Тег: Regulations

Let’s imagine that some crazy landowner in the city put up a giant-sized poster with, say, an image of an erotic nature.

Out of common sense, it would be right and fair to punish such a stunt immediately and force the poster to be taken down. Under a state, that is exactly what would happen. But what would happen under ancap?

Anonymous question (paid in the amount of 0.0005 BTC)

First of all, I want to apologize for not noticing the donation transferred on Thursday immediately, and therefore I am only answering now. I will try not to disappoint in the future.

Under a state, we actually see huge erotic images all over the city in the most prominent places, from billboards right in the middle of sidewalks to banners covering the entire side of a high-rise building. The image usually features some minimally dressed girl enjoying a Coca-Cola or checking how comfortable it is to sit on the hood of a sports car. I don’t know about feminists, but I like such advertising, especially now, because it reminds me of summer.

If tomorrow marketing research in focus groups shows that sales can be increased by advertising of a homoerotic nature, or scenes of violence, or something along those lines, then either we will soon see and gladly welcome fresh advertising imagery, or this will be preceded by lobbying work to obtain permission from the state to display such things, if it currently prohibits it directly.

But your question, in essence, concerned something slightly different. What if someone decided to place not an advertisement, but an image of a deliberately repulsive nature, which does not call for buying anything but simply evokes disgust? In a state, even if the current laws do not provide a ban on such things, the image can be dismantled by a simple order from some law enforcement agency, or, if it is a civilized state, there is a chance for a private lawsuit to succeed.

Quite some time ago, I wrote about some possibilities for harmonizing the urban environment under ancap; now I will consider a slightly different aspect.

In the absence of a state, a scandalous image will remain as long as the owner is willing to pay for it. Some will organize protest actions, call for a boycott, some will try to buy the building in order to destroy the image, some (the vast majority!) will limit themselves to flame wars on the internet, some might even risk pelting the owner of the object with eggs — and some will release souvenirs and begin to glorify the city’s new symbol. Imagine, a magnet of the Eiffel Tower, which was considered disgustingly ugly and people demanded its demolition in the early 20th century! Now imagine a magnet of our city’s fucking cunt-thing! Not much time will pass, and it will be impossible to imagine the city without this monument. The free market is always eclectic, and nowhere offline is this manifested as vividly as in the appearance of cities.

How does libertarianism view human cloning?

анонимный вопрос

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.

Clones are among us!

How to explain to a statist-hoplophobe that such a funny thing as state regulation of crypto is not only pointless, but will not make the world even slightly safer?

анонимный вопрос

I don’t quite understand why we are talking about a statist-hoplophobe, and not a statist-guitarist, for example, if the subject is the control over cryptocurrency circulation.

By design, most cryptocurrencies do not require the participation of a trusted intermediary, let alone one necessarily authorized by the state. So, avoiding state regulation of cryptocurrency circulation is very simple, and banning it is pointless. The only thing the state can regulate more or less effectively is the conversion of crypto into fiat, meanwhile, money earned in cryptocurrency still has to be spent primarily in national fiat currencies.

So, a state wishing to regulate cryptocurrency circulation can act like the United States, which pressures crypto exchanges on its territory and demands they snitch on their clients, while crypto exchanges in the rest of the world have simply told these pushovers to get lost and require confirmation during registration that you are not a US citizen. Thus, it is not so easy for a US citizen to perform uncontrolled exchanges of crypto for fiat in significant amounts.

That is why unfortunate US citizens continue to buy drugs with good old cash dollars, and use cryptocurrency far less widely than they could. What does the need to buy drugs with physical cash mean? The need for personal contact with a pusher, additional security measures for everyone involved in the distribution chain—since they are easy targets for robbery—in short, blood, filth, and endless street clashes. Does the world become safer because crack-dealing gangs are dividing territory?

Compare this situation with peaceful and safe Russia, where the only danger for a “zakladchik” [dead-drop courier] and a drug user is the cops, while the level of street violence related to substance circulation has decreased considerably with the arrival of cryptocurrencies in this industry. Where would violence come from if the producer, the buyer, and the courier are physically separated and do not know each other?

