Тег: Violence

The Efficiency of Violence

What do you say about the idea that the costs of ensuring security and protecting property rights are higher for private companies than for the state, and that the state, by virtue of its exceptional efficiency in applying force and maintaining order, can better provide the protection and guardianship of law and order, as well as courts, than private companies, and therefore it is necessary in this regard?

анонимный вопрос

How can the state’s costs for protecting property rights be lower than those of a private company? Only through games with budget line items. Yes, for a police officer, it is enough to hang a sign saying “forbidden, fine is so-and-so” and carry out a couple of exemplary fines—whereas a private entity would have to constantly hover and be vigilant to ensure the prohibition is not violated. But this does not mean the police officer is mega-efficient. It means that he himself might receive pennies, or even feed entirely on bribes, while the state must bear the primary costs of ensuring that people are afraid to contradict this police officer. And the costs of maintaining this fear are spread across a heap of budget items, from education to the maintenance of prisons.

A private entity, on the other hand, often has to compete with the state under completely unequal conditions. Where the state provides a service already paid for via taxes and requiring no additional money, the private entity is forced to charge the client additional money, since the state does not share taxes with them.

The state introduces distortions, often quite unpredictable ones, into the market picture, and as long as these distortions persist, judging market efficiency becomes more difficult. One might start a business relying on the current market conditions, only to encounter a completely new regulatory framework in the middle of the project, and that’s it—the project must be shut down and the losses written off. State institutions can usually count on their interests being considered during legislative innovations, so planning is a bit easier there. But it is somehow strange to conclude based on this that the state is necessary. This is simply an example of unfair competition, which is created by the state itself.

To summarize. Indeed, the state can impose arbitrarily high costs on private companies for anything by using force or the threat of force. But who needs such a state? Certainly not the consumer, onto whom all these costs will eventually be shifted.

Distortion of the market efficiency picture

Fighting repressions through the harassment of security forces

Bitarch’s Column

An interesting and quite popular idea for a non-violent struggle against employees of state security agencies was voiced in a conversation on the SVTV channel by Mikhail Svetov and Pavel Nikulin (the stream “Federal Torture Service”). This strategy is successfully applied in the West by far-left organizations such as SJWs. Libertarians should also adopt it if we want to achieve any significant results and avoid being “crushed by the system.”

The essence of the idea is to publicize the names, photographs, home addresses, social media profiles, and other personal data of state employees (FSB, police, Rosgvardia, FSIN, OMON, etc.) found guilty of repressions against oppositionists. This can be done both online (in the form of a site like “Myrotvorets”) and offline (in the form of flyers near the home where the “sadist” lives). To counter expected censorship attempts, it is better to host such sites on the darknet (TOR) or, in the future with the development of blockchain technologies, in decentralized data storage systems with IPFS.

Fearing the loss of reputation and harassment of both himself and his family, this employee will surely think twice before “putting on a bottle” another oppositionist.

For my part, I will add that it would also be good to have a unified database with as many employees of the repressive apparatus as possible, creating for them a risk of guaranteed retribution in the event of mass state terror (and preventing it—similar to the deterrence doctrine between states themselves, after which wars between all developed countries completely ceased in the second half of the 20th century).

Addition from Ancap-chan

I am not aware if Bitarch is a Russian citizen, but I want to note that Russian legislation protects the personal data of its citizens; therefore, if any such data appears online, it will, of course, be posted by unknown State Department agents, and if it appears right by your entrance, it is personally from the retired US President Mr. Obama, out of boredom and malice.

I also want to note that much easier targets for such measures are not even the security forces, but much more defenseless categories of citizens: PEC employees who commit violations during vote counting, administration employees who do not approve mass protests, and similar silent executors who are ready today to violate citizens’ rights for a mere pittance. If it turns out that such activity leads to significant personal inconveniences, some of them will either refuse such side jobs or start negotiating for an increase in the rates for their thankless labor.

A court in Chechnya, at the request of the prosecutor’s office, forgave debts to Gazprom. Gazprom challenged this decision in court. What are the prospects for this process, in your view? Which side do your personal sympathies lie with?

Dad

I’ll start from the end. My personal sympathies, of course, lie with the residents of those Russian regions who regularly pay for the gas supplied to them, while the inefficient monopolist, enduring losses in the Caucasus, justifies every new tariff increase with non-payments. This time, the regional legislative assemblies, impressed by the fact that Chechnya was once again declared a privileged subject of the federation, also began to compete in demanding the cancellation of their residents’ far more modest debts.

