Remember, a long time ago, I rejoiced along with you that a libertarian ran for president of Ukraine? In the elections, Gennady Balashov received some ridiculously low numbers of support, partly because his electorate went to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And, as it turned out, not in vain! A representative of Zelenskyy in the Rada just stated that his “Servant of the People” party will run in the parliamentary elections with a libertarian program.
Of course, judging by current polls, the chances of the libertarian party of Ukraine obtaining an absolute majority in the Rada are slim, and they will have to form a coalition, but slow and steady wins the race; this is already significantly more than one could have hoped for. I congratulate our neighbors on this stroke of luck; the cat that came out of the bag turned out to be exactly the right kind of cat.
As I understand it, the point is that in the article about the targeted offer of libertarianism, 14 groups were listed, including conservatives, who were told that the state is a poor ally against evil homosexuals, but homosexuals were not included, so it is unclear how to reach their hearts, and this point should be clarified. Very well, here it comes.
1. Any private discrimination pales in comparison to the horrors of state discrimination, not to mention such madness as court-ordered stoning or extrajudicial family executions to wash away the shame of the lineage.
2. Private attempts to use violence against you because of your non-violent sexual habits in a libertarian society can be resisted with weapons in hand, and most people will support you.
3. It is the conservatives in a libertarian society who will have to move to some separate territorial community if your very sight irritates them. You, however, will have every right to live wherever is most convenient and behave as you please, as long as you do not initiate violence.
4. But you will still have to tolerate all that “you just haven’t had a normal man/woman,” depending on whatever your gender is. So in that regard, it won’t get better, but it won’t get worse either.
If you have followed Donald Trump’s election campaign, you have likely heard of his method of tailoring the political program to each group of voters. Every person has points of vulnerability in their position, and by pressing them, one can win them over. Mikhail Svetov also advises using this approach in his lecture Propaganda Tools in the 21st Century.
Let us attempt to identify large electoral groups and work with their primary fears regarding the state. Our goal is to evoke in these people a hatred for the institution of the state as a territorial monopoly on violence and to interest them in the ideas of libertarianism.
Many people belong to several categories at once; accordingly, libertarianism can be promoted to them from multiple positions simultaneously (for example, parents with children who are also entrepreneurs).
Some regulations described in the article may be absent in the country of residence of our “libertarian candidate.” For example, Russian legislation lacks liability for criticizing LGBT, which exists in Switzerland, while it conversely imposes liability for the propaganda of non-traditional sex. Here, one should explain to the person that any state regulation has a property of “position inversion.” It does not matter which side the state is currently on regarding a specific issue; the very fact that this area is regulated means that tomorrow the regulation may change to the opposite, because for currently oppressed groups, the state may seem like a natural tool for fighting for their interests, and they will use it. In the middle of the 20th century, the state repressed Alan Turing for homosexuality, but a few decades pass, and in the same country, they repress critics of LGBT. In West Germany, until 1977, the state prohibited women from working without their husband’s permission, and now it punishes men even for complimenting a girl within the framework of anti-harassment legislation. Thus, it is important to make people understand: the complete absence of state regulation is better than state regulation in your favor.
Now, let’s go through the groups
Entrepreneurs
1. State regulation prevents entry into the market or creates severe obstacles to doing business. You have an idea, but you cannot implement it due to prohibitions from the state. The state forces you to obtain licenses for many types of business, which consumes a lot of time and resources. Constant inspections (fire, sanitary, labor inspectorate) interfere with business operations. Infrastructure monopolies (electricity, gas, etc.) make business uncompetitive. Even if the building is your property, you often have no right to install a suitable sign or paint the building the color you want without permission from the local authorities.
2. High taxes prevent the ability to develop the business. Everything goes to the state rather than to the development of your enterprise. This is especially relevant in Russia for businesses where the primary share of costs consists of salaries.
3. The labor code significantly complicates the hiring and firing of employees. If an employee does not bring you profit, you cannot simply fire them; they can force you to reinstate them in the position through the court. You have to find various workaround maneuvers, which also increases your costs. You have no right to allow an employee to work more than a certain number of hours, even if they want to. The ability to hire for a probationary period is limited.
