Alright, I admit, the Fed messed up. Let’s assume the Federal Reserve really did inflate financial bubbles during the war and even after, which led to the depression of 1930-39. But what about the panics of 1873 (and subsequently the long depression of 1873-79), the devastating 1893 and the prolonged depression until 1896, and the short-term 1908. There wasn’t even a hint of a Fed back then.
Moreover, I am placing more emphasis on the depression of 1893, as it was the most terrifying in scale and damage (surpassed perhaps only by the Great one). The unemployment rate reached 17-19% at its peak! And all this happened during the administration of Grover Cleveland, who is considered the most libertarian US president. He was for: low taxes and non-interference in the economy. And against: high tariffs (which were simply enormous at the time!), business subsidies, pensions and material aid to victims (for example, he refused to allocate $100,000 to farmers in Texas affected by crop failure in 1887). And he gave a f… that is, he vetoed unconstitutional (as he believed) laws that Congress wanted to push through. By the way, what do you think of him?
And as the older brother who explains everything in much more detail, but whom few will read, this time we have the book by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. I will be taking illustrations from there.
The Crisis of 1873-1879
We see that during this time, the decline in business activity was accompanied by a decrease in the money supply, a drop in prices and — attention! — an increase in real income. In other words, production grew at a frantic pace — and this despite deflation (the reasons for deflation are well known: the US was returning to full convertibility of dollars into gold after issuing a huge number of unsecured greenbacks during the Civil War years). Thus, deflation does not necessarily lead to a slowdown in production. In general, calling this period a depression is somehow strange; rather, it was simply a structural reorganization of the economy under conditions of rapid economic growth and a decrease in the money supply. In the twenties of the 20th century, there was also frantic economic growth — but it was accompanied by the inflation of the money supply, which I wrote about when answering the question about the Great Depression.
The Crisis of 1893-1896
The crisis was preceded by a significant increase in the money supply, from 210 to 308 million dollars in Treasury accounts over the period from 1879 to 1888. This was due to the growing number of supporters of “soft money”: the return of greenbacks, i.e., unsecured treasury notes, or the unlimited issuance of silver dollars (it was precisely at this time that silver began to depreciate sharply because its mining rates increased). Meanwhile, the bimetallic standard assumed a fixed ratio between the price of gold and silver. Anyone interested can read about what arbitrage opportunities this hides in popular form in chapter four of the fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. What happens when the state persists in maintaining the bimetallic standard can also be read in Saifedean Ammous’s The Bitcoin Standard, which summarizes the experience not only of the USA, but also, for example, the Chinese Empire.
Add to this that, although the USA did not yet have the Fed at that time, there was unregulated banknote emission by approximately 8,000 banks under conditions of fractional reserve. Therefore, once all these factors of monetary expansion had worked for long enough, any shift in market conditions was sufficient to trigger a banking panic. This happened in 1893. Under fractional reserve conditions, this inevitably meant the bankruptcy of many banks. The money supply shrank sharply, followed by a decrease in the volume of investments.
At the same time, although unemployment grew to significant levels and incomes fell at the peak of the crisis, the market adjusted very quickly to the new conditions, and soon it fell again. So here too, we see a trend: the crisis passes quickly if the state does not twitch and does not try to cure it with regulation. The illustration shows a classic V-shaped crisis structure: a rapid decline, a rapid recovery. Real income recovered to pre-crisis levels as early as 1895.
The Crisis of 1908
The same thing: credit expansion (the money supply grew from 261 million dollars in 1897 to 339 million dollars in 1906), a banking panic, the V-shaped nature of the crisis, and just over a year to recover to pre-crisis indicators.
Grover Cleveland (President in 1885-1889 and 1893-1897)
As is easy to see from the dates of the presidency, the crisis of 1893 could not possibly be Cleveland’s fault, because he had only just taken over from his Republican predecessor, Benjamin Harrison. Thus, he should rather be credited with the rapid exit from the crisis, and the record number of vetoes he placed on bills passed by Congress contributed exactly to this: he prevented the inflation of government spending (Warren Harding reacted to the crisis of 1921 in exactly the same way later — and with the same success), advocated for the reduction of tariffs, killed a bill on the emission of additional silver dollars, and solved the problem of the Treasury’s gold reserve by attracting private capital — a syndicate of several financiers simply bought up a sufficient number of bonds.
Cleveland turned out to be the only president in US history who managed to serve two non-consecutive terms — and this characterizes the intensity of the passions that prevailed at the time around the question of what is more beneficial: Laissez Faire or economic regulation. Unfortunately, Cleveland’s fight against the growth of statism ended up being lost: while under him the Democratic Party, in contrast to the Republican, remained practically libertarian, later the Democrats were consumed by the merging supporters of Mikhail Svetov the Populist party, and since then, instead of a choice between freedom and statism, US citizens choose between a giant enema and a shit sandwich.
