Тег: Marketplace

I would like to find out about the foreign policy of an anarcho-capitalist society. I have read The Mechanics of Liberty, but I still didn’t understand it well enough.

анонимный вопрос

Friedman devoted two chapters of The Machinery of Freedom to the problem of territorial defense against an aggressor of the “nation-state” type, with an interval of forty years between them. In the first part, he estimated the chances of an anarcho-USA fending off nuclear aggression from the Soviet Union and concluded that for the sake of defense against such a serious aggressor, he was willing to accept the existence of a state. In the second part, once the USSR was reliably dead, he breathed a sigh of relief and began to fantasize about how territorial defense is ensured without a state.

In my view, Friedman pays excessively much attention to the territorial aspect of the problem. For example, when he dismisses the model of financing defense through insurance, he puts the cart before the horse and assumes that clients will be tried to be sold “national defense” specifically (and that they will hope to save money, counting on their neighbor buying it). But the client does not need national defense. They need assurance that if an insured event occurs personally to them, they will receive the money. Whether they are on territory near where they bought the policy or on the other side of the planet is unimportant to them. And exactly what means the company uses to reduce its own risks of having to pay out insurance does not concern them either, as long as the company does not commit fraud.

Thus, if the organization of territorial defense truly reduces the chances of an attack by an external “state”-type aggressor, insurance companies are capable of calculating how much to invest in it to keep it profitable, and how to interact with other insurance companies to share the costs, for example, proportionally to the client base.

Friedman also presents an interesting thesis that the absence of a single jurisdiction over a certain territory is not in itself a guarantee against an aggressor’s claims. And when a conditional USSR arrives in a region where ancap reigns, it is sufficient for them to smash one city with a nuclear bomb and declare something like: look, see, Alderaan was here, it is no more. If the residents of Yavin do not wish the same fate, they owe five hundred million credits by the day after tomorrow, and we don’t care that they have neither a single administration nor taxation; if they want to live, they’ll figure it out somehow.

Effectively, he suggests that when it is too costly for a stationary bandit to expand its territory, it retains the option to act toward that territory as a nomadic bandit. Further, as you understand, everything depends on how coordinated the response will be. If a community is capable of reaching a level of coordination sufficient to pay a large tribute, it is reasonable to assume that further resistance will be coordinated at a level at least no less. This means that the second Death Star will indeed be destroyed without firing a single shot, unlike the first, which managed three.

At the same time, let us note that it is the free market that contributes to the fastest scientific and technical progress. And if, at the initial stage of ancap, states will still be able to oppose network market structures due to the difference in scale, then by the end of the transition period, the technological backwardness of states will become too obvious, and they will have to focus rather on holding onto the remnants of power over their own subjects.

Perhaps by ancap’s foreign policy you did not mean defense. But since for ancap the state is nothing more than a bandit, relations with a bandit amount to nothing more than deterring it from banditry directed at oneself, and other diplomacy is reduced precisely to this aspect. Visa regimes? That is about ensuring the bandit does not attack travelers. Customs regimes? That is about ensuring the bandit does not rob caravans. Regulatory regimes? That is about ensuring the bandit does not interfere with contracts. All these negotiations will come down to the interested party spending money on a payoff. As long as this money is less than the money required to eliminate the bandit, the latter will have a chance to survive.

Design code under uncap

In Petrozavodsk, the rules for placing signs were recently canceled, and most likely, entrepreneurs will start hanging very bright banners again to advertise their establishments; however, ordinary people will clearly not be very fond of such an arrangement. What will happen to the design code of signs (and to the facades of buildings, since differently glazed balconies and air conditioning units spoil the appearance of the object) under ancap?

анонимный вопрос

This is a typical example of a question about externalities. Who will pay the owner of a historical building for a careful reconstruction instead of a cheap and high-quality modern renovation? Who will forbid defacing the facade with convenient and useful air conditioning units? Who will encourage the creation of banners and signs that please the fastidious taste of an aesthete, rather than those that simply increase sales? Who, if not the state?

