a cashier rushes out of the store and barks, “Stop it!”
This is where the key difference between ancap and the state manifests. It is not just anyone barking, but an official representative of the client. The partners of the security guard who lost his mind immediately pull the boss away and provide first aid to the victim, because the highest authority—the client—has commanded it. The one who pays the money.
Then the routine chores begin: the security company fires the overzealous guard, the thief reimburses the store for the money that caused the scuffle, there may be some maneuvers regarding his health insurance, and finally, there may be a press campaign resulting in damage to the security company’s reputation (and possibly the store’s, although that would be unfair).
But what if the store director rushed out and began to shout enthusiastically, “Give it to him, you scum, crush him!”? That is when a riot could happen. We can, of course, hope that everything will be limited to lawsuits, boycotts, and similar civilized reactions, but a riot or the burning of the store cannot be ruled out in this situation: people react extremely nervously to manifestations of crude thuggery—and there is no reason to assume that people would suddenly change under ancap.
Can riots become mass movements? They can, if we are considering something like a clan society. This can be considered ancap only with a great stretch, but such a society is certainly stateless and, therefore, also worthy of consideration. As we know from the example of Somalia, a specific legal system develops in a clan society where the clan acts as an insurance group and pays for crimes committed by its members. Such a system managed to extinguish the civil war in Somalia; it would handle riots as well.
However, the type of society where problems could truly take on a protracted character is one with a combination of market and clan orders. On one hand, there are several large groups defending the interests of their members, and on the other, there is a large number of individuals who do not belong to any clans and attempt to interact in a mode of open market access to goods and services. Clan members may perceive such loners as members of some foreign clans and bring claims against uninvolved parties within the framework of collective responsibility. Meanwhile, the loners, by inertia, will view the rioters as individuals with their own personal grievances—and be surprised by the absurdity of those claims.
Essentially, this is exactly what is happening in the USA right now. The quarrel occurred between the nominal clans of left-wing activists and police officers, but the leftists consider all business owners to be allies of the police—after all, it was the store that called the police when the incident happened. Blurred boundaries between groups generate numerous misunderstandings, where even those who express sympathy for the rioters are attacked. And the more such unresolved conflicts there are, the harder it is to stop the war.
Therefore, I venture to suggest that under ancap, in various unrest-prone areas, it will be very important to be able to quickly and clearly communicate to everyone who stands behind you. First, people learn to draw boundaries, and only then do they learn not to cross them.
Regarding the conclusions about the unsuitability of blockchain for real estate registration, I partially agree. In its pure form—yes. I have been working on this issue at the University of Bologna for four years. Last year, when I visited Kyiv, I gave a presentation on how to apply blockchain as a real estate registry. So, if you are interested in learning more: theory, protocols, system architecture, regulation. I presented it quite simply in my presentation at the blockchain hub.
Alexey Konashevich
https://youtu.be/F9IYLtXrn78
Thank you, I watched the presentation with great interest. My concept of property rights registration was approached slightly from a different angle and sketched out in much broader strokes. Not being a programmer, I was answering not the question of “how,” but rather the question of “who would handle this without the state, why would they do it, and why would they do it well.”
Your presentation implicitly suggests that the state, as a monopoly territorial jurisdiction in the validation system for the transfer of property rights, is a resource-intensive atavism that does not increase system efficiency but complicates its optimization.
In order to formally describe the functioning system of decentralized legal mechanisms, you build “smart laws” on top of smart contracts—an additional abstraction that validates smart contracts, separating legal ones from illegal ones. Then you raise the question of who creates the smart laws and introduce a new abstraction, e-voting:
But in the world of decentralized ledgers, it doesn’t work that way. E-voting for a law is, essentially, its validation by a group of independent validators. What happens if a certain minority votes against a law in current legal reality? They are forced to obey the law passed by the majority. What happens under decentralized law? The minority has the opportunity to create a fork. Two alternative smart laws emerge, each describing its own set of permissible smart contracts, and different voluntary transactions can take place in different legal fields.
Essentially, these are the same good old contractual jurisdictions that I’ve already talked the audience’s ears off about here.