Whether this trolling was successful, or simply competing Caucasian security officials used this quirk to assert themselves at each other’s expense, interesting facts began to emerge immediately following the court decision to write off the debts. It turned out that the debts being written off were pinned on the population without any basis, whereas in reality, the gas was either stolen or squandered (while money for infrastructure repairs was stolen) at a higher level. And now, cases are being opened against those who managed the gas distribution, and in general, it seems that quite a few heads will roll as a result of all this.

In a peaceful region, a utility non-payer will quickly have all supplied resources cut off, and recovery for what has already been consumed will begin. In regions like Chechnya, whoever makes such a decision will be forced to start worrying about their health, so they will prefer to ignore the problem for as long as possible, although with a much greater probability, being unable to defeat the theft, they will lead it.

It is unlikely that as a result of all these investigations, Gazprom will recover any noticeable part of the stolen money. The most sensible thing its management could do is try to get rid of the loss-making asset and sell its Caucasian divisions to those ready to conduct business in the region according to the much more brutal local rules. Gazprom would then only have to honestly supply gas to a regional private gas operator at domestic Russian rates and on a prepayment basis. Let them continue to sell it at three times the price on the spot and try to get at least some money for it.

Since ancient times, representatives of the military aristocracy have considered it shameful to pay for what can be taken by force, for then allies might consider them weakened and turn away, and enemies, for the same reasons, might decide to attack. Therefore, of course, the costs of ensuring the fulfillment of contracts in Chechnya and other bandit enclaves must be monstrous. In such an inefficient system, maintaining even a modicum of stability requires a constant influx of external resources, but those are exactly what are starting to run out.

So, in the foreseeable future, we will see fierce infighting there over dwindling flows of budget funds, over any poorly controlled resource supplies, and simply for the right to dispose of people. Unfortunately, there is also a high probability that violence will spread outward from there even faster.

However, if one does not try to drown the problem in money—which only makes it swell—then all these inefficient practices die off relatively quickly, especially if there is strong opposition to attempts to spread archaic orders to territories where more efficient ones are adopted. And this applies not only to Chechnya, but also to the wonderful, tolerant Europe, which also prefers to appease its internal bandits with handouts rather than presenting them with the fact that this is not that place, and things are not done this way here.

Actually, Chechnya has its own hydrocarbons, but it’s like in Venezuela: the political regime is not the right one for extraction

Will this be within the norm under ancap?

анонимный вопрос

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CoAlxgwXcM

In this case, the norm has absolutely nothing to do with whether it is anpcap or socialism. There is a broad global trend toward the reduction of aggression, including toward children. When you read someone like Kassil, far more brutal customs are described, both between children and between children and adults. I suspect that in those times, such an episode would not have attracted any attention at all. He didn’t kill or maim; he simply forced a fussy child to get up and led them by the hand—what’s the big deal? A hundred years have passed, and this episode is now perceived as clear coarseness of manners, though still not so egregious as to make one jump out into the yard and immediately intervene for the child instead of continuing the filming, or, say, to lean out of a window with a rifle and demand an immediate stop.

It is very difficult to predict what the norms regarding violence against children will be in the foreseeable future. The trend may continue, and then the ideas currently being promoted—for example, by the Dobroum project—will over time seem banal, or even self-evident. Or the trend may reverse, and then our era will seem to descendants as a time of softness and degeneration.

At the same time, ancap can develop within the framework of any current of this trend. If the world becomes more non-violent, the key principle in relations with children will be the principle of non-aggression. Did the child attack? No, they were just lying there and didn’t want to get up. How can they be hit? How can children be hit at all? If greater violence becomes the norm, the emphasis will shift toward legal capacity. Is the child not a legal subject? Then they are in the zone of the guardian’s responsibility. See a child being hit? Well, ask whose child it is. If the guardian is the one hitting—well, they are probably hitting for a reason. If it is not the guardian hitting, it is an attack on someone else’s property, an impropriety, and should be stopped—for example, by blowing the aggressor’s brains out.

