Тег: Law

Two Models of a Libertarian Society

What do you think of this famous lecture by Chandran Kukatas?

Sergey Sushinsky

There is one, but rather significant, incorrect assumption in the text. In both of the social models being considered, there is some kind of absolute impersonal external enforcer who imposes this model. In the Federation, it is forbidden to help without being asked, and some external force suppresses all such attempts; in the Union, it is forbidden to restrict another’s freedom even in the smallest way, and some external force, again, suppresses all such attempts.

But in reality, there is no external impersonal force; all rules are established and enforced by the people themselves. In the Federation of Freedom, a person can intrude upon someone else’s territory and free slaves there, and to those who want to challenge him for violating others’ borders, he can present what he discovered within those borders. In the Union of Freedom, a person can tie up an epileptic, and to the person who demands they be untied, demonstrate a video recording of the previous seizure.

Of course, common sense does not have to triumph in absolutely all cases; it is enough that there is no “external stupid lex” who doesn’t care about common sense, but only wants the law to prevail.

It is clear that Kukatas, speaking of hypothetical libertarian orders, effectively reduced everything to an analogy with the US Civil War, where one side defended the rights of states to establish their own laws, and the other defended the need for everyone to adhere to a single standard of freedom. Kukatas himself took the position of the conditional South in this conflict, which is, in fact, the main provocative message of the lecture.

Federation of Freedom

How does NAP differ from existing laws?

After all, both can work equally well if punishment is inevitable.
Do prisons (they will exist in ancap, right?) violate the NAP? Or even not prisons, but any restriction of freedom or coercion. I understand that the punished person violated the NAP themselves, but then it becomes a kind of “eye for an eye” principle. Personally, in my understanding, it should not be that way.

Kirill

I have already had to answer the question of how the NAP differs from contractual jurisdictions, and now I am similarly being asked to find differences between heterogeneous things, between a general principle and specific prescriptions, which may be based on this principle, or may not be.

The NAP is a principle stating that no one has the right to initiate violence with impunity—it specifies nothing about what the measure of retribution should be. State laws, by contrast, regulate the measure of retribution both for NAP violations and for many other types of actions, but at the same time, they mandate that this retribution be carried out through the mediation of specialists paid for by taxes, denying this right to those who are, in fact, directly interested in retribution.

Is someone who has been robbed by a private individual willing to voluntarily pay the state so that it keeps the robber in prison for several years? Usually not, so the state reaches into the citizen’s pocket itself and carelessly pulls out the required sum, after which it spends it haphazardly on whatever it feels like, though some of it does end up going to prisons.

Is someone who has been robbed by a private individual willing to voluntarily pay some private company of their choice to keep the robber in prison for several years in the absence of a state? Obviously, they are no more willing than under a state. This means the only person who could pay for the cost of keeping someone in prison under ancap is the person hiding in the prison itself, and I have written about this in sufficient detail. On the other hand, for example, if I have purely property claims against a robber, there is hardly any reason for them to lock themselves in prison; one can always agree on the payment of compensation, like civilized people.

Will that very inevitability of punishment be ensured under ancap? Not necessarily. The damage may be too small to pursue independently. But if someone is engaged in the seizure of other people’s property on a systemic basis, they will almost certainly be caught eventually. They might get lucky, and a substantial compensation will be politely demanded from them. Or they might be unlucky and be shot on the spot. A dangerous trade, to be sure.

But the richer and more prosperous a society is, the more likely it is that the capture of various gangsters and thieves will be streamlined and handled by specialists. After all, until the state over-regulated the detective market beyond all reason, the Pinkerton agency in the US flourished quite a bit.

Ancap-sama, it seems to me that intellectual property law is not as much of a delusion as one might imagine, and the problem lies at most in the terminology (“right” → “privilege”).

After all, for example, when using streaming services, a completely free contract is concluded with the user, which specifies how the content can be used. If you don’t like it—don’t enter into these contractual relations! The problem arises perhaps when buying physical media, as I haven’t seen any contracts there (but usually the relevant laws are cited, which, roughly speaking, are the same contract, as they are voluntary). In conclusion—is it possible that under ancap, after publishing a book, I wouldn’t be able to forbid readers, for example, from reading it on the street during the day? Where would you disagree?