4. As soon as your asset seems interesting to some enterprising security officer, they can initiate criminal prosecution against you and seize the business. To prevent such an outcome, funds must also be spent, and this cannot provide a full guarantee of safety.
5. Bribes, kickbacks, and other non-tax costs increase the cost of doing business, complicate accounting, and carry risks of criminal prosecution.
6. Copyright and patent laws prevent you from conducting business normally (patent trolls, channel blocking of video bloggers for quoting or using music and video without complex procedures for acquiring rights to them).
7. If a new breakthrough industry appears that is not yet regulated, by default, many government officials consider such activity prohibited, so the business community has to ask for the introduction of regulations just to be allowed to work somehow. This applies, for example, to the use of cryptocurrencies or the sharing economy (Uber, AirBnB, energy).
Youth
1. Due to the obstacles faced by business, youth experience difficulties finding employment, let alone starting their own business.
2. For guys, conscription slavery is relevant, which has no practical sense in conditions where large conscript armies are completely ineffective.
3. State regulation of education means that one must study according to unified programs that took a long time to coordinate and have since become obsolete. Many subjects serve the function of indoctrination instead of transmitting current knowledge and skills. The humiliated position of teachers prompts them to vent aggression on equally powerless students. Schooling is paid for through taxes; parents who wish to homeschool their children do not receive tax deductions for this, so very few can afford an alternative to school. As a result, classes are formed by compulsion, and people forcibly driven into a collective are always in a prison, with corresponding rules.
4. A number of professions imply the mandatory presence of a state-standard higher education diploma, so even after school, the choice of further education methods is artificially hindered by the state.
Users of medical services
1. State clinics and hospitals have no interest in providing quality services, as their existence is already paid for by taxes, and customer reviews have no influence on funding. Those who wish to receive paid treatment pay twice — for compulsory health insurance and for paid services.
2. The cost of medicines is greatly inflated due to state regulation of their market entry, patent privileges, import restrictions, and customs duties.
3. An unjustifiably high entry threshold into the profession due to requirements handed down from above creates a shortage of specialists.
Public sector employees
1. The state, acting as an employer, often imposes restrictions on workers that are not written in any employment contracts. Forced participation in pro-government rallies and election falsifications, self-censorship in expressing one’s political position — all of this is quite humiliating.
2. The state hinders private business from developing, which is exactly why a person has to seek a safe harbor in public sector positions, although the pay is low and the worker is not respected.
3. In public sector professions, one spends more time filling out papers than actually working: the utility of the work for society becomes near-zero, and one works only for the approval of the superiors.
Communists
1. The state, according to Marx, is an instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling class. It is impossible to get rid of class oppression without getting rid of the state. Any ideas of nationalization are the transfer of the means of production from the people into the hands of the state, i.e., the ruling class of bureaucrats; therefore, on the contrary, one must demand the transfer of all means of production to the people.
2. In the nineties, there was a correct people’s privatization when members of labor collectives received shares, but the state retained control over the courts, police, and monetary emission, and over time either took property away from the people or depreciated it.
3. Bitcoin is the correct communist money. State slips of paper are issued in any quantity the state desires, while cryptocurrency is honestly backed by kilowatt-hours, in full accordance with the labor theory of value.
1. The state forces you to pay for abortions through taxes (thus taking indirect part in them), and in wealthier countries — for hormone therapy during gender reassignment surgeries for transgenders.
2. You are forbidden from refusing service to people (homosexuals, migrants, representatives of certain ethnicities and religions) with whom you do not wish to have any dealings (employment, renting housing, providing services), as your right to private discrimination is not recognized.
3. LGBT have already achieved a ban on their criticism in many Western states and will strive for this in Russia. Attempting to preserve existing state norms regarding the curtailment of their rights means waging a fruitless war; it is better to exclude such an unreliable ally as the state from the conflict before it stabs you in the back. Moreover, the conflict will resolve itself afterward.
4. In the nineties, there were sexual education lessons in school. Now — basics of religious cultures and secular ethics. Tomorrow they will invent some other mandatory requirement. You can never guess which lobbyist will be stronger; it would be more reliable to simply deregulate education so that everyone can choose which cultural norms their child will assimilate. Otherwise, we will reach a point where children undergo gender reassignment surgeries without your consent, as in Canada.