You probably already know that any ancap should answer this question. “The market, of course,” an ancap will answer. But how will the market do all this? It doesn’t have hands. The market has invisible hands, don’t worry. Now I will explain where they grow from.

First, the invisible hands take the economy by the scruff of the neck and pull it out of the obvious hole. If no state clings to the economy in the process, it will be easier for the market to pull it out. Every entrepreneur will decide for themselves, based on local cultural norms and their own ideas of what is acceptable, what size and what acidity of colors is appropriate for a sign here in order to maximize profit. And the better their property rights to what is under the sign are protected, the more this profit will be viewed in a long-term perspective.

A poor person will buy a cheaper apartment, as spacious as possible and not too far from work. A well-off person will buy a spacious and cozy one. A rich person will build a beautiful house in which every detail will please their own eye. Somewhere between being well-off and rich, it will already be strange to remember such an archaic problem as an air conditioning unit sticking out in a prominent place.

Some historical buildings will be demolished for the sake of objects that bring more income. When this income turns into wealth and prosperity, the remaining historical buildings will become expensive and prestigious—those who want to live in historical buildings themselves or house tourists there will invest in their careful reconstruction. And whoever finds the old historical buildings insufficient will find a great architect, and they will build a new building that will become no less historical—despite the fact that niches for air conditioning units will be provided in it. And the signs on it will look solid and noble. Or perhaps lush and neon, if that turns out to be the spirit of the neighborhood. Because why hang a sign that violates the spirit of the place, especially if you are not limited in means? It will not be as effective.

And in some places, instead of such subtle matters as spirit, there will be strict rules prescribed by the owner of the territory—or a homeowners’ association. They are within their rights, but most likely they too will use their rules to ensure that their land is worth more, the district is considered more prestigious, and the tenant is not too frightened by unnecessary strictness. They will have a far more direct motivation for this than officials from some urban planning department.

Do you want such beauty in Petrozavodsk?

Musk and the alarmists

I read in a left-anarchist channel reflections that our very own Elon Musk has completely dropped his mask and is now collaborating not just with the state, but with the military establishment itself; shame on him, and shame on everyone who speaks of him approvingly.

This reminded me of the words of another liberal idol, Ludwig von Mises, who said that the entrepreneur’s task is to vigilantly seek ever-new ways of satisfying customer demand, and if guns find more demand than butter, there is no sense in blaming the entrepreneur for producing guns.

But with Musk, it is much simpler; he is not choosing between guns and butter, but is steadily moving toward the future he considers desirable. In the brave new world that Musk is building, there is no problem with delivering eighty tons of cargo to the other side of the planet by rocket in an hour. And it makes no difference what cargo one starts with. A customer was found for the development of cargo suborbital transport—so we will build it. And once the technology is mastered using military budgets, it can be brought to the private market to send cargo cheaply. And then, with a bit more polishing, send people.

In reality, for most military tasks, sending dozens of tons twenty thousand kilometers in an hour is overkill. However, for emergency response, this option will be very useful. Thus, I foresee a predominantly peaceful use of this technology being developed with military funds.

If taxes have already been collected and the question is how to spend them, then let them at least be spent by a private actor on dual-use technologies with prospects for wide civilian application.

What will happen to currency under ancap? Won’t hyperinflation occur, since there will be no copyright on currency and everyone will be able to print their own shillings?

Vladimir

To understand what will happen to currency under ancap, it is enough to visit the site coinmarketcap.com, which provides the price history of more than seven thousand cryptocurrencies. Since there is no copyright on cryptocurrency, literally anyone can create one, and this site reflects far from all of them, but only those that are traded, more or less, on exchanges, or were traded for some time.

