Тег: Rights

How the state turned rights into privileges

Once, a person simply sat in a carriage, and later—behind the wheel of a car—and drove. Not because the state “allowed” it, but because the road was a road, transport was transport, and an adult person was considered capable of being responsible for their actions.

Then came the stationary bandit (“the state”). It did not take away freedom all at once—that would have been too noticeable. It acted carefully: first accounting, then registration, then a license, and finally a fine for its absence. And suddenly, that which was a right yesterday is called “authorization” today.

Driving a vehicle without a driver’s license? When automobiles first appeared, people learned to drive much like they learned to manage a horse: through practice, advice from acquaintances, and sometimes painful lessons. The license gradually became not just a confirmation of skill, but permission to use one’s own transport.

Crossing a border without a passport? Before the era of total passport control, millions of people traveled, moved, and looked for work without the ritual we are now accustomed to involving visas, stamps, and the humiliating question: “What is the purpose of your trip?” Today, a person is born on the planet, but to walk a few kilometers in another direction, they must prove to an official that they have a valid reason.

Building a house on your own land without approvals? It would seem the land is yours, the money is yours, the risk is yours. But no: bring a project, get a permit, coordinate setbacks, height, purpose, materials, utilities, and perhaps even the shade of the fence.

Buying medicine without a prescription? Once, a person could decide for themselves what to take, consulting a doctor, a pharmacist, or their own common sense. Now, many medications are available only after an official blessing. And it is not about whether medical advice is beneficial. It is about something else: why has advice turned into permission?

Opening a workshop, a production facility, or a small business without a license? Making soap, baking bread, transporting people, repairing houses, cutting hair, teaching children, hosting guests—the state increasingly views this not as a peaceful exchange between people, but as suspicious and illegal activity that must first be legalized.

Buying, carrying, and using weapons for self-defense without a license? In many countries and eras, weapons were a common tool of a free person—dangerous, requiring responsibility, but not a state gift. The authorization system turns everything upside down: a peaceful person must explain why they need a means of protection, and the state decides whether they are sufficiently convincing in their fear for their life.

And what about a child who wants to leave abusive parents for another reliable adult? In a natural order, they could find refuge with a relative, a neighbor, a teacher, or a family acquaintance. In an authorization-based order, an adult ready to help faces a practically prohibitive guardianship procedure, while the child meanwhile remains inside “properly documented” violence. The papers are in order—so, apparently, everything is fine. Bureaucracy has an amazing ability to fail to notice the human being behind an ideally filled-out form.

Practicing medicine without a state license? Of course, one should not deceive patients, hide qualifications, or cause harm—responsibility must be held for that. But the very fact of voluntary assistance, consultation, or treatment between people did not always require official permission. Licensing has replaced the question “Are you competent and honest?” with the question “Are you on the right list?”.

The main trick of the authorization state will be that it first declares a natural action dangerous, then forbids it without permission, and then issues permission and calls it the protection of freedom. This is how a right turns into a privilege. A right is something you can do as long as you do not violate the rights of others. A privilege is something you can do only when you are told “yes”.

And the most uncomfortable question here is not: “Why are they forbidding this to us?”. It sounds differently: “Why have we become accustomed to asking permission for our own lives?”.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Imposing cultural traditions

A quite significant portion of the questions people ask about Ancap boils down to whether one can do this and that, whether it’s permissible to do this and that, how Ancap views this and that. Can you kill pedophiles and murderers? Is slavery and abortion permissible? How does Ancap view intellectual property and global warming?

As you know from memes, Ancaps have a simple, concise, and even fully correct answer to all these questions: the market will resolve it/. In other words, in response to a question about the imaginative subject “Ancap” a specific imaginative subject, “the market,” is pointed out, which will establish the corresponding norms. Of course, this answer is too brief and therefore doesn’t satisfy those asking. Let me elaborate on the topic a bit.

Mostly, people aren’t bothered by what other people do because another person’s behavior fits into another person’s notions of what is proper. And when it stops fitting, that person starts to worry about it, begins to think about how he should relate to it and what can be done with it.

A libertarian can roughly describe his notions of what is proper as “self-ownership is respected, NAP isn’t violated.” This isn’t enough, and notions of what is proper are supplemented by all sorts of “here it’s customary like this.” For example: here right-hand traffic; we let children pass ahead in line; at a restaurant the person who invites pays, and so on. But besides all these ethically neutral customs, there are also those relating to various borderline situations. For example, at what age does sex stop being an adult’s business and become the business of whoever is doing it? Or what kind of natural compensation is permissible to demand from a debtor or from someone who caused damage? Or in what cases does an author have the right to restrict other people from using his work? These things are not derived from basic libertarian principles, as is, for example, right-hand traffic.