5. The state prohibits the possession of effective means of self-defense, and even on the path to acquiring permitted, low-effectiveness means, it has placed a heap of administrative hurdles. This not only deprives you of the right to self-defense but also undermines the defense capability of the entire country.
6. You are forbidden from killing an attacker, even if your life is in danger. Despite clarifications from the supreme court, real law enforcement practice is such that successful self-defense usually leads to a criminal case for exceeding the limits of necessary self-defense, which ends in long sentences. The state refused to adopt the Castle Doctrine, although the petition for its adoption gathered the necessary 100 thousand signatures on ROI.
7. Due to the peculiarities of how democracy functions, the state often gives in to various well-organized radical currents and groups. For example, under the influence of radical feminists, tomorrow you may be held accountable for harassment if you simply pay the bill for a woman at a restaurant. And under the influence of radical Islamists, you can already today be forced to apologize to Ramzan Akhmatovich.
Left-liberals, social democrats, supporters of social justice
1. The problem of corruption exists worldwide. Even in advanced countries like Sweden and Finland, corruption exists in large volumes; it is simply on a different level (large business) and very rarely becomes known. Soil for corruption arises wherever an official has the right to make a decision at their own discretion.
2. The state destroys “sanctioned” food products and prohibits entrepreneurs from distributing expired products for free (although they may be perfectly fit for human consumption). This is lobbying for the interests of owners of agro-holdings and food industry enterprises.
3. You hope in vain that a progressive income tax will help establish social justice: in countries with a progressive tax, wealth inequality remains very high. This happens because large business has many tricks to reduce the tax burden, and the primary weight of taxation still falls on the middle class. You do not have the opportunity to move your business offshore, classify restaurant dinners and business jet flights as representative or travel expenses, or secure state subsidies and benefits. You will be assured that robbery is useful because the rich will be robbed more, but no, it is you who will be robbed more.
4. The state spreads unscientific nonsense about the harm of marijuana, resulting in many harmless consumers sitting in prison and research on its medical use being stalled.
5. The minimum wage, the ban on discrimination during hiring, and other labor market regulations only increase unemployment, as they complicate obtaining a job for those whose labor would bring the employer less benefit at the same pay. People with disabilities, women with children, pre-retirees, and people without work experience simply will not be able to find employment, although they could do so if they had the opportunity to dump their prices on the labor market.
Pirates
Intellectual property protection laws hinder the free exchange of information and its accessibility to underprivileged strata of the population. They also limit the possibilities for creativity (due to the ban on creating derivative content) and scientific research (many scientists are unable to pay for access to collections of scientific articles and journals). Patents on medicines make them prohibitively expensive for low-income citizens, and many of them die from diseases that could be cured. So-called intellectual property is simply state privileges. You are trying to forbid the state from establishing such privileges, but why not consider the possibility of removing the state as such?
Copyright-lobbyists
Along with intellectual property protection, you will inevitably receive censorship of your content from the state. Moreover, the lion’s share of funds will still be appropriated by various intermediaries forcibly introduced by the state, such as RAO, while you will get pennies. Or you might even be forced, for example, to publish in a scientific journal at your own expense, but the journal will keep all rights to use the publication, and the state will fully support it. Would it not be better to practice non-violent methods of monetization instead of involving such an inconvenient intermediary as the state? The state will bring you more costs from a ruined reputation than you will gain benefits from how it protects your intellectual property.
Eco-activists
1. Environmental protection is of little concern to the state. An official is more likely to allow an oligarch friend to destroy the environment for a large bribe (or even for the prospect of increasing tax collections as a result of “economic growth”) than to give in to environmental activists.
2. Private ownership of forests, lakes, and hunting grounds will create a powerful incentive to protect the environment and engage in the breeding of endangered species of animals and plants. There is no need to fear that the owner will forbid you from walking in the forest, picking mushrooms, or having a picnic; they will more likely make efforts to ensure that people vacation specifically on their property and will try to provide them with decent service.
3. If a private company causes damage to nature and people suffer because of it, it can at least be sued, but when an ecological catastrophe is caused by the state, there is no one to hold accountable.
Parents with children
1. The state forbids you from choosing the style of upbringing that you consider more correct.
2. There is a mandatory educational program with many subjects that do not provide current knowledge and skills but simply serve as indoctrination. You can only manage additional education, which will finally take away the remnants of your child’s leisure time.