Atomic Tram

Answered by Alex Murin

Let’s start with how copyright is currently protected. That is the entirety of Part 4 of the Civil Code. To properly manage the fruits of one’s creativity, one must know the laws. Currently, the law prohibits copying without permission, assuming that the author did not grant such permission initially. And it assumes that your interests can be protected without your knowledge by some organization, like the Russian Authors’ Society. The law also protects your descendants, who haven’t written a single line of music or a single kilobyte of code.

No one intends to limit the freedom of contract under ancap. If you like such a contract, then you offer the user or the new owner to enter into it. Ask them to write a paper stating that they have indeed read it, understood everything, like the terms, and have paid. If you believe that your book cannot be read during the day in public places, then write that and get the buyer’s consent. Not in the form of “by opening this link, I acknowledge that I am now the eternal serf of the publisher, who bought the author two beers and thereby gained exclusive rights to the work,” but ask them to perform a conscious action: write a paper or an electronic document and sign it. And preferably without hidden pitfalls, so that the buyer understands what they are doing. And without state lobbying, under which the actual author ends up in holey shoes in a cold shed.

And yes, you will have to independently find a court that will compel the payment of compensation to you, rather than giving three hundred rubles to the Ust-Labinsk District Court, by whose order the bold offender will be caught, brought in handcuffs, and put in a cage with robbers. If you like copyright, take the trouble not to create traps when executing such a contract, otherwise someone might consider it a direct attack. Voluntariness must be truly voluntary, not a pit that a user falls into by clicking the wrong button. Or one where the state finds a song remaining in the browser cache, even if they didn’t listen to it.

Addition from Ancap-chan

I have nothing much to object to in this harsh rebuke. Yes, you can demand certain restrictions on the use of your content from the consumer, but you will have to pay for the enforcement of these requirements yourself. So it’s better to think ten times before setting any requirements at all, because it will be far more reliable to win the loyalty of consumers rather than trying to oppose their will with your own. For instance, some Kirill Yeskov or Pavel Usanov writes a new book, publishes it, and warns readers: “Guys, let’s let the publisher make some money, let the book be sold only on paper for about three months, and then I will release the text for free access myself, and you won’t have to deal with piracy technologies.” And it works! And then, when the text becomes freely available, grateful readers even send donations. Because you don’t need to be an asshole; it doesn’t pay off.

Scientists are smart, be like scientists!

E. Shulman

Is incitement to suicide/aiding suicide a crime?

Rachok

In the simplest case, we have a picture like this. A person commits suicide and leaves a note: in my death, I ask you to blame so-and-so, because he behaved toward me in such-and-such a way. This is, in essence, the same as if a person went to the square in front of a tyrant’s palace and committed self-immolation as a protest against his policies. He could have carried out a terrorist attack or an assassination attempt, but he preferred this form of expressing his opinion.

For everyone else, this is a strong argument to investigate exactly what the person the suicide asked to be blamed for their death had done. The relatives and friends of the deceased, of course, will be particularly interested in this. An interesting case could arise with an insurance company. Generally speaking, suicide is not an insurable event. But if the heir of the suicide sues the person named in the suicide note and presents the court with sufficient evidence of violence by the defendant toward the suicide, the court may find the accused truly guilty of unintentional homicide, and in this case, there are grounds to claim insurance. Indeed, is there a great difference between the situations “beat severely, the beaten person died from the blows” and “systematically beat, the beaten person committed suicide”? However, I do not think that under ancap, such complex situations will be codified in advance; most likely, the court will make a decision on the merits in each specific case.

In a situation where there is no explicit accusation from the suicide, it is much harder to prove that driving to suicide took place, but if those who cared about the deceased manage this, the task reduces to the previous one.

As for assisting suicide, I already had a post about a girl who ordered her own murder. Anyone has the right to ask for help in such a delicate matter, but to protect oneself from claims by the deceased’s relatives, measures must be taken to ensure the full legal purity of the contract. It would be most logical if such a service were provided by professionals—for example, doctors performing euthanasia.

As for suicide booths on every corner—that is a hyperbole, of course. It is unlikely that the service would be so in demand.

The Inviability of Ancap

Grigory Bazhenov, an economist better known to the wider community as the initiator of the project No to Excise (by the way, an interesting example of a fairly competent public campaign, do join), has published an article on the insolvency of the ancap concept.