In ethically contentious situations, a person tends to offer as a norm the option that’s more advantageous to him personally. If he’s also influential enough – it can be painful to be hit with, it can bring much good, it evokes universal love or simply annoys – then they might agree with his proposed norm; but further down, this decision can easily become a precedent, and now others will cite this version of the norm as local custom. Then, for someone who wants to revise this norm, it will be necessary to be much stronger, more useful, more charming or more annoying, because he’s going against tradition.

Thus, one can speak about the right of the strong: that person who put in efforts to create a precedent, may thereby establish a legal norm. It will be difficult for him to change this norm whenever he wants – in legal tradition this is called the Estoppel principle – if someone previously demonstrated by his actions that he adheres to such-and-such a norm, then he cannot legally insist that it not be applied to him.

In artistic form, the Estoppel principle is well demonstrated in Maxim Shapiro’s famous story “Respect for Cultural Traditions”.

Of course, whoever possesses undeniable superiority in strength, usefulness, charm or sheer annoyingness, or who leads a united group of like-minded people, will be able to promote such a legal norm as “this specific idiot has the right to act in any situation, as he pleases,” creating thereby a state. However, until he creates legal norms for transferring his power, this state will inevitably end with his death, and death is usually quite early. At least this regularity ancient history shows us. But we are considering *ankap* here – that is, the public order in which the probability of success of such idiots is deliberately reduced to a minimum.

So how will they treat heretics, slavery and the rest at *ankap*? You decide. The more effort you put into making your opinion prevail, the more intolerant you are of other opinions – the greater the probability that heretics will be given exactly as many lashes as you outlined to the first one you met. And of course, the greater the probability that in defending your opinion you will suffer unacceptable losses – and wipe out. Nevertheless, if these topics excite you vividly, I recommend boosting strength, usefulness, charm.

And annoyingness.

Respect for Cultural Traditions“

A question from Georgy Nemov regarding non-accession to contract jurisdictions

Let’s simulate a situation:

Territorial and extraterritorial contractual jurisdictions are formed, as well as a decentralized cross-arbitration mechanism linking them. Natural law continues to be supported only by religious or ethical organizations, in whose understanding the guarantor of rights is God/karma. Thus, these organizations remain the only ones who guarantee the life and freedom of a person in territories with a population that has not entered into contract law. These people may be marginal, fragmented, poor, or simply very far from the ideas of ancap. And these people flock under the protection of such religious organizations.

1. Do you think such a situation is possible?
2. If so, is this process natural, and is it a legal objectification of the human being?
3. If this happened, how should our union of contractual jurisdictions proceed? Should it be perceived as a threat, and how should it be fought? Or, conversely, supported?

Ancap-chan’s Answer

1. In fact, this describes a fairly ordinary case of tribalism. While some people, in the event of legal conflicts, rely on those organizations that are obliged to provide assistance by contract, others simply rely on the help of coreligionists/like-minded people. There is nothing surprising about this; there are currently many extremely decentralized communities of interest in the world, from hitchhikers and fencers to libertarians and Krishnaites. They already generally provide primary legal assistance to their members, especially locals to newcomers. I don’t see why these mechanisms should suddenly look different in our model world with greater decentralization of law.

2. I realize that you and I interpret the model situation somewhat differently. You likely view “jurisdictions” as organizations to which a person is legally attached, and those who are not attached are as if outside the law. I view jurisdictions more as “areas of norm imposition,” into which a person may fall both according to contracts and outside of them. And since in the model situation states, as organizations of general jurisdiction on their territory, exit the stage, a huge number of situations arise in which the jurisdiction is unknown in advance. If I’m having sex in a car parked opposite a church, whose jurisdiction is it? The parking owner’s? The church’s? The wife of the person I’m having sex with? It all depends on the context. If the car is parked incorrectly, the parking owner deals with us. If the parking owner is a church, its employee may suggest we have sex elsewhere and not distract the parishioners from pious thoughts. If my partner’s wife has an agreement with him that such things are not accepted between them, then demanding information from me about how aware I was of his availability is entirely within her jurisdiction. But some universal jurisdiction, which cares about everything and can dictate its norms in any sphere—that is already the dark etatist past; in our model situation, these dinosaurs died out long ago and ignominiously.