What do we see when studying the price history of various currencies relative to Bitcoin? In many cases, it is a short-term speculative rise, followed by a long and painful decline with occasional spikes, sometimes ending in complete oblivion. The issue is not even unrestrained emission, but the fact that the consumer does not need an excessive variety of types of money. As we know from Alexey Tereshchuk’s catallactic theory of money, money are goods used to reduce costs in indirect exchange. If there are many candidates for the role of money, under conditions of freedom of choice, the consumer will use those that can reduce their exchange costs more effectively than others.

How many types of money are needed to fully satisfy the needs of the market? Money has various parameters by which they can be compared. For example, the possibility of anonymous transfer, or conversely, the impossibility of such, or the size of costs to make a payment, or preservation during storage, or preservation of value over time, or the development of infrastructure for working with this type of money, and so on. Each such factor is interesting because it allows reducing the consumer’s costs when using money in different ways. It is very unlikely that one single type of money will be found that leads in all possible criteria. Therefore, in the course of natural currency selection, at least as many should remain as there are leaders in individual functions of money.

However, of course, this does not mean that new and new attempts will not be made in the market to displace the old leaders. They will be. Most of them will end in failure. There will also be initially fake attempts, where the creators of the currency build hype around it, profitably sell it to all who wish, and then relax, and the currency fades into oblivion.

Coinmarketcap.com in the Weimar Republic

Liability of the solicitor of a crime

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.

How to fight cartels under ancap?

liberal

There is a well-known assertion that monopolies do not form in a free market. This, of course, is not true: in a free market, everyone has the opportunity to secure a monopoly for themselves. All it takes is very little: simply invent something that others haven’t thought of, implement it, and start selling. That’s it, you have a monopoly. If your product is in demand by the market, this monopoly will also bring you superprofits. Then competitors will catch up, and for a while, you can maintain your superprofits if you enter into a cartel agreement with them. Then someone will start to break it, hoping to seize a larger share of the market, and after some time, nothing will remain of your cartel.

But why suspect people of bad intentions? Let your cartel agreement remain sacred and inviolable, because each of its participants has learned the prisoner’s dilemma by heart and knows how to think a couple of steps ahead. Let’s raise our glasses to the cloudless future of your business!

Alas, the weather is fickle. Tomorrow, someone will appear who dreams of a monopoly. They will invent something that no one has thought of before, implement it, and start selling. After that, it will suddenly turn out that this was a substitute product for your cartel’s goods, and now you have competitiveness problems. You will urgently have to agree to increase production and lower prices to maintain market share, but still, your horse-drawn carriage, which was so progressive until recently, will gradually begin to lose to that wretched tram.

What is to be done? The market is free, entry is open to anyone who wishes, and this is an unavoidable obstacle for anyone who wishes to rest on their laurels from past achievements. One should invent some kind of thing that would allow limiting free entry into the market; then the old, respectable business will certainly be threatened by nothing. What should it be called? There, let’s call it the state! Great, all that’s left is to implement this product and start selling it.

Ah, what? Did I answer the wrong question? Well, sorry…

Oh, youth! They promised to bury the cities in manure knee-deep! What went wrong?

About dangerous psychos

We have psychiatric hospitals and maximum-security prisons.

Their “clients” remind us that there are very real psychopaths, maniacs, serial killers, and other problematic characters. Most of them are not Dexters or Hannibal Lecters, and they do not act in accordance with the public good. Due to the peculiarity of the processes occurring in their brains, there is no clear way to convince them using reasons or arguments.

How can ostracism help against them?

What would a system for searching and destroying or isolating such “Jack the Rippers” look like? If it is isolation rather than destruction, then with whose money and by whose efforts?

анонимный вопрос

People value security and are willing to pay for it. Inadequate aggressors are not just dangerous, but because of their apparent irrationality, this danger seems even more serious than if people applied the cold reason of an insurance agent. The same considerations apply here as to why people fear terrorist attacks more than car accidents, even though mortality from the latter is much higher.