As Mikhail Svetov, the creator of nap.world, claims, medium is the message. The one who speaks is part of the message. Therefore, it is not enough to examine the proposed text of the non-aggression pact; one must look at the person proposing it.
Mikhail’s rhetoric is hate speech. Even in his New Year’s greeting, he wishes torment and death to all “bad people.” It is important to understand: the proposal to conclude a non-aggression pact is not a declaration of peace. It is a declaration of war. A war against everyone who does not sign the pact. To Mikhail and his supporters, everyone outside the NAP agreement is not a legal subject.
Most likely, you are under no threat as long as you do not draw their attention. But if you initiate violence, or even publicly approve of someone else initiating violence, that’s it—you become a permissible victim. Lies will be told about you. Your counterparties will be discouraged from cooperating with you. If you have done something illegal, a report will be filed against you. But they will not physically lift a hand against you.
What does this remind us of? To me personally, it resembles the tactics of radical feminists or SJWs. They will find any instance of harassment or racism and broadcast it loudly. They will peck at you for any approval of such things. They will twist the facts about you and do everything in their power to make you persona non grata.
Feminists started before Svetov, and we can see where such tactics lead. They lead to the world becoming less sexist. Harassment turns out to be dangerous. Sexist jokes are laughed at less. Sexist advertising sells worse. The vile feminists, whom one wants to recoil from in disgust, make the world better. For them, it remains just as dirty, patriarchal, and unjust. It becomes better for us, the more moderate ones.
The Bitarch proposes using antifragile tactics (according to Taleb) to fight the state—that is, tactics that only grow stronger through opposition. If everyone whom the state prosecutes for victimless crimes declares that the state is a bandit and that they do not recognize its jurisdiction, it will undermine the legitimacy of the state, and the wider the repression, the stronger the delegitimization. Is this an antifragile tactic? Yes. The first such cases will receive wide publicity, and the prisoners will be seen as political. As the movement develops, attention will not be as intense, but this will be compensated for by the scale of the movement. However, such blatant disrespect for the court will more often lead to longer sentences, so it will be difficult at first to decide to bring politics into one’s case.
But what if an irreconcilable community actually forms around the idea of signing the NAP and intimidating everyone who hasn’t signed it? Let’s look again at Taleb, the book Skin in the Game. He shows how an inflexible, irreconcilable minority, evenly distributed in society, gradually imposes its rules on a flexible majority. In the US, political correctness became a norm recognized by the majority. In Russia, the example of implementing an accessible environment for the blind is more obvious. You won’t find a blind person on every street, but every traffic light beeps, and everyone trips over tactile paving: this is a norm imposed by an inflexible minority. Those who shame NAP non-signatories have a chance to achieve the same effect.
First, they will purge the ranks of decision-makers. Then they will intimidate the liberal opposition. Next, they will begin to harass those who approve of the actions of security forces—and then the security forces themselves. And at this stage, the idea of massively refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of state courts looks like a completely natural progression.
In short. The nap.world project as executed by Svetov is aesthetically repulsive to me, but if he gathers enough fanatics, the world around me really might become better. And after that, it would be good if they lusted themselves. Like the djinn from Andrzej Sapkowski’s story “The Last Wish.”
After Zalina Marshenkulova on Svetov’s show got drunk and just chatted about life instead of having a proper discussion, I didn’t expect her to prove herself to be a good debater, but I hoped for the best. But, my Goddess, how wrong I was! Of course, over three years, Zalina has become better at conveying her thoughts, and instead of wine, there was now water on the table in front of her, but the main factor in her success at the debates was still Svetov himself. It was enough to let him speak freely, and he dug his own grave, much like Rudoy did in the debates with Prosvirnin.
I consider the subject of the debate itself to be Svetov’s strangest and stupidest mistake. The title was promising: “Feminism: a struggle for rights or privileges?” But Mikhail didn’t particularly try to talk about the struggle, the rights, or the privileges. Already in the opening speech, I suspected something was wrong when he reduced his presentation to the trivialization of problems by feminists and some flaws in how Zalina managed her Twitter. This wouldn’t have been scary if it hadn’t turned out later that these essentially exhausted all his grievances with Zalina and feminism.
Mikhail came to talk about feminism, but spent the entire debate on how his opponent behaves on social networks; it was petty. Especially since he describes his own Twitter primarily as a private space and explicitly says that his influence on the discourse is greatly exaggerated, otherwise, he claims, we would have lived in a wonderful Russia of the future long ago. As a result of such an approach, Zalina’s rhetoric was often reduced to discussing tweets. As a viewer, I wanted to see a struggle between two points of view here and now, not archaeological excavations of someone’s posts and explanations for their words.