It is completely irrelevant how you personally feel about psychoactive substances, but the fact that this market has switched to crypto has made the lives of ordinary, uninvolved people safer, whereas where the market has not switched, everything has remained as it was. Even this single consideration should be enough to convince a person who is truly concerned about their safety that crypto should not be regulated.

Now, if he—as is common among statists—is convinced that the state should regulate absolutely everything that can be somewhat shoehorned into the market of anything even slightly dangerous, because “control is needed, how can we do without control,” then conversation is useless; only personal experience will change his mind.

And if only the guy had a short-barreled—excuse me—a bitcoin…

Why not sell libertarianism through the idea of the absence of state regulation, especially when there is the example of the flourishing of entrepreneurship in 1998-1999, when they left business alone and let it develop?

анонимный вопрос

This question was clearly inspired by my post “to whom and how to sell libertarianism?“, and is an invitation to develop the topic.

But the example you chose was not very successful. In 1998-1999, there was no conscious deregulation; the state simply defaulted on its credit obligations, which led to it stopping borrowing for quite some time. Investors, no longer having such a tempting option as investing in government securities, began to invest more actively in the real sector. Moreover, the financial crisis sharply lowered the cost of assets, and the fall of the ruble lowered the cost of labor. In general, in full accordance with the Austrian theory of the economic cycle, recovery after a crash happens quickly if one does not interfere with the process, which is what happened—not because the government was so wise, but because it was bewildered and did not know where to start.

So the example you proposed is more about the fact that state non-interference in the economy during a crisis has a very beneficial effect on the economy. Even to illustrate that state non-interference in the economy has a beneficial effect on it in general at any moment, additional examples are needed, and better yet—logical arguments. Although, of course, people love history precisely because it is a set of instructive tales for any life situation, so do not hesitate to provide historical examples if you see that they are in demand with the audience. You won’t prove anything with them, but you certainly can sell an ideology.

After all, for people, 1998 is more associated with something like this, rather than with the liberation of business…

What arguments do Keynesians bring in favor of government regulation? They claim that the Austrian school cannot prove its theory. And how do they prove their own?

анонимный вопрос

The triumphant march of Keynesianism across the globe is based on simple trickery. The Great Depression was declared a failure of the free market, rather than a failure of state regulation, and a set of state regulation tools was proposed to counteract such phenomena. From the very beginning, Keynesian theory was criticized by the Austrian and neoclassical schools, and throughout the entire time it dominated, no convincing answers to this criticism were provided.

Why did the Keynesians defeat the Austrians? Because the governments themselves acted as the arbiters in the dispute over which economic policy governments should pursue. This violates the fundamental legal principle “No one should be a judge in their own cause,” and it is no surprise that governments with grim regularity preferred those teachings that offered to grant them more significant powers, rather than those that proposed, on the contrary, full deregulation of the economy.

Fortunately, in democratic countries, some feedback remains between the government and the voters, and when stagflation occurred in the seventies—directly contradicting Keynesian theory—the monetarists, with their less clumsy methods, took the place of the Keynesians in the courts of the sovereigns. Countries with dominant Marxism were not so lucky; there, Marx’s teaching was declared omnipotent by virtue of its correctness; in other words, the feedback between theory and reality was absent.

I had to make this historical excursion to make it clear immediately: the success of Keynesianism is based not on logical justifications of the theory’s correctness, but on the fact that its implementation brought direct benefits to those implementing it.

Now I will touch upon the Keynesian proofs directly: after all, even if factual considerations did not match the public justifications, the Keynesians still had to provide some justifications.

At the heart of any theory lies a certain model of reality. Keynes refused to consider models of interaction between agents and focused instead on models of relationships between abstract entities such as aggregate demand, aggregate supply, total employment, the general price level, gross product, the velocity of money, and so on.

Thus, the model of a crisis according to Keynes looks like a system with positive feedback: the lower the demand, the lower the production, the higher the unemployment, the lower the demand. Within the framework of such a simple model, everything is logically flawless. Keynes’s conclusion: the government must stimulate demand through public works, regardless of what they are—even digging holes and filling them back in—and this will allow an exit from the vicious circle. It is evident that such a theory is perfectly suited for propaganda purposes: first, you frighten them properly, and then you promise to save them if they buy your miracle cure for the problem.