3. Let’s consider the situation where, say, in some locality, some people call their insurance company during a conflict, while others write in a thematic chat “alarm, ours are being beaten!”, and people from the surroundings start gathering, ready to defend the interests of a member of their community. Should such a thing be perceived as a threat? That depends on what interests the community defends in the conflict. If it is determined to protect its own at any cost in any conflict, then it is a clear threat, and a conditional insurance company must be ready for war with this gang in such cases. But if it is determined to extinguish the conflict, then there are no problems; this is one of the most important functions of communities. A person feels comfortable in them, but in order to belong to them, they accept that other members of the community care about their behavior. In this situation, from the insurance company’s point of view, the community acts as an “insurance cooperative” and can be viewed as an equal counterparty.

Alternatives to the right to carry a pistol

I’ve noticed that almost all answers to the question “how will it work?” boil down to “gun law.” If anything goes wrong—shoot, and figure it out later. If you break the law (which doesn’t exist, meaning you just seem like a bad person to someone)—you’ll be killed. Don’t want to pay a court judgment—shoot your way out, but the plaintiff can hire a private special forces squad against you. And so on. The principle of proportionality of punishment is somewhere far off, but the right to shoot is right here. Everything indirectly leads back to the idea that “whoever has the gun is right.” Wouldn’t it be better to organize a social order where such situations are prevented in advance and long before they happen?

Muscovite (not Chinese)

To start, I’ll note that the status quo is exactly as described in the question: the principle of proportionality of punishment is somewhere far off, while the right to shoot is right here. Therefore, whoever is armed can easily dictate their will to those who are unarmed. Anyone could be armed—a bandit, for instance, or a cop. If he uses a weapon with particular cynicism, there’s a chance he’ll be reprimanded, fired, or given a suspended sentence after the fact; even if it’s a real sentence, it is, one way or another, a delayed punishment that in no way prevents either the already occurred outrage involving the use of weapons or new similar actions.

Ancap differs from the status quo in that everyone has the right to own a weapon, everyone can use it, and whoever wants to dictate their will to a randomly chosen victim by threatening them with a weapon risks encountering armed resistance not only from the victim but from anyone else. Can it be said that under ancap, whoever has the gun is right? Well, then we would have to admit that everyone who bothered to bring a gun is right. Even so, this seems more attractive to me than a situation where “the one who decided to use armed violence is right, and the others are unarmed, disenfranchised cattle.” But anyway, enough about ancap, the question is about a hypothetical society without “gun law.”

The first idea is the most obvious. No guns—no gun law. Alas, if you deprive society of guns, you simply get brass-knuckle law, knife law, or even just fist law. Not to mention the possibility of plowing into a crowd with a truck.

The second idea is the creation of a smart environment in which any violence is suppressed by technological means so quickly that you can barely manage to exercise your “gun law.” Among sci-fi writers, I read a description of such a society by Lem, but I didn’t like it: it exaggerates too much; instead of serious forecasts, it becomes a kind of parody that discredits the idea. I can only note that this path implies enormous trust in technological solutions. If we don’t leave them to state monopolies and allow private entities to independently design solutions in this vein, we could very well end up with numerous commercial zones where a high level of security is ensured purely through technological means.

The third idea is being actively pushed by Bitarch. He proceeds from the premise that there is nothing terrible about self-defense, but the inclination toward aggressive violence is something that can be worked on. To take away a person’s desire to attack is far more humane than killing. What can be said here? For me, the moral status of a “vaccination against violence” is roughly the same as the moral status of any other vaccine. If you can ensure mass testing and vaccination through non-violent means—well done. If you can’t—prepare for acts of mass disobedience, lawsuits, and an extremely poor reputation for your proposed solution.

So, in short, those are the options for replacing a “gun law” society that came to mind. Do you have any others? Describe them in the comments.

You stand there and wonder: am I right enough, or should I tuck a couple more guns under my crinoline?

Why did you decide to build the basic theory through rights, rather than through freedoms?

Did it turn out that way? Is it easier to explain to liberals with remnants of religious consciousness? Are there some non-obvious pitfalls with liberties that aren’t present in an explanation through rights?

Λ (taken from the chat)

Freedom is the natural state of a human being outside of society. Robinson is free on a deserted island until Friday appears, and he has no rights, because there is no one to whom he can make claims, and no one to whom he must yield. When society emerges, it means the restriction of liberties and the appearance of rights. Since the book on ancap is dedicated specifically to life in society, it discusses rights rather, as they are generated by society itself.

A free person before the emergence of the need for ancap