My favorite quote from the past debate:
While women die of anorexia, in the same way men die of melancholy. I absolutely do not want to draw an equal sign here, because both, of course, are tragic
Mikhail Svetov, fighter against the trivialization of problems
The phrase is so funny and wild that I can only address the men: don’t be melancholy, men, you are great!!!
I imagine the scene: a typical anorexic girl, who has spent several stints in psychiatric hospitals, destroyed all her internal organs, ends her fleeting life from dystrophy. And next to her, a man dies of melancholy, like poor Hachiko, because the girls wouldn’t give it to him, an incel, and therefore life is over. May the Goddess preserve you, two victims of social injustice, femine!
Svetov could have tried to return Zalina’s serve about death from anorexia, even with a take about similar problems among men, but not to cite melancholy as an example: no, damn it, men don’t die from torture in prison, their psyche isn’t maimed in the army, they aren’t bullied if they are fat or, conversely, scrawny. Melancholy is the main scourge of men!
Svetov’s story about men who ruin their lives for the sake of building a career looked about as convincing. And this in the context of discussing labor inequality! Like, don’t rush into the labor market, girls, it’s scary here, destinies are broken here, stay home, take care of your appearance. According to Svetov, it turns out that the most terrible male problems are some vague melancholy and their own privileges.
Speaking of privileges, by the way. What a topic for debate was missed! How I would have liked to see a competent analysis of the feminist myth about privileges. It is here that the feminist discourse about the all-pervasive patriarchy and the methods of fighting it is weakest. I would have liked to hear about the harm of legal privileges: Svetov only slightly touched upon the topic of maternity leave, and yes, Zalina answered the question about positive discrimination manifested in the leniency of cops toward girls at rallies. And yet, the struggle for benefits is exactly that part of the feminist discourse that can be most convincingly dismantled specifically from the positions of libertarian ideology.
Alas, the debates turned out sluggish, Svetov looked even weaker than in the argument with Kagarlitsky, and for a conversation at such a level, the high-ranking debating parties had no need to rent a hall — they could have exchanged barbs in cozy Twitter with equal success.
Libertarianism is based on natural rights; why is Svetov against them?
анонимный вопрос
In a recent video by Mikhail Svetov, which your question is about, much seemed strange to me. Since that is the case, I will first go through the entire video and then move on to the topic of the question, so as not to make two posts about one video.
To begin with, Svetov uses a definition of anarchy as a Hobbesian war of all against all. I don’t remember if Hobbes used the exact word anarchy; I recall the term state of nature more. However, in our video on the deterrence doctrine, I tried to show that a war of all against all is not the natural state of society, meaning that Hobbesian (and Svetovian) rhetoric is based on a dubious foundation.
Svetov also uses the word rights as a synonym for the word privileges, thereby limiting himself to so-called positive rights. This is indicated by his phrase “fear people who want to grant you rights.” Libertarian discourse, however, usually concerns negative rights, which are freedoms. One is not “granted” such rights, because their realization does not require the actions of others; non-interference is entirely sufficient.
In attacking liberals, Svetov implies progressives of the American type, given that he uses headlines about minority quotas and affirmative action as illustrations. In Europe, they more often call themselves social democrats, and it is unclear to me why Svetov separates them from socialists at all, saying that from one side we are pressed by a socialist boot and from the other by a liberal one, while in fact he is speaking of the same socialist boot.
Another interesting point: Svetov opposes morality and conscience, claiming that evil liberals removed conscience from man and replaced it with morality. However, Svetov does not define what conscience is and where it comes from, if not from the experience of interacting with other people and the memory of their moral evaluations. Or does he want to say that conscience is the voice of God? Well, in that case, it is unclear what he has against natural rights, understood as divine decrees.
Another phrase that Svetov uses in his video: “where there is no law, there is no crime.” Yes, that is correct; crime is a term from positive law, which is a system of commands. There is a command, someone violates the command, they have committed a crime. In private law, there are no crimes; there is property damage, breach of contractual obligations, and so on, and the person who suffered the damage is free to oppose this and demand compensation—or not oppose it and not demand it.
Thus, I would say that Svetov’s video is simply a juggling of terms. We define anarchy in a way that no anarchist defines it, after which we prove as simply as two plus two that anarchy is bad, and even that the state is anarchy. Everything is logical, but we get nothing but confusion in the end.
Now let’s return to the question of whether libertarianism grows out of natural law. Historically, yes, but today that is not important because human thought has not stood still. We can derive libertarian principles deductively based on the laws of logic: here is an apodictically true statement that a person belongs to themselves; now we show that any attempt to refute this statement implicitly relies on the very premise we are trying to refute. Those whose brains haven’t melted have grasped the Tao and discovered natural law. Or we can examine human interactions and show which behavioral strategies prove more advantageous and therefore survive through natural selection. This utilitarian approach gives us the same libertarian principles, but in this case, the laws of logic do not stick out as if they were god-given and people were merely objects under them. Therefore, such an approach is less irritating to people like the hypothetical Mikhail Svetov with their obsession with ethics, but more so to connoisseurs of mathematical rigor.