To me, of course, the first scenario seems more natural and probable. The trend toward non-violence is accompanied by an increasing value of human life and is largely driven by this. Ancap presupposes the elimination of the state, which, among other things, is a systemic factor that reduces the value of human life (firstly, it produces violence, meaning violence becomes commonplace; secondly, it makes people poorer, thereby reducing the value of life). This means that under ancap, the value of life will increase, and there will be less violence.

But, alas, the reasons for the trend are not fully clear, and I cannot guarantee anything on this matter. After all, the softening and hardening of manners throughout world history clearly does not follow a simple linear dependency.

P.S. When the post was already ready for publication, news arrived that Anastasia Shevchenko’s daughter died in intensive care. For those who do not know: the mother was accused of membership in an undesirable organization and placed under house arrest until trial, deprived of the right to communicate with her daughter. The daughter was seriously ill and required constant care. The court, choosing the preventive measure, ignored this circumstance.

So: under ancap, this would not only not be the norm, but would become completely impossible. The state kills. It is not just a machine of violence, but also a completely irresponsible machine.

Why is the ancap utopia better than the socialist one?

Studying libertarianism, I still haven’t understood why the “ancap” ideal model of social organization is better than some socialist utopias from the 18th-19th centuries.

In utopias, there are hypothetical people with a different morality—free, equal, happy, and always ready to help one another. A number of conditions that are clearly fantastical in modern realities are taken as given; there is no clear program for transitioning to such a wonderful society.

It is roughly the same with you, but there is exploitation, economic dependence, and so on. A number of rather debatable assumptions are taken as given—about the NAP, about the idea that something resembling affluent consumerism will emerge from the free competition of guys with guns, and about the need to convince people that “collective subjects” do not exist.

There is no transition program to the “better” social order (let me remind you that the caricatured mass-culture perceptions of leftists as lovers of mass shootings came,
firstly, from Cold War era propaganda, and secondly, from the practice of building an industrial society in Russia).

Why prefer inhuman ancap fantasies to the humane utopian fantasies of men from the 18th-19th centuries?

Vasily Vasiliev

Oof. Well, let me try to answer.

Why prefer the utopia of anarcho-capitalism specifically? It does not require the emergence of some special humane “new man” for its implementation, it is ready to work with any starting situation, and it quickly and guaranteed makes people’s lives wealthier and more prosperous than they were at the start. And, what is not unimportant, this is easily verifiable in practice.

Suppose we have Somalia. A country devastated by a socialist dictatorship and numerous wars. The state is abolished. People begin to organize their lives independently. They have a very short planning horizon, so they are quite ready to obtain resources from neighbors through direct violence. This means they have to spend significant resources on self-defense. Neighborhoods bristle with checkpoints; movement requires convoys. Hobbes arrives and strolls around business-like. “So, what do we have here? A war of all against all? Well done, boys. Now, who here isn’t fighting? Get to fighting, damn it, immediately!”

Fine, the last pre-war canned meat will soon run out, something needs to be eaten, but there’s not much to take from the neighbors either. Sooner or later, people will have to disperse and divert some individuals from the exciting process of shooting neighbors from ambushes to the conduct of boring and banal farming. And suddenly, someone is herding livestock, someone is growing vegetables, someone is running a gas station, someone is maintaining mobile communications and the internet, and someone is pirating. The difference in starting conditions (some have the sea nearby, others a savanna) leads to the division of labor. The division of labor gives rise to trade. Trade brings peace. Peace increases the planning horizon. The elegant fruits of tactical thinking fade into the past. Yesterday’s brave warrior today drives tourists on safari, because it is more profitable than arranging a safari on the tourists. Yesterday’s pirate today peacefully catches fish and takes divers for rides, because he’s had enough of fighting. And his pirate tales give him a charisma bonus and generous tips. Hobbes cries quietly on the beach: his beloved Leviathan never emerged from the sea due to a lack of demand.

What could hinder this rosy scenario? Firstly, the actions of neighbors who stubbornly wish to install a state on this territory. So far, society resists such attempts, but this consumes strength, and the path to ancap becomes thornier. Secondly, long-standing and venerable traditions of redistribution. If you’ve risen a bit—be so kind as to share with your clan comrades. They covered your skin during the war, and in general, don’t stick your head out. Over time, this tradition will evolve into insurance companies and various mutual aid funds operating on a voluntary basis, but initially, simply due to poverty, such redistribution will greatly slow the development of the institution of private property.