3. If you wish to provide your child with quality home education, no one will reimburse you for the taxes paid for the maintenance of state schools.
4. Child protective services can take your child (even forever, depriving you of parental rights) for quite harmless things — lack of renovation in the apartment, a child’s complaints that parents did not buy them a gift, an untidy appearance of the schoolchild, and so on. The quite sound idea that a child has a right to protection not only from strangers but also, if necessary, from parents, has resulted in the fact that often the family as a whole is repressed.
Unemployed
1. The state has over-regulated the labor market and burdened salaries with huge taxes, so an employer cannot afford to hire you officially, and if they break the law anyway and hire you “under the table,” it is more profitable to take an illegal migrant; they are cheaper and will not go to the labor inspectorate to complain. This corrupts employers and demotivates them from creating humane working conditions.
2. In return, you receive a pittance of a benefit from the state if you register as unemployed. You will be tossed the most illiquid vacancies from the state employment exchange, be slowly trained in courses with no guarantee of employment afterward, and be required to constantly prove that you are still unemployed; thus, if you get a temporary unofficial part-time job, you will have to hide this fact from the state to avoid losing your status.
Victims of repression and victimless crime laws
This is a very broad and diverse group. This includes political prisoners, those held accountable for the use of psychoactive substances, violators of various licensing restrictions, those accused of pedophilia for claiming that maturing happens differently for everyone and the age of consent is a harmful thing — and even those fined for crossing an empty street on a red light.
To them we explain: it is impossible to replace bad repressive laws with good ones; they can only be abolished, otherwise not you, but someone else will become their victim. If no private person suffered or was put in danger, then there is no need for punishment. If you yourself suffered or were put in danger due to your actions (for example, not wearing a seatbelt), then it is even more pointless to punish you additionally — you have already punished yourself. Therefore, one must demand from the state the abolition of all laws implying punishment for a victimless crime, and if it resists, this is an excellent reason to abolish the state: its very existence is already a punishment for innocent people.
Pensioners
This is the most difficult category of people for the promotion of libertarianism. But even pensioners can be interested in the dismantling of the state.
Every working resident of Russia contributes 22% of their earnings to the Pension Fund of Russia (PFR). In 2018, the average salary in Moscow was 80 thousand rubles, and the average pension was 19 thousand rubles. Suppose a person works from age 25 to 60 with some breaks, and as a result, pays contributions to the PFR for 30 years. If they had not paid insurance contributions to the PFR but instead saved them in their own bank account (for simplicity, let’s assume that the deposit interest rate equals inflation, meaning it can be ignored in calculations), they would accumulate 80,000 * 0.22 * 12 * 30 = 6.3 million rubles. As of 2018, the average life expectancy in the Russian Federation is 73 years. The remaining life expectancy after retirement is thus 13 years. Accordingly, if you were not the state, your annuity would be 6,300,000 / (13 * 12) = 40 thousand rubles. This amount represents the state’s real obligations to you.
How then to ensure the fulfillment of these obligations? It is necessary to demand the total privatization of state property. A program clear to any pensioner: “seize and divide.” Seize from the state, divide among those whom the state has robbed. And, of course, stop the robbery for the future, though that is a concern for the young, which, however, is also close and clear to pensioners. All that remains is to conduct a discussion on the methods: how to seize and divide so that everything is not stolen in the process.
The political program of libertarianism boils down to the consistent reduction of the role of the state, that is, deregulation and tax reduction.
If movement in this direction leads to an increase in the security and wealth of residents until the state is reduced to the role of a “night watchman,” and further curtailment of state functions causes the level of violence to rise and prosperity to decrease, then the minarchists are right and the ancaps are not, and there exists a minimum state optimum below which it cannot be reduced.
If the state optimum is not found, and every reduction of the state brings only benefit to the people, then the ancaps are right after all; the state is a harmful parasite and must be completely eradicated.
If an optimum is found, but not where the minarchists assume it to be, but, say, at the level of “night watchman plus a poorhouse,” then the social liberals are right, and the hardline libertarians, with their meager brains, have failed to grasp the full importance of competent centralized redistribution of resources.