Personally, I first became acquainted with Rothbard and the Hoppean derivation of the principle of self-ownership, and then with Hayek and the Friedmanite utilitarian justification of property, and I suggest not arguing over whom to love more—father or mother. Both praxeology and spontaneous orders are two equally useful methodological principles; let us use both, depending on the situation, rather than imitating Svetov, who is so right-wing that he tries to bite off libertarianism’s left leg.
A criminal case was initiated against Mikhail Svetov over an Instagram post from 2012. Given how keen the interest in him has been from Russian security forces, it is completely obvious that the case was opened when they decided the moment was most appropriate.
I can assume that the moment was deemed appropriate for one simple reason: at the recently held LPR congress, Mikhail Svetov stepped down from the party’s governing bodies. The security forces may have reasonably decided in connection with this that Mikhail had lost public support, and it would be possible to settle scores with him without much of a scandal. They will have to be made to understand that they were seriously mistaken.
The LPR calls for holding solo pickets in support of Mikhail at the building of the Moscow Investigative Committee. This is a good step, but more can be done. Quite recently, Mikhail Svetov visited 30 cities across the western and central parts of Russia with lectures. Thus, literally every attendee of a lecture (or those who wanted to attend but could not fit into the hall due to the zeal of local security forces) now has an excellent reason to also hold a picket at the Investigative Committee building in their own city, with a poster saying, for instance, that they know Svetov personally, consider him a decent person, the case is being fabricated, enough of the embarrassment, stop this farce.
People registered for the lectures via Timepad, leaving their contact details. It would make sense for the lecture organizers to send a mailing to the collected data and suggest expressing support for Mikhail. After all, during the lectures themselves, Mikhail said that he travels to cities not so much so that people would listen to him—they can listen on YouTube. His main goal was for people in the regions to look at each other and realize how they are not alone in their distrust of the state. Well, here is a new excellent reason to gather and look at each other.
Enough people should come out, and then let the worried security forces urgently inform the head of the IC, Bastrykin, that a mistake was made, he shouldn’t have been touched, and it’s better to hush up this scandal before it flares up.
Judging by the charter that Svetov wants to adopt at the congress, that is exactly the case.
Anonymous question. A donation in the amount of 0.00099851btc
was attached to the question.
This question turned out to be today’s record holder among questions with an attached donation in terms of the time I needed to answer: usually, if an answer is paid for, I answer on the same day. The fact is that I have no relation to the Libertarian Party of Russia, so I had to scour both of your charters — the one currently in effect, and the one Mikhail Svetov expects to adopt at the LPR congress, which will take place on November 2 in Moscow (I was sent links to the cloud, but for safekeeping, I preferred to move the documents to my own site). The reading was not easy, so I apologize in advance to those who may find the answer a bit boring; it is a very specific question.
So, if we rely on the letter of the charters, then both now and in the wonderful Svetovian LPR of the future, you have a typical oligarchic party where all real power is held by committees that control the mechanisms of their own reelection. The changes proposed to be made are, in essence, cosmetic:
regional branches are prohibited from engaging in entrepreneurial activity (very strange for a party that, in theory, should treat entrepreneurship as a fetish).
on the other hand, regional branches are allowed their own symbols, albeit in agreement with the federal committee (I didn’t even know that previously your charter had only one symbol for the entire party; this norm was violated left and right).
the general meeting of a regional branch loses the right to expel members from the party (all power to the committees!).
the general meeting of a regional branch loses the right to consider an appeal against expulsion from the party by the branch’s steering committee (the power of the committees is indisputable!) .
the moratorium on the return of previously expelled members to the party is increased from three to five years (this reminds me of the constant extension of Disney’s copyrights for Mickey Mouse — it feels as if someone was expelled from the LPR whom they really don’t want back, and now they are extending the term during which this cannot be done).
previously, the federal committee was dissolved if more than a third of its members left; in the new edition, it is more than half (if the dominant faction has an absolute majority, the opposition is in principle unable to block the committee’s work).
a limit is introduced on the maximum size of the committees (increasing the administrative weight of each committee member)
the federal committee will be able to suspend the powers of individual members and dismiss the party chairman (expansion of the dominant faction’s power).
appealing to the ethics committee becomes paid. If you win the case, the deposit is returned. If you lose, the money goes into the party coffers. No sanctions are provided for those who made an unlawful decision upon which an appeal was won (very convenient, for example, to kick out the entire opposition from the party before the congress, and by the time the ethics committee reinstates everyone, the train has left, all decisions at the congress have already been made, profit).