The most obvious market agent that could provide such a service is, of course, insurance companies. They collect premiums while the client is safe and pay out a benefit in insured cases. Therefore, assuming that insurance companies act in good faith and do not cheat their clients, it is in their interest to promote the maximum safety of their clients.

But security from maniacs can be provided in different ways, and this is determined by social mores. Clients may desire security from packs of stray dogs but categorically protest against their wholesale extermination, so those who undertake to satisfy this whim will have to account for the corresponding restriction in means.

Similarly, simple empathy no longer allows our wealthy and prosperous society (and under ancap it is presumably expected to be even wealthier and more prosperous) to demand security from violent psychotics through their extermination; rather, it is a matter of treatment. Again, a mental disorder may be acquired rather than innate, for example, as a result of trauma, and before that, the person could well have been a respected client of an insurance company. Thus, the obvious line of thought in our case would be the search for methods of treatment.

Will this be expensive? Pennies. I did not mention the comparison between terrorist attacks and car accidents for nothing. A disproportionate amount is spent on preventing terrorist attacks. In the same way, violent psychotics will receive a disproportionate amount of attention, although their number is completely negligible. Of course, if a person with mental problems had an insurance policy, they would receive higher quality and more expensive treatment, but even if there was no policy, they would still be attempted to be returned to normalcy, and by quite humane methods.

Direct Action Stocks: Division of Labor

Bitarch posted a note on VKontakte about risk-free struggle against the state. In short, the idea is to anonymously hire non-politicized members of the public for real-world actions. The methodology is quite obvious; it is a standard division of labor. But, of course, such technology requires infrastructure for widespread implementation — secure platforms where one could post orders and expressions of readiness to fulfill specific tasks. Bitarch writes about the darknet, which is rather vague, and without certain qualifications, this tells an inexperienced political activist practically nothing. However, to develop a taste for this, one can start by using simple, makeshift services.

For instance, the friendly channel Anarchy+ recently launched a service called Protest Action Exchange, where you can place an order for an action, ask for donations to implement your idea, and so on. Although the channel is anonymous and all communication goes through a bot, it is still far from true security, but the risks are modest enough because the exchange does not accept orders related to violent actions.

So, if you have ideas, take the opportunity to find performers. If you have the strength, take the opportunity to get involved. The project is non-commercial, and although it was started by left-wing anarchists, they have no prejudice against libertarianism, so no ideological screening is expected.

How will ancap overcome the demographic pit?

Artem

Ancap is a free, unregulated market. That is, any decisions within ancap are made voluntarily and for mutual benefit. Now let’s look at who cares about demographics under ancap.

First, there are producers of goods and services. They are interested in increasing demand, and specifically, in increasing demand for children’s goods. Children are a very capacity-rich market because they need special nutrition, they quickly outgrow clothes, quickly change their preferences in toys, their safe outings require specially designed spaces, they need to be educated, treated, and so on. So I will receive various tempting offers, from “Today in our store we have a tasting of baby food, be sure to try it and see that your child would be satisfied” to “Planning a tour? Special group discounts for families with children!” I will be shown movies and clips on the internet praising the joys of motherhood. In general, I will constantly feel that with a child, I will be a welcome member of society.

Second, there is me. If I know that my relationship with my child concerns only the two of us, then I will have no fears that I will be deprived of parental rights over some nonsense that bothers neither me nor the child. If I know that people will be happy to sell me any technically possible product or service, from ectogenesis to caring for the child while I feel the urge to take a break from them—then I will have no fears that I will be alone in the face of many accidents, because specialists will help me deal with all the unpleasant chores. So, in essence, the only things separating me from having a child will be money and desire.

But at the same time, if I am too lazy to earn good money, too carefree to save anything or use contraception during sex, and too squeamish to care for an infant—then at least I will know that parental rights to a newborn can be profitably sold to those who, for some reason, have problems having their own child. So it will be completely unnecessary for me to have an abortion, especially if the process of carrying the child is easy enough and doesn’t stress me too much.

