Тег: PRB

How are ecological problems solved in an anarcho-capitalist society?

I was arguing with a buddy; he says that in the PRB (Beautiful Russia of the Future), you can’t just take and distribute state land (which is 92% of it) as homesteads, because people will take it, cut down all the forests, sell the wood to China, and then leave. How realistic is this? Will an ecological catastrophe occur?
How are environmental problems solved in an anarcho-capitalist society? I heard there are several books on this topic.

Anonymous Ancap (question accompanied by a donation of 0.00021605 BTC)

If state land were distributed in modern Russia, then after some time, those who invested enough in this land and built a profitable business on it would start having that business squeezed out of them. Foreseeing these obvious consequences, people would be interested in squeezing as much as possible out of the obtained land as quickly as possible, and conducting more or less intensive farming only on a very modest scale, below the radar.

If the same were done in the Beautiful Russia of the Future, where judicial reform has already been carried out, property rights are protected, and there are several precedents of the successful protection of these rights, then it’s a different story. One could clear part of the forest, selling the logs to China, and use the proceeds to purchase wood processing equipment, gradually scaling a normal business, without forgetting to plant new forests to replace those cut down.

Thus, the optimal strategy for an entrepreneur will depend on their planning horizon, which is further the greater their confidence in tomorrow. Confidence, in turn, is strengthened by the presence of institutions that protect property rights.

Now about environmental problems. Ecology is a complex of knowledge and technologies for organizing a comfortable living environment for humans. The greater the solvent demand for such an environment in a specific territory, the higher the probability that the owner of the territory will prefer to invest in increasing the ecological attractiveness of the plot, even to the detriment of the existing business on that plot—because the demand for ecology also allows one to make money.

As for emissions, there is no fundamental difference between a simple garbage dump on someone else’s plot and, say, releasing harmful substances in the form of smoke into the atmosphere. This activity will meet opposition from neighbors, which will be more pronounced the greater their desire to have a healthy ecological environment right here. Were the polluter’s business somewhere on the internet, they could avoid responsibility for a long time, but land cannot run away; it is a large, stationary target. Therefore, anyone who, at their own risk, sets up a smoking factory that bothers the neighbors risks soon being left without a factory, and realizing that it is cheaper to install a filter on the smokestack, they will do so.

One might object, saying that in Africa, the compliance with environmental standards by enterprise owners is not very good. This is because the balance of violence there is not very stable. As long as it is cheaper to protect a factory from an attack than to re-equip it according to the latest word in ecological science, the owner will invest in protection. But in the absence of a state, under conditions of a sufficiently stable and sufficiently wealthy local community, the balance of violence can be maintained for a very long time, which means everything will be OK with the ecology as well.

I know that a huge number of pseudo-libertarians have appeared in our movement

Pro-lifers advocating for the ban of abortions, pedo-hysterics advocating for the ban of consensual intercourse with minors, and there are even freaks pushing for a “new Russian Pinochet.” The second class is the most delusional, of course. And it is the most numerous. While the first and third can be dealt with by simply distancing oneself from them, here we have a situation where the hydra of pedo-hysteria has embedded itself so deeply into the womb of the libertarian movement that it is practically impossible to extract. What are your options for action?

Inglikament Artzebantovsky-Bukht

You have listed three categories of people, of which the first and third would like to change the status quo (currently abortions are legal, and communists are not being thrown from helicopters into the ocean), while the second would wish to maintain it (voluntary intercourse with minors is already restricted). Libertarians are conducting a public campaign to change many things in society, and therefore need very broad public support. But the preferences of different people will inevitably differ, and the more actively you fight for the purity of the ranks, the less support you will have.

In this regard, I would like to recommend reading a post in an interesting channel run by anarchists who clearly have leftism in their history but have somewhat outgrown it (subscribe, by the way, the channel is good). The post analyzes behavioral strategies in conflict for a broad expansive social movement versus a hermetic sect. It notes a curious feature: expansive expansion is usually accompanied by fairly peaceful rhetoric, whereas sectarians are extremely aggressive in their rhetoric, even though their composition and numbers remain stagnant.

The libertarian movement is currently on the rise, so it will inevitably attract various freaks. There is no need to waste energy on internal sectarianism; it is more useful to focus on the unifying traits of your worldview. As for the pedo-hysteria, you can shrug your shoulders and say that personally you do not understand how one can distrust the personal preferences of teenagers so much and approve of state violence for victimless crimes, yet you are ready to cooperate with conservatives on the topic of lowering taxes and many other issues. This is a callback to my recent post, where I fantasized about how hypothetical American libertarians, without having a majority in Congress, nevertheless set the agenda and pass their laws by exploiting the contradictions between socialists and conservatives.

In short, if you have signed up for politics, be more flexible; unite around common interests, and you will have plenty of time to fight once you are in the parliament of the Beautiful Russia of the Future discussing a bill to abolish the age of consent. If you manage to gain broad enough support on this issue, you won’t need a helicopter.