I probably didn’t notice all the changes, but I hardly missed anything fundamental. Another feature of Svetov’s charter is that it contains two charters: the first part works until the party is registered, and the second part replaces the first in the event of official state registration of the party.
The volume of the documents is quite large. The current charter has 44 pages; the one proposed by Mikhail Svetov has 78 pages. Usually, when people draft such detailed agreements for joint activity, it speaks of an immense lack of trust they have for each other and a certain external force to which one can always appeal if something goes wrong in the joint activity. A charter is important specifically for an external judge who knows nothing about what is happening in the organization and for whom the map equals the territory. Organizations that are created naturally for the maximum efficiency of joint activity, and which do not intend to rely on someone’s external legitimacy, do not typically describe internal norms in such tomes.
A natural organization is characterized by first relying exclusively on informal agreements, then introducing some written norms as it grows, and then consolidating them into charters. An unnatural one, complying with the Russian law on political parties, is forced to take a template charter and demonstrate to the state that it lives by it. In fact, however, it will still operate within the framework of certain informal agreements.
And now I will allow myself to deviate from the charters and quote a fragment of a lecture by Mikhail Svetov, given by him on October 16, 2019, in Novosibirsk:
The Libertarian Party of Russia today is the only organization that seriously says that the regions need to be given broad powers, transferred in such a way that it would be impossible for Moscow to take them away again.
Mikhail has been talking for several months, and especially often in the last month as part of his unprecedented tour across the country, about how the regions should impose a new federal treaty on Moscow. So impose it!
A regional branch of the party brings together local politicians who interact directly with local politicians representing other political forces. It is with them that they form coalitions and alliances, agree on the distribution of candidates by district and the order of speeches at rallies, or arrange to borrow equipment or use an office. Moscow in all this real regional political activity is a disorganizing factor that can only contribute to the disruption of agreements carefully built on the ground, but is almost never able to help. This is especially relevant for parties without centralized funding from above. If the main source of the party’s money is membership fees from ordinary members, then how shell-shocked by the vertical of power must one be to pay any attention at all to the whims of the Moscow leadership! He who doesn’t buy the girl dinner doesn’t get to dance with her.
The Libertarian Party of the Russian Federation does not need a charter. It needs a federal treaty. I will allow myself to quote again a fragment from the same lecture:
What is the libertarians’ criticism of democracy? That democracy adopts equal inconvenient laws for everyone. There is no such law that is equally suitable for Muscovites, Novosibirsk residents, and residents of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
Well, if it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist. Thank Mikhail for the useful lecture and do as he suggests. If you can manage to impose a new federal treaty on Moscow within the party, it will be the first step toward imposing it on Moscow within the state. If you can manage to limit such a mild and intelligent leader as Mikhail Svetov, it will be the first step toward limiting such a brutal and unpleasant type as Vladimir Putin.
In my view, any person is a subject of law by virtue of their belonging to the human race. At the same time, any person can be an object of law by virtue of the fact that other people, in the course of legal interaction with one another, act upon this person as an object. For example, my father may gift me an apartment or, conversely, bequeath some of his property to third parties, thereby disavowing my right to inherit this property, which I have by default. This is a unilateral action affecting my rights; that is, here I am an object of law.
If a person is incapacitated or for some other reason is unable to carry out subject-based legal activity, other persons may act on their behalf and in their interests. And although their direct expression of will is absent here, from the perspective of the persons with whom transactions are carried out on their behalf, they are already a full subject of law. For instance, a transaction carried out by proxy remains a transaction with the person who issued the proxy, not with the person to whom it was issued. But they remain a subject of law and can at any moment delegate the right to perform transactions in their name to someone else—or begin to perform them independently. To do this, they do not need to sign any non-aggression pacts—neither literally nor figuratively. They simply, so to speak, consume the right that they already have and have had all along.
Refusing a subject the exercise of their rights is a usurpation of law. A child has the right to leave home at any moment and live independently, and if they own a share in that house, to demand the division of property. This will likely be an imprudent decision on their part, and if this imprudence is obvious to everyone around, they will try to convince the child that it would be better to change their mind. Or simply not help them (but not hinder them) in the legal formalization of the actions to divide the property. But justifying the usurpation of someone else’s right by the fact that some non-aggression pact has not been signed is a kind of mental gymnastics that is beyond me.
On October 16, a lecture by Mikhail Svetov took place in Novosibirsk, for which I recently asked you to chip in money. A huge thank you to everyone who responded to the call!
The organizers of the lecture were unable to spend this money for its intended purpose because absolutely all the venues they tried to negotiate with backed out. As I understand it, it was theoretically possible to mislead the venue owners and not inform them that Svetov would be speaking—then we would have enjoyed power outages, a police visit in the middle of the lecture, some kind of fire alarm—or simply the doors being closed half an hour before the start. Instead, all the details were told to everyone immediately, and the venues honestly refused to cooperate. Whether it made sense to act in exactly this way, I will leave to the organizers’ conscience.