In general, the resulting model is completely counterintuitive: a crisis is caused by the overproduction of goods (according to the AES, it is caused by the overproduction of money, and when there are many goods, that is actually great, which fully corresponds to the worldview of any average person); the chief evil in the economy is savings (according to the AES, it is precisely savings that allow for the implementation of increasingly indirect production chains, which ensures economic growth); the best way to fight crises is the destruction of savings and the squandering of resources. Why the implementation of such madness is a sure path to ruin at the level of an individual household, but somehow magically saves the economy once the state begins such a practice for the entire country at once, the Keynesians did not explain. There is a complete logical gap between micro- and macroeconomics for them; they are two entirely unrelated disciplines.

Modern Keynesianism has mutated greatly compared to the original theory, merged in ecstasy with monetarism, and formed a single mainstream current that continues to create increasingly sophisticated models for various areas of life. If Keynes began by promoting the very necessity of state regulation of the economy, now the necessity of state regulation is no longer questioned, and economists are having a field day, infinitely refining specific ways to do it in the most sophisticated manner. 

How will treatment protocols be developed under ancap? Today, the WHO does this, and then the state implements these recommendations. But without a state?

Semyon Podporin

Even today, there is a more or less market-based competition between various treatment methodologies in the world. There is the WHO, with its ICD and list of essential medicines. There are numerous schools of traditional medicine that find their followers, often even on an international level. There is homeopathy and all sorts of other extrasensory practices. There are fasting and prayers. There are several families of therapeutic gymnastics.

Thus, even when competing with international bureaucracy, the medical market is quite flexible and provides services for every taste and budget. There are no grounds for it to be any different under ancap. Yes, it will be easier to introduce various “placebo-drugs” to the market. On the other hand, there will be no imposition of such drugs at the state level, as was the case with something like Arbidol.

Yes, humanity will not have a single list of diseases and drugs, but developing new medications will definitely become easier. Yes, there will be more various placebos on the market, but funding for the Cochrane Collaboration will likely grow, as will its authority.
Many also fear the curtailment of research into new drugs due to the demise of patent law, but that is a completely different question, which, moreover, I have already partially answered.

fully decentralized self-governing self-funding association – the market solves the problem of placebo-drugs

Hi. And how, under ancap, can the harmony of the urban environment be ensured? What would stop one guy from building houses in the Baroque style, while another builds right next to him in the Constructivist style (let’s say)? Or is this not a problem worth thinking about at all?

anonymous question

Strictly speaking, even under a state, in most cases, nothing prevents two developers from building houses in completely different styles next to each other. There is a set of formal criteria regarding something like insolation, number of floors, and parking area; once those are met, it’s done. If the verdict of the chief city architect or some other expert bigwig is required, then corrupting them is simply a matter of time.

At the same time, there are many cases of self-organization in condominiums, where the purchase of land for development or a finished real estate object is accompanied by a set of restrictions common to the entire condominium—on fence height, number of floors, roof color, or even damn curtains on the windows. As long as such easements allow for increasing the value of the property in the condominium, the market supports them. As soon as a restriction leads to a decrease in the price of the properties, the market sets in motion the forces to abolish them, and suddenly the condominium board decides to lift the ban on building a second garage on a plot, or the requirement that roofs must necessarily be red. In the described mechanism of restricting property disposal rights, there is nothing that could not be implemented under ancap.

Here you go, an addition to baroque under state regulation

I recently came to the conclusion that antitrust services are not very effective in handling their task (one can use the recent situation with the collusion of memory chip manufacturers or with video cards as an example). And how can the free market resolve a monopoly?

anonymous question

This question is so common that when a memo for arguing with schoolchildren was being compiled, it was listed as number one.

Indeed, antitrust services are not needed. Monopolies are either formed where the optimal business size turns out to be comparable to the total market size, or where government regulations have created the monopoly artificially (for example, through licensing of activities, exclusive procurement from a single supplier, issuance of patents — in other words, by prohibiting anyone but the monopolist from entering the market).