The language of the article is not the simplest, but as I understood, after scrolling through Grigory’s channel (also recommended, by the way), he is a mainstream economist who believes that non-mainstream things should be communicated in the language of the mainstream and based upon it, otherwise one remains on the sidelines. For an economist, this is logical. For a popularizer, this is walking on thin ice.

But let’s return to the article on ancap. Grigory summarizes that the insolvency of the ancap concept lies in the fact that “anarcho-capitalism proceeds from an economic interpretation of the concepts of competition and monopoly, but at the same time transfers these concepts into spheres where they are simply inappropriate”. I am very sorry, but this is a fight in the wrong place.

The doctrine of anarcho-capitalism does not imply free competition between organizations exercising aggressive violence for the right to rob those who are less efficient in this area. This is closer to the doctrine of extraterritorial insurance rackets advocated by Oleg Tarakanov, which he considers an intermediate option between minarchism and ancap.

Anarcho-capitalism is primarily a legal, not an economic, doctrine, and it asserts that no one has the right to rob, and that any imposed contracts are null and void, regardless of the status of the person imposing the contract.

This legal doctrine is merely supported by economic theory, as it proves that purely economically, a free market is better than an unfree one from the perspective of economic agents. And then Mises says that this conclusion is enough for a smart person to choose the free market, and Rothbard adds that even if it were proven that a certain form of unfreedom were economically more profitable, “proper guys” would still be for freedom. One can treat Rothbard as a freak for such bias, but fortunately, thanks to Mises, this is indeed immaterial.

So ancap is simply a critical hum, whether addressed to a minarchist state structure or to a world of competing insurance rackets: not bad, it says, but it could be better.

Animal rights

And what about animal rights? If a dog eats me, will it be acquitted?

анонимный вопрос

What will happen to animal abusers in a Free Society (stray dogs and cats)?

Roman

Hi. Regarding Varlamov’s recently released video, a question: how does ancap view circuses and animal abuse? Is it possible to limit torture and abuse through the court if animals are not subjects?

Vadim

Three questions about animal rights arrived almost one after another, which gave me a reason to talk about this topic out of turn. True, I have already answered a question quite close in meaning, it’s a pity that you are not very keen on watching old answers and instead ask as if nothing happened. So, mostly, read the answer in the old post.

I read Varlamov’s post about the Zapashny animal abusers with great respect. Varlamov is not calling for the Zapashnys to be banned; he condemns the ban on Cirque du Soleil. Against animal abusers, he calls for voting with your feet, as the institution of reputation works much more reliably than state bans. Today they will be banned, and tomorrow they will start organizing underground performances that crowds will attend. No, let the market decide on humanism, not the tsar.

I first read that circuses with animals are disgusting at a rather tender age from one of my favorite writers (even though he was a communist) — Jack London. I don’t know if the original authorship of this thought belongs to him, but at least he did a very good job for the moral condemnation of such things, and I thank him for that. I hope Russia will not need hundreds of years for the rooting of corresponding ideas. To be honest, I even find it unpleasant to watch clowns in a circus (too many jokes about violence and humiliation), but aerial gymnasts, for example, are a different story!

And in conclusion, I will briefly answer the first question, which stands out a bit from the general row. A dog that has mauled a person will neither be tried nor acquitted. If the dog was not someone’s property, and no one had undertaken to protect the residents of that territory from wild animals, then there is no one to hold accountable for the fact that the dog mauled someone. How the next person who encounters it deals with it is their personal business. If the humanism toward animals that I raved about in the previous paragraph forces someone to start protecting it from people, it will be equivalent to turning the dog into property and taking responsibility for its further behavior.

I don’t want pictures of animal abusers, I want the cute John Griffith Chaney!

The Question of Emancipation

According to the principle of self-ownership, a person owns their body and its derivatives. Does it not follow from this that the mother (or both parents) owns their child?

анонимный вопрос

Under ancap, under what conditions does a sentient being/program that is not human cease to be property and obtain rights equal to human rights?