One way or another, the lecture eventually had to be held at the headquarters of Sergey Boyko. About one hundred and fifty people crowded into an office of about a hundred square meters (there were over eight hundred registrations on Timepad), it was very stuffy, one person fainted, I was close to it as well, and there was no sound amplification—in general, the impression was not very good.
Brief financial report: A total of 42,570 rubles were collected. 15,560 went toward stage rental, printing, transportation costs, and partial compensation for the ticket cost to the federal tour organizers. The remaining money will be returned to the general sponsor or will be used by them for other projects.
On the other hand, Libertarian band released a surprisingly decent recording of the lecture—for once, Svetov’s performance can be watched without straining; even the questions from the audience are clearly audible. So, I have now re-watched the performance in a more human setting, and at least I can comment on its content.
Briefly, Svetov’s message is as follows: uniform legislation for all regions is completely unsuitable for Russia; such a large and diverse country can only be a federation. But it is pointless to wait for federalization to be handed down from Moscow: however it is granted, it will be taken back later if desired; we went through this under Yeltsin. The demand for federalization must come from below; ideally, Moscow should simply be presented with a fait accompli: that we have these rules, this economic policy, and now let’s agree whether we pay you any taxes at all, or simply tell you to get lost. If you want taxes—give us representation and guarantees of autonomy, something like that. Of course, this is all my interpretation; Svetov expressed himself carefully so as not to trigger a criminal article.
I assume it is precisely because any specificity leads to a criminal charge that Svetov offers no plan of action for federalization. On the question of methods, he is extremely laconic: do something, anything.
I was pleased that, standing in front of a banner about contractual jurisdictions, Svetov mentioned those very contractual jurisdictions several times in a complimentary key, which is a further development of the idea of federalism. I also cannot fail to note Svetov’s thesis on how nuclear weapons specifically gave humanity the possibility of the practical implementation of libertarian ideas, since it makes the concept of the Westphalian state meaningless—this is either a direct borrowing from our article on the deterrence doctrine with Bitarkh, or an independent invention. Similarly, the thesis about the church as an example of a contractual jurisdiction is either taken directly from Laxi Catala or also invented independently. Thus, one can state the gradual formation of a quite specific Russian school of libertarianism, which is not reduced to the dogmatic reproduction of the rhetoric of the founding fathers of the teaching.
My main grievances with the considerations presented by Svetov concern the expression “non-aggression pact,” and especially the monstrous phrase “a child becomes a subject of law when they conclude a non-aggression pact.” Such rhetoric is well-suited as material for stupid memes, as well as for forming a sect around oneself, but certainly not for conscious acceptance by a wide circle of people.
At the end of the lecture, Svetov gave a short interview to Ekaterina Khudoleva(Just in case—that’s not me! Yes, also from Kuzbass, yes, also a journalist, yes, roughly the same age, but not me). In the interview, I was pleased by the answer about Nozick, where Svetov’s grievances with Nozick’s analytical philosophy were laid out quite clearly. I hope that in the book Svetov is writing, according to his words, he will expand on them in more detail.
After yesterday’s announcement, I thought about letting you rest, but now I have a selfish interest.
On October 16, Mikhail Svetov will perform in Novosibirsk. This visit is part of the month-long tour of 29 cities that I previously described, of which only Saransk has fallen through so far.
On the official website of Svetov’s team, funds are being raised to support the tour as a whole. However, as I understand it, although it is written there that the money will go toward tickets and venue rentals, in reality, only tickets are paid for from there. The local organizing team claims that due to the influx of people wishing to attend the lecture, they had to find a large hall, which means the need to find 32,000 rubles for its four-hour rental. In this regard, in the Novosibirsk LPR Telegram channel (by the way, please subscribe), an additional fundraiser has been announced; the payment details differ from the official Svetov ones, don’t be alarmed.
The theme of the lecture is the new federal treaty. There is a short five-minute clip about this on the SVTV channel; he also seems to have given this lecture in several cities, but I only managed to find a recording from Yekaterinburg in terrible quality. Local organizers promise to try and make a more decent recording and a separate stream this time.
Thanks in advance to everyone who chips in for the lecture; I’ll provide a review of how it went.
Oleg Tarakanov (Laxy Catal) is a fairly well-known libertarian theorist in Russia, whom I have already referred to repeatedly in my channel, until I finally managed to get in touch personally. The interview was conducted over several evenings via Facebook correspondence, so it later had to be quite thoroughly cleaned of incidental off-topic tangents and some repetitions of theses inevitable in such a prolonged correspondence. I present for your attention the final result.