Ancap will establish itself more easily the harder it is to maintain a subsistence economy on territory liberated from the state. If all the resources for survival are right there, then why trade with neighbors? You have to shoot at neighbors; they are enemies, they are coming to take our beer and women. So, in the jungles of the Amazon, ancap will not be seen for a long time even without a state, but where living conditions are more diverse—where could it possibly go?

And what is wrong with socialist utopias? That there is no natural transition to them; a revolution is absolutely necessary, which will forcibly establish freedom, equality, and brotherhood—even if without mass shootings, the French managed quite well with the guillotine.

They seem like savages—yet they have trigger control

Is the use of violence by ancaps against representatives of law enforcement agencies, such as the police or army, who are violently enforcing the state and its laws, aggressive or nonetheless defensive?

анонимный вопрос

To be honest, such questions feel somewhat dogmatic to me. It’s as if someone started pestering an imam, for example: “Is the killing of infidels a defensive jihad—or an offensive one?”

Well, in the name of the great and merciful Market, I shall begin!

Since the state is a system of institutionalized violence against private property, then, of course, any person who is a subject of any given state has grounds to present property claims against that state. Since no state not only refuses to consider the possibility of restitution for property forcibly seized from people, but also applies sanctions for the very act of contesting such seizure, it must be concluded that an open conflict exists between the state and the individual, which is essentially a euphemism for the term “war.” In our case, it is a form of guerrilla warfare.

Thus, the question of how appropriate it is for an individual to use violence against certain state employees is merely a question of the laws and customs of war, as well as a question of tactics and strategy.

I remind you that the primary element in this war is the existence of property claims the individual has against the state, arising from the state’s forced seizures of the individual’s private property and the restriction of their freedom. Therefore, victory in the war is brought closer by reducing the rate of seizures and restrictions, reducing the share of state property in total wealth, and reducing the number of civil servants and other persons supported by the state.

So, can you beat up cops after all—or not? Theoretically—you can. Practically—there is usually no point. Privatizing something state-owned or securing a tax deduction is far more useful. Achieving a reduction in tax rates is an extremely noble cause indeed. But killing a state employee is simply killing a human being. It is permissible if they are carrying out a direct attack dangerous to your life, but it will in no way diminish the state, reduce taxes, or weaken regulations. On the contrary, it more often leads to a tightening of the screws and personal bitterness toward you from the deceased’s previously indifferent colleagues. So, this offensive jihad is not the duty of a libertarian.

Now, the widespread looting of state property kills the state quickly and reliably, even one as powerful and creepy as the late USSR. Widespread sabotage of taxes and regulations does the same. It is this defensive jihad that is more pleasing to the Market.

May the Market guide you on the straight path and be favorable to you. Amen!

The omnipotent Market knows best!

Freedom of speech and its limits

A call for murder, is that freedom of speech or not?
An insult, when I call someone “short” with the intention to “offend”…
1. …a person who is short,
2. … a person who is tall, is that freedom of speech?
If I engage in bullying using insults, is that freedom of speech?

Generally, is bullying a form of aggression? If one reads Svetov, for some reason he believes it is not.

анонимный вопрос

As usual, I will begin by briefly defining the terms. Aggression is the initiation of a conflict. Conflict is the presence of grievances. Aggressive violence is the initiation of a conflict through the use of violence. NAP is a legal principle according to which no one can be granted the right to unpunished aggressive violence. Freedom of speech is a legal principle according to which words do not constitute a violation of the NAP. Bullying is the public tearing apart of a tied-up animal by a pack of dogs (there are many other uses of the word “travlya,” but in the figurative sense when people “hunt” or bully other people, it refers specifically to this method of hunting/baiting). An insult is a manipulation intended to provoke the insulted person into escalating the conflict, preferably to the point of violating the NAP, in order to justify further, more serious sanctions against the insulted party.

If you agree with the proposed definitions, it should become quite obvious to you that the content of any words—be it slander, a call for murder, or even an order to commit murder—according to the principle of freedom of speech, does not violate the NAP. Nevertheless, words can easily be a form of aggression, albeit non-violent, since words can be used to initiate a conflict.