Dmitry

Indeed, according to the principle of self-ownership, both a child and an artificial intelligence are the property of their creators. But the very concept of property is a convention. And exactly what rights the right of ownership entails is also a convention. Some sentient beings agree to tolerate certain behavior of other sentient beings if, for some reason, they believe those others have the right to do so. Generalizing the countlessly diverse behavior of the most varied sentient beings, wise lawyers formulate legal principles which, in particular, state:

  • which set of rights is called the right of ownership
  • what constitutes a human
  • that a sentient human possesses the right of ownership over themselves
  • that since a child almost inevitably grows into a sentient human, it makes sense to recognize part of the rights of a sentient human in advance
  • how a growing child will obtain those rights that they were not yet entitled to at birth
  • how a sentient being that is not human can obtain rights equal to human rights

The conclusions of different lawyers may not coincide. Different people may share the opinions of different lawyers to varying degrees. Some people are ready to use violence for the sake of asserting their ideas about legal doctrine, while some are not.

And ancap, as applied to the issue under consideration, is simply such a legal doctrine which asserts that there is no one whose opinion on this matter is uniquely and a priori correct, and subject to imposition on all others through the unlimited application of force.

The moment you declare that ancap is the principle of self-ownership raised to an absolute, or the principle of non-aggression raised to an absolute, or the principle of freedom of contract raised to an absolute—you are deviating from the principles of ancap. Keep your absolute away from children (and other borderline legal phenomena).

Keep the absolute away from children!

Restrictions on rights

1. Imagine a situation: a local epidemic of some infection suddenly breaks out in a hospital, and the doctors forbid you from leaving the quarantine zone. But in doing so, they are restricting your right to freedom of movement. How would such situations be resolved under ancap?

2. Consider this situation: in the summer, a child is lying/sitting in a car, crying, possibly suffocating from lack of air and heat; the parents went somewhere on business and forgot about them, and a passerby sees this and wonders what to do. Can they or the police break into the car or smash a window without permission, if the car is private property (which is inviolable under ancap)?

3. Is it permissible to cause damage to a person’s property that clearly threatens other people? Examples: a car with the handbrake on starts rolling toward another car, a tower leans due to age and is about to collapse onto neighboring buildings, etc. The nuance: there is no contact with the owner of the threatening property, or there is no time for it (the car is rolling).

I decided to combine three similar anonymous questions into one to avoid writing three similar answers.

In the first case, it turns out that exercising your right to freedom of movement could lead to significant harm to third parties, so you are asked not to insist on its exercise until it can be ensured that the threat has passed. In the second and third cases, causing damage to private property prevents harm to a third party. In all cases, you are simply presented with the fact of your rights being violated.

Where do rights come from? Rights arise from the interactions of some members of society with others. Some people agree to tolerate certain behavior of other people because they believe that those people have a right to such behavior.

Doctors believe they have the right to restrict your movement; they only need to convince others of this, and for this, they can use various methods. The most obvious and correct one: when you are admitted to a hospital, you sign a contract that outlines various boundaries, including force majeure situations like quarantine. Again, to ensure quarantine, doctors usually bring in specialists specifically for enforcement. Who will pay for this? As already mentioned in the post about epidemics, the most obvious interested party is insurance companies. They are the ones interested in ensuring the epidemic is prevented and the volume of insurance claim payouts is minimized; for this purpose, they can pay both those who enforce the quarantine and those caught in the quarantine—as compensation for the inconvenience. Or the insurance company may decide that the danger is small and will not introduce restrictions—those are its risks.

A passerby believes they have the right to encroach upon your private property to save a person; they only need to convince others of this. This is quite simple: they only need to demonstrate the rescued child to other passersby, and they will join the rescuer’s sincere indignation toward the jerk who left the child in the car, and perhaps even help in searching for the car’s owner.

General principles emerge from the generalization of private practice. They work well for typical situations and allow for the saving of mental effort. When two conflicting general principles collide in one head, a mental effort must still be made. It’s nothing terrible; the ability to think is always useful.

What will happen to the world ocean under ancap? Will anyone have ownership rights to it?

Ashot

Right now, international neutral waters represent a curious space of partial ancap. While not being anyone’s property, they allow a vessel to remain almost entirely extraterritorial (a vessel is considered the territory of the flag state, and therefore the market has decided in favor of convenient flags—such states have large merchant fleets, sometimes without even bothering to have access to the sea).