Laxy Catal
Ancap-tyan
Laxy Catal
Ancap-tyan
Laxy Catal
Laxy Catal
Ancap-tyan
Ancap-tyan
As far as I know, in the Russian-speaking internet, you were the first to start promoting the idea of contractual jurisdictions, albeit under a different name. Conventionally, Paul Émile de Puydt is considered the first to mark himself in this field. How did you come to this concept?
Yes, I am probably the first in modern Russia to have thought it through completely in my head, but Alexei Shustov did beat me to writing a text where, in my view, a strange and not fully thought-out hybrid of an ordinary territorial state with contractual jurisdictions inside it is described. Shustov’s text slightly accelerated the writing of my own text, which is more consistent in getting rid of the traditional state and, most importantly, has an “insurance paradigm” of the state within itself. Shustov lacks insurance. Furthermore, I am much harsher in my terms; I am not shy about calling a racket a racket and I leave the classical idea that “the state is the result of the institutionalization of racket” untouched, simply adding insurance and nuclear weapons to it, which make territorial entities large, stationary targets (by the way, this phrase is from Heinlein’s “Friday”).
I first encountered the term “contractual jurisdictions” in a short article by Anatoly Levenchuk, “Providers of Cellular Statehood,” in Computerra magazine. I was also familiar with the views of Gustave de Molinari through a short article in Libertarium titled “The Production of Security.” I also knew a bit about how the racket was organized in the nineties, and that often the tribute to the “roof” (protection racket) was less than taxes, while the roof provided protection from the tax authorities and actually protected those under its wing. So the idea of contractual jurisdictions is not only as old as the idea itself but has been implemented in practice many times. My contribution was in conceptualizing it as an insurance service and interpreting “roofs” as states competing on a shared territory.
Could you describe in more detail the intellectual community you interacted with back then? What ideas were prevalent, how was your idea perceived, what were the objections and alternative concepts?
Back in the early 2000s, I was an ordinary demo-liberal in the spirit of Gaidar-Chubais. But generally, I wasn’t very interested in politics, having stepped away from it after the victory over the communists in 1991. A turning point was the failure of the SPS (Union of Right Forces) in the Duma elections in the autumn of 2003 (I think). Then, over the winter, I swung toward pure ancap, and after turning it over in my head, I couldn’t make all the gears mesh. You could say that’s when I started thinking about contractual jurisdictions, although I didn’t know that’s what they were called. Essentially, I wanted to construct a political world-order in my head that fits together without contradiction. This was simmering in my head for about five or six years, probably, before it clicked. Over those five years, much was adopted and much was discarded. Contractual jurisdictions, insurance, racket protection, nuclear weapons—these are the main points, of course. My subconscious sorted and combined everything on its own; eventually, it all fit together (though I don’t remember the exact moment), and it only remained to put it into words. I rushed to write my text, “Insurance States,” for the Lebedev Readings, which took place in May 2009; there I presented the text without retelling it in detail, as it is quite long. The people at the readings are knowledgeable—the “libertarian crowd,” the older generation of Russian libertarians. I published the ideas I discovered in my LiveJournal as I found them. The “insurance paradigm of the state” that I found greatly impressed Anatoly Levenchuk, and he wrote a note about it, and almost everyone read him. A year earlier, Shustov had presented the idea of contractual jurisdictions at the readings, so I didn’t cause any sensation at the readings themselves, except that my prediction—that seven to fifteen years remained until the implementation of the idea—impressed the people.
By the way, I stand by this prediction; although ten years have passed, I think in a few years everything will start to crumble.
Do you observe any intellectual continuity between those old libertarians of the 2000s and the current activists who are joining the libertarian movement en masse? Which of the opinion leaders from a decade ago remains relevant for the new generation, in your view?
I’m afraid I’m not the one who can competently answer this question. I am not well acquainted with the younger generation coming into libertarianism. I consider myself part of the middle “generation” that came to libertarianism in the 2000s. The older generation came in the 90s, the younger in the 2010s. Now, while I know the older generation well, I know the young ones poorly. I am slightly disappointed in the older generation, though not deeply. Those who are not minarchists (there are few minarchists in the older generation anyway), in private conversations or separate comments on FB and LJ, almost always explicit themselves (coming out :)) as supporters of ECU, extraterritorial states. But! None of them has ever said this publicly, not even in a separate post. I see a kind of duplicity in this, hypocrisy perhaps, as if being a supporter of CJ (contractual jurisdictions) is something shameful or something not customary to talk about. In essence, libertarians have no constructive ideas about what needs to be built (rather than what needs to be destroyed), except for ECU. Of course, if they don’t want to be hamsters in the wheel of history. That is, I see an almost complete victory of the ECU idea, but a kind of semi-secret one.