It is also easy to see that I have defined the concept of bullying vaguely, because it is not a legal term, but a purely polemical one. Nevertheless, it stems from the image of an amusement involving the tearing apart of an animal deprived of its freedom, and this is a fairly important point. As long as the object of your actions, carried out through verbal insults, can freely avoid the conflict simply by ending communication, I would not call it bullying—the factor of coercion is absent. In other words, I define bullying as systematic insults under conditions of coerced communication; that is, there is an element of aggressive violence in bullying, but not in the words, but specifically in the restriction of the freedom to leave the conflict zone.

Thus, verbal persecution in prison or in a conscript army is bullying. Similar persecution at work is not bullying, but simply a conflict. It can be ended by resigning. Persecution in school is bullying only if the persecuted person is forbidden from leaving the school.

An important point. Legal responsibility for bullying lies specifically with the one who restricts freedom, not with the one who bullies. That is, not with the dogs, but with the one who chained the bear to the post. This is exactly why responsibility for bullying in school lies with the parents, teachers, and the state: the state obliges parents to provide the child with a secondary education, teachers apply sanctions to the child for leaving school without permission, and parents deny the child the right to switch to homeschooling. Similarly, responsibility for bullying in prison lies with those who put the conflicting parties in one cell and locked them in, and for bullying in a conscript army—those who conscripted the conflicting parties into one military unit and forbade them from leaving it.

As for Svetov, he did indeed, in a conversation with Boris Kagarlitsky, get somewhat confused in the definitions of “aggression,” “violence,” “aggressive violence,” and “self-defense,” which his interlocutor caught him on, and as a result, the debate was lost. Therefore, the assumption that he was insufficiently strict with concepts in some other conversation does not seem improbable to me. Furthermore, the term “bullying” itself has no precise definition, so a specific phenomenon that someone calls bullying may either include aggressive violence or be pure non-violent aggression. Moreover, one party to a conflict may call the behavior of the other party bullying, even if it contains neither violence nor even aggression. For example, someone performs their job poorly, receives criticism regarding the actual deficiencies in response, and loses their bonus. Why would that not be a reason to position oneself as a victim of bullying?

A violation of the NAP is first and foremost not the dogs, but the chain.

When it comes to violence, only physical violence is mentioned. But various methods of psychological violence can cause physiological problems with the CNS, with the brain. If one arranges constant quarrels, doesn’t let [someone] sleep, and other “breathing into the tube.” One could say that “one can leave this,” just as one can hire security.

anonymous question

When the actions of one person cause damage suffered by another, and the evidence of damage and its assessment can be demonstrated, this is sufficient to demand compensation for damages, and it is completely irrelevant whether physical violence specifically took place.

It is another matter that damage resulting from non-violent actions is much harder to prove, which is why an external arbitrator may deny compensation for damages in such cases. This is precisely why, in the case of psychological violence, a more successful response tactic may be not a lawsuit, but, for example, retaliatory psychological violence.

Of course, when a victim of psychological violence receives such recommendations, they have reason to despair.
What can be said here? Just as it is very useful to possess a weapon and know how to use it for direct protection against physical violence—and only after successful self-defense to file lawsuits against those who survived—so too, for direct protection against psychological violence, it is useful to train the psyche and know how to use psychological weapons—and only after successful self-defense to engage in ruining the reputation of the unsuccessful abuser, if they haven’t already put their head in a noose.

If the state is destroyed, corporations will take its place, won’t they?

Anonymous question

A lot here depends on what you put into the concept of “the state.”

If we are talking about who will become the new provider of the services that the state currently provides, then yes, of course, who if not corporations would take their place. Private companies are already successfully competing with state ones in the markets of medicine, education, pension provision, the creation of technical standards, and much more—effectively any market-demanded services that the state does not explicitly usurp.

As for those functions over which the state tries to usurp a monopoly—establishing arbitrary rules in a certain territory, forcibly redistributing property, and so on—then illegal criminal groups will take the place of the state here. In essence, the state currently differs from them only by legality. It is this very crutch that I want to kick out from under it.

In this regard, many people ask: will crime increase if one of the criminal groups loses its dominant status? History tells us that it could either increase or decrease. If we destroy the state for the sake of the sacred right of barons to uncontrollably plunder villeins, then crime will increase. If we destroy the state for the sake of the sacred right of citizens to uncontrollably own property, then crime will decrease. The devil is in the details: not only the state of the environment is important, but also the ideas that guide the actions of the people living in that environment.

bad, bad corporation!