From this, it can be concluded that under ancap, the birth rate will be higher than in miserable countries with powerful juvenile justice and a heap of regulations related to children. But lower than in traditionalist cesspools where a woman is property, and if her purpose is to give birth, then go, fulfill your purpose and don’t complain. In short, there will be as many children as those who decided to raise a child need, and whether reproduction ends up expanded or the human population declines in certain periods—I have no idea, it’s not my business.

By the way, here is another category of consumers ready to raise children

Once more about intellectual property law

Suppose I am a writer. I live in Ancapistan. I wrote a book. I posted it on my website, free for readers. At the top, I put a banner that rotates with every view and brings me a little bit of money. At the bottom, I put a donation button.

A malicious pirate copied my book to his own site. He threw out a couple of chapters he didn’t like. He put his own banner at the top. He put his own donation button at the bottom.

If I take a little shotgun and go to kill him, will the jury acquit me?

анонимный вопрос

This is a supplement to the question proposed by the King of Sex and Tea Bags, but this time without a signature.

Oddly enough, I quite often do exactly what you described. Some Bitarch or Vitaly Tizun posts an article. I take the text, correct the commas, remove paragraphs I don’t like, accompany it with some comment of my own, and post it on my own site, not forgetting to place a “donations” button under the post. As it happened, none of them have come at me with a little shotgun for this; in fact, some even praise me, saying the edited text is easier to read. Perhaps it’s because I credit the author and provide a link to the original post. Therefore, the authors see their own benefit in my behavior and do not object.

But what if I ignored the norms of netiquette, took anyone’s texts, edited them however I liked according to my taste, and posted them in a channel under my own name? One thing would be obvious in this situation: it would also be unnecessary for others to observe the norms of netiquette in their attitude toward me. Perhaps the slandered authors would rain attacks on me in social networks and tediously explain to the public that they are the actual authors of the text, that the originals should be obtained from them, and that they are the ones who should be donated to if the work was liked. And I would continue my strange approach to content creation, focusing on exactly what and how I change in the posted texts. For example, I might post the text of the Iliad, leaving only the first half of the second song, and refer all those who are outraged to Mandelstam. Over time, I would gain a community of connoisseurs of my specific edits. Or perhaps the readers would quickly get bored. That’s the market.

Now, if I focused not on self-assertion through edits, but on simply posting as many “tasty” texts as possible, I would end up with a very ordinary electronic library. In this case, it would be redundant for me to cut out even the author’s name and substitute my own; I would post it as is, but I would take care of fast servers, providing the text in all popular e-reader formats, and other things valued by users. I would try to ensure that I have everything people are interested in, in the most convenient form for reading. I would develop a reader community, interview authors, and so on. And the authors would come to me themselves, suggesting, “Look, I have a fresh book here, take it, and give me a percentage of the donations.” I would say: ok. I would allocate a personal section for the author in my library, make them a moderator there, let them answer readers’ questions and entertain them in every way, and we would split the income in an agreed proportion.

Of course, if I behaved like a textbook “mudesa,” treating authors with disdain—saying, “be grateful that you talentless hacks are published anywhere at all, you should actually be paying me for this”—or, say, inserted scenes into someone’s books that made the author look like an idiot—well, then perhaps I would drive someone to the point of coming at me with a little shotgun. But I could just as easily drive anyone to that for any other reason; here, the activity of posting other people’s texts is no longer the principal issue. And the more vilely I behaved, the more people wondered how I hadn’t been shot yet—the more satisfaction they would feel upon the occurrence of that fact. Of course, those who demand compensation from the killer for my murder would find it difficult to find a sufficiently impartial court, but not everyone in the world is a fan of literature. So, they’d hardly be acquitted, but they probably wouldn’t be judged strictly either.