In the first case, the monopolist successfully meets the demand, the market grows, and over time it turns out that there is now room for several more companies; any attempt by the monopolist to fight them using market methods leads to such a loss of profit that it becomes more profitable for the monopolist to invest in other industries rather than cling to a market share where they are still a monopolist.

In the second case, the monopolist becomes arrogant, raising prices and degrading the quality of services, while the state has to deal with consumer dissatisfaction. Sooner or later, either lobbyists for potential competitors will push through the deregulation of the industry (this is how Novatek secured the right to export liquefied natural gas, which previously belonged exclusively to Gazprom), or a black market will develop, which, without doing anything about the de jure monopoly, will undermine its de facto monopoly. Despairing of fighting the black market through state power, the monopolist will be forced to make concessions — and finally start lowering prices and improving quality.

Back to the question of global warming: the point is not that the climate will change, but rather what will follow: the disruption of climate cycles, the disruption of ecological stability, etc., etc. All of this will undoubtedly affect the agro-sector, plus the growing population. What is to be done about this?

anonymous question, addition to the previous answer

If a certain community agrees on what climate is optimal for it and has the means to establish these conditions, its representative simply takes the climate control remote and sets the required parameters. If there are no means to establish an arbitrary climate, people either migrate to more acceptable climatic conditions or adapt to the existing ones. If there are means but no agreement, then whoever holds the remote will, one way or another, set parameters that satisfy some and dissatisfy others.

To study the causes and effects of climate change, one can ask: a) who influenced the changes that occurred and to what extent; b) who suffered what damage as a result. But in fact, a different question is of interest: is it possible to organize joint activity so that the degradation of the established system of consumption of goods does not occur, and if so, how.

The current level of human development allows for direct steering of the climate approximately at the regional level: creating a large reservoir, for example, or, conversely, dividing a river into irrigation ditches. Which approaches to organizing the operation of common resources work more or less in the interests of the operators is analyzed in a book that I have already recommended: Elinor Ostrom, “Governing the Commons”.

If it is not possible to design a scheme for the operation of common resources according to the principles she derived, then the best thing that can be done is to give up and eliminate regulation entirely: in systems too complex for direct management, only the free market can bring order.

Global climate changes, certainly, still fall into this category.

Why, from the perspective of libertarianism, are market manipulation and insider trading not crimes? And why should serious financial crimes not be regulated by the state at all?

@wizard1209

Market manipulation is an attempt by a certain market player to predict the behavior of other market players in response to various options of their own behavior. They bet money that their prediction is true, and that a certain market behavior will bring them profit at the expense of other players’ losses—and then they test their prediction.

Formally, there is no violation of the non-aggression principle here, but if the manipulator’s prediction turns out to be correct, other players suffer a loss, and they, after all, did not enter the market for that purpose. Therefore, it is not surprising that the manipulator may be disliked.

Most market participants prefer predictability and do not highly value a store where, as a result of manipulations, the price jumps randomly. Therefore, the store is interested in introducing its own restrictions that make manipulation more difficult, and the smaller the market size, the more relevant such things are for the owners of trading platforms.

Insider trading is the same kind of market manipulation, except that the manipulation is carried out by the trading platform itself or persons affiliated with it. Naturally, for the reputation of a trading platform, being caught in insider trading is even more dangerous than if it allows manipulations by third parties. Therefore, in developed markets, insider trading is fought even more strictly.
And the state, when attempting to fight these things, as is its habit, either simply tends to make a mess with the best of intentions because it doesn’t know how to be efficient—or, under the pretext of fighting manipulations and insider trading, engages in those very manipulations and insider trading.

Now, in cryptocurrency trading, there are as many market manipulations as you like, but the higher the turnover, the less dangerous it is for those who do not suffer from it. So choose Bitcoin; it is the least prone to manipulation of all cryptos. I have chosen it specifically as the currency for receiving your kind donations: 1A7Wu2enQNRETLXDNpQEufcbJybtM1VHZ8