You mentioned that there are few minarchists in the older generation, however, around the same time you described, a libertarian party appeared in Russia with a purely minarchist program. So it seems there were plenty of ideas about what they wanted to build; they were clearly inspired by the Georgian reforms and other liberal concepts. Did you have contact with the LPR (Libertarian Party of Russia) at any stages of its formation and development, or did your circle of intellectuals shun politics?
As a member of the middle generation of libertarians, I communicate with both the old and the young. I know the founders of the LPR—they aren’t the ones running things there now; they are people from St. Petersburg. They are not in the LPR now; Muscovites took the party from them, which was predictable. The St. Petersburg people are quite sympathetic to ECU, and the Muscovites are too. BUT! Again, no one says this openly. A paradox!))
LPR was created by Oleg Khrienko and several other people from St. Petersburg; they later created RLN radio, where Alexander Kitchenko is now the head. Oleg initially led the LPR and, it seems, funded it, but later focused on business and left politics. All these people are sympathetic to ECU, which I know from personal conversations. In the current LPR, I know Boyko, Shalnev, Svetov, and a couple of other people. Shalnev is too much of a practitioner; he burns with the desire to do something, regardless of what, without thinking about the futility of the hustle; thinkers like me are alien to him. Sergey Boyko is more balanced in this regard. Boyko and Svetov are supporters of ECU. Last autumn at the Adam Smith readings, I asked Svetov if he knew about the insoluble problems of minarchism and ancap, to which he, not knowing who he was talking to, immediately referred to ECU as a reasonable alternative, sending me to my own text. That was funny. That’s how we met in person. It seems like a clean victory for ECU, but people online, like hamsters in a wheel, continue to obsess over minarchism and ancap, as if my “terminal texts” about their fundamental problems don’t exist.
In the case of a world of contractual jurisdictions, how do you see the position of a person who does not wish to enter into such contracts and, consequently, does not have a “roof”?
The position of such a person is like that of an animal in the forest. An animal is free, of course, but it can be shot. Such people will have no rights, but “right” and the general concept are dubious, cut away by Occam’s razor. As Svetov likes to say, “where there is no law, there is no crime.” Since people without a roof have not bound themselves by any contracts imposing obligations to behave decently, one can behave however one likes with them. However, I think roofs will forbid their clients from offending the roofless, in order to minimize the number of insurance cases, but the roofless will be able to have shootouts and other things among themselves without consequences for the winner. Moreover, Barr shot Hamilton in a duel without consequences when there was still freedom in the States. It is exactly these people, being in the Lockean “natural state of freedom,” who can build pure ancap without extraterritorial states. I hope there will be many such people, just as there are many small countries that could be conquered by large neighbors but live on because they are of no interest to anyone.
Thus, it turns out that insurance roofs may be market-demanded if people in society are aggressive enough (for example, experiencing a serious lack of resources)—or not particularly demanded under conditions of relatively peaceful practices (this usually correlates with material abundance). Could it be that increasing abundance will simply make insurance roofs unnecessary, and a pure ancap will become the sustainable model of relations?
Insurance roofs, also known as extraterritorial states, can become an intermediate stage on the way to quasi-pure ancap, but I find it hard to imagine how one could somehow bypass this stage. This is due to the inevitability of the painful collapse of the current world order, during which hell and chaos will be no joke, and roofs in this chaos will be centers for the emergence of a new order.
That is, the problem is not that ancap is completely impossible (a domestic situation can look very much like ancap, and an ordinary person may think they live under ancap)—but that somewhere behind the scenes, which few think about, somewhere at the level of reinsurance or even re-reinsurance, there will always be power players with nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, and satellite groups, and it is hard not to consider them extraterritorial states. It is exactly they who will make large conflicts unlikely, threatening to inflict unacceptable damage on the aggressor. Such players will break away from traditional states and be independent, like pirate fleets or merchant guilds once were. Racket protection on such a scale is a good business; private individuals will master it.
One can imagine at least two more paths to quasi-pure ancap. 1. Through minarchism, that is, the gradual privatization of state functions through reforms from above, but without abandoning the territorial sovereignty of the state until the point where only the name of the state remains, and nothing stands behind it. 2. Through agorism, where ancap grows through the state until it dies from banal lack of demand—and again, bypassing the stage of multiple extraterritorial roofs, which impose more or less permanent relationships on people through the carrot or the stick. Minarchism is the path of the conventional LPR; agorism is the path of the conventional Zolotorev and Sherstnev.
Ha, don’t make me laugh. This has never happened, and here we go again—as Chernomyrdin used to say. I am no great expert in history, but at least in the 20th century, there has been no large-scale decline in the role of the state without an accompanying catastrophe. Losing a war or the collapse of an empire led to the reduction of the state. And that’s probably all. To imagine that one can de-statize quietly and without catastrophe—no, that’s some kind of utopianism; that’s