That is precisely why, when ancap arrives on land, the changes at sea will be minimal. A vessel will remain the private property of its owner, fishing grounds will be jointly operated by fishing companies (and if they fail to carefully read Elinor Ostrom, the market will punish them), there will be an increased likelihood of encountering pirates in the straits (but a rich set of tools can be used against them), the water will remain salty, and the great garbage patch will remain localized in the Pacific Ocean, existing by the will of the prevailing currents.

As wild fish becomes more expensive, humanity will increasingly switch to farmed fish; as plastic becomes more expensive, there will be a growing temptation to fish it out of the ocean for recycling; as the population grows and seasteading becomes cheaper, a considerable part of the ocean may become the territorial waters of new floating islands; until then, it is unlikely that anyone will start carving it into small plots.

Modern ancaps see the future of the ocean, while states persist on land, something like this

Is abortion justifiable from a libertarian perspective?

анонимный вопрос

The topic of abortion is the subject of heated debates that flare up from time to time within the libertarian community, and I get the feeling that the cause is not the acuity of the problem, but rather that it is a convenient scholastic exercise allowing one to examine the phenomenon from various positions while continuing to be considered a libertarian.

Arguments for abortion

  1. According to the principle of self-ownership, a woman has property rights over her own body, including the embryo that appeared there, regardless of whether this happened by her will or against it. The embryo is thus viewed as a part of the woman’s body, possessing no legal personality. At the same time, however, the interests of the father or other parties may be taken into account: if they provided the woman with resources from the moment of conception under the promise to carry the child to term, and she has an abortion, they are then entitled to require her to pay the agreed-upon liquidated damages.
  2. Even if the embryo is considered a person and its legal personality is recognized, its presence inside the womb is lawful only with the mother’s permission; otherwise, it must leave the organism upon first request, or else the woman has the right to remove it from the organism by force. As is easy to see, the discussion here is raised to a more abstract level, where the relationship between the woman and the fetus in her womb is interpreted as a relationship between two independent subjects, which may be considered a certain kind of casuistry.

Arguments against abortion

  1. If abortion is prohibited in a community with a free exit, the rules of which the woman accepts by virtue of her presence in it at the moment of conception, then the act of abortion will be a breach of contract on her part, and therefore the agreed-upon sanctions should be applied to her. The legal personality of the embryo is entirely irrelevant in this case. This position, however, is vulnerable to the woman’s claim of her right to freely leave the community and only then have an abortion, and therefore it is mentioned infrequently in disputes.
  2. By the fact of conception, parents commit violence against the child, because, firstly, they change its state from non-existence to existence without its consent, and secondly, they forcibly cast it into a state of helplessness. This entails an obligation for them to compensate the child for the harm caused, that is, to ensure an unobstructed birth, and then to provide resources until the child acquires the ability to exist independently. This position is vulnerable to the thesis that if changing the state from non-existence to existence is violence, then the reverse change of state back to non-existence would be quite adequate compensation; also, if conception is violence, then it is the duty of every responsible citizen to prevent such violence, meaning the very fact of unprotected sex should already be considered an attempt at conception and punished with the full severity of the law for violators of the non-aggression principle. It is not hard to guess that a community consistently practicing this approach would survive for exactly one generation.

An attempt to reconcile the parties

If you consider abortions to be aggressive violence against prenatal children, then you presumably would want children not just to be born, but also to grow up in love and affection. But it is easy to guess that if a woman wanted to have an abortion, and she was stopped only by the fear of your harsh sanctions, it is not a given that she will feel warm emotions toward the child, not to mention the temptation to use various ways to starve the fetus or kill the infant in such a way that the causes of death seem natural. Therefore, it would be very ethical on your part to offer a desperate woman, ready to get rid of an unborn child, financial assistance and your guarantee to take the child into guardianship immediately after birth in exchange for a firm promise to carry the child to term and give birth to it. In this way, you will not only prevent what you consider a crime, but also ensure the child a truly loving and responsible family.

If, however, you prefer to remain in the position that your business is to demand punishment for crimes rather than prevent them, then be prepared for the fact that quite a few will consider this bad faith behavior; for if you know that a helpless prenatal child died, although a shred of your effort could have saved it, then according to the principle of estoppel, you cannot demand punishment for another person who also allowed this death, although a shred of their effort could have saved the child.

You didn’t take the child into guardianship, how could you!