And finally, if it turns out that sustainable results are impossible to achieve because different societies have their own optimum of state functions, then the panarchists are entirely right: people are too different to be treated with a one-size-fits-all approach. Some need more state, some less, some zero—let everyone receive according to their request.
But in order to achieve all these results, a willingness of people to experiment in building a society convenient for them is necessary. However, decades of violent socialist experiments have largely discredited the very idea of consistently building something new. Therefore, we now more often see sporadic attempts to improve something, followed by rollbacks. But just as a long peace has taught people not to take the danger of a major war seriously, a long period of ideolessness can return the taste for reforms to the people. Our task is to ensure that at that moment, the idea of specifically libertarian transformations is floating in the air.
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.
I don’t know if Heinlein read Hayek, but in the book “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” he effectively describes through examples the emergence of spontaneous orders, specifically a court that does not rely on any laws handed down from above or precedents coming from the depths of centuries.
The essence of the procedure is as follows. The parties to the court turn to anyone who is willing to arbitrate between them and whom they would like to see as a judge in their case. There are those who make judicial practice their profession, those who supplement this with other activities, and those who may suddenly find themselves invited to judge.
An interesting feature of the judicial proceedings is that the judge takes an equal amount of money from each party before the start of the hearing, based solely on the size of the claim. The more that is at stake in the conflict, the more the judge risks their reputation, and the more money they charge for it.
If either party wishes, the judge may call in any number of volunteers as jurors. The task of the jurors is to deliver a verdict of “guilty” or “not guilty,” and for their work, they receive a fixed payment set by the judge. To be honest, this tradition seems to me a rudiment from Earth, and in the described society, it looks like a tacked-on addition.
After the case has been examined on its merits, the jurors, if there are any, deliver a verdict, and the judge announces the sentence, stating who owes how much to whom.
The point of the entire ritual is to defuse conflicts and prevent vendettas. Instead of a court, one can agree to a judicial duel, where, again, there will be a referee and possibly seconds.
Of course, I like the described system, especially since it strongly resembles how I myself described the proposed judicial proceedings under ancap. I am asked about courts often—this is already the fifteenth question—but everything can be easily found via the corresponding hashtag.
Liberalism and libertarianism are two terms with very similar, yet mirrored, fates. In the middle of the 20th century, statists snatched the term “liberalism” away from the proponents of economic freedom. And around the same time, the term “libertarianism” was snatched by proponents of economic freedom from the socialists. Mind you, I have not heard of libertarian socialists calling themselves classical libertarians after that.
Classical liberalism in the 20th century is primarily Mises and Hayek. Both are convinced supporters of the free market, both are convinced opponents of collectivism, but both consider the existence of the state entirely acceptable and see some benefit in it, namely the protection of private property. For this purpose, the state is granted a monopoly on violence, and to ensure it does not use it against citizens, citizens must have the right to bear arms and to self-organize, up to the point of armed resistance to the government.
Libertarianism is, in effect, classical liberalism in economics plus the application of those same principles to all other spheres of life, primarily in ethics and law. Rothbard argued that a monopoly on violence contradicts the principles of a free market and must therefore be rejected along with the state; subsequently, Nozick clarified that if a state were to emerge again on a free market as part of a voluntary process, then libertarians should, in theory, have no complaints about it.
As a result, in addition to classical liberals, who simply say that the state must be limited and that political activity should be pursued for this purpose, we also have anarcho-capitalists, who claim that all services, including the protection of private property, are perfectly provided on the free market, and “we are not buying the state, take it away”—and minarchists, who do not mind the state remaining, but only on the condition that it behaves itself, does not extort taxes, but politely asks for donations.
This is how the differences between classlib and libertarianism appear to me
The Austrian School of economics asserts that values are subjective; a person always makes choices based on their own personal preferences, which are unknown to anyone else, immeasurable, and unpredictable. Even within such strict frameworks of ignorance, a number of general statements can be made based on praxeology, that is, the logic of human action.
The Neoclassical school took a different path. It consistently and diligently approximated human behavior using mathematical models. Starting with the simplest model of homo economicus—the omniscient, dispassionate utility maximizer—it gradually released new patches to describe the behavior of real people in the language of models, so that it would correlate somehow with actual observed human activity.
Within this approach, various cognitive biases, the influence of different emotions, and so on, were described, extending even to the phases of the moon and blood glucose levels. Did this help in any way to learn how to predict the behavior of economic agents? Only for some special cases, and only at the level of probabilities, which, in general, remains within the bounds of common sense. I believe the achievements of behavioral economics can be helpful in creating realistic human emulators conducting some economic activity in the information space.
At the tenth Adam Smith readings, Rostislav Kapelyushnikov gave a very interesting lecture on how the achievements of behavioral economics in studying bounded rationality are used as a justification for paternalism. The idea is that since a person makes a certain choice anyway, and makes it irrationally, why not gently nudge them toward a choice that is more beneficial both for themselves and for society. In other words, there is still an attempt to decide for the person what is best for them, and behavioral economists give their approval for this, whereas classical economists, who proceeded from the presumption of the rationality of human choice, did not give the state such sanction. Thus, the state received a scientific indulgence for even greater intervention in the economy in terms of regulations.
Does behavioral economics shatter the idea of libertarianism? Rather, it provides new arguments to continue ignoring libertarianism, while practice still turns out to be on the side of freer societies where there is less regulation, no matter how scientific that regulation may be.
Human cloning is a long-known natural phenomenon, the consequences of which most of us have encountered without experiencing any undue difficulties. Clones, due to their peculiarities, are loved in fiction—so much so that introducing a clone into a plot is becoming a sign of a certain cliché. Cloned people are actively used in psychological and other medical studies when it is necessary to exclude the influence of genetic differences and focus on environmental factors. In short, the fact that human clones exist is as commonplace as the existence of albinos. So what if they are monozygotic twins; have we never seen identical twins?
At the end of the last century, advanced biotechnologies made it possible to clone adult organisms. Theoretically, nothing prevents cloning humans in a similar way. How would clones obtained from adult humans differ from clones obtained at the zygote division stage? Only in the fact that they would be of different ages. In other words, the social consequences would be significantly fewer than with natural twins—at least those can be mistaken for one another, although, for example, their fingerprints already differ—whereas it is much harder to mistake twins of different ages.
What is the point of cloning an entire adult human? Practically zero. Making ordinary children is much easier and cheaper. What is actually capable of bringing benefit is tissue cloning. An organ grown from oneself will graft much better during transplantation.
About the horror stories
I will immediately dismiss the religious ones, since groundless fantasies can be absolutely arbitrary, and it is impossible to analyze them all.
People will be cloned, grown, and then sliced for organs. Well, guys, that’s like claiming that cars will be assembled and then dismantled for spare parts. Growing a less differentiated cell culture is much easier and cheaper.
Rich people will copy their consciousness into their clones. We are currently further from consciousness copying technologies than we are from a manned flight to the edges of the Solar System. We can at least plan the flight with existing technologies, but there are not even any approaches to consciousness transfer. When such technologies appear, it may turn out that clones are completely unnecessary there, and that people have mastered rejuvenation procedures in general.
I have been asked repeatedly how fundamental science will develop without the state. Well, cloning is precisely an example of how the state directly prohibits science, so without the state, it will at least be able to develop, whereas now, in a number of areas marked with red flags, it is forced to move forward along strange detour paths.
The purpose of an improvised lecture on the benefits of libertarianism is to change a person’s perspective. After that, they can rewatch any films—whether from the beginning or from scratch—that touch upon the relationship between power and the individual in any way, and see everything in a new light.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of any films that provide a sufficiently accurate representation of a society under ancap. One would have to search thoughtfully to see if there is anything interesting about the stateless period of the Wild West, or the gold rush in Alaska, or if the mischievous Japanese have created some anime about ancap that is more plausible than Cowboy Bebop, and so on.
Sometimes libertarians tend to recommend something moralizing about how vile the state is, and how it particularly unpleasanty stepped on someone’s toes in a specific case. I don’t know, I’m not a big fan of direct propaganda; I find it more interesting to root for the Trade Federation in its entirely justified pursuit of secession from the Galactic Republic than to listen to pompous monologues from the adaptation of “The Fountainhead” (though Gary Cooper is a handsome man, of course!). And in general, it’s more pleasant to notice small details in passing than to be attacked directly; the latter is more likely to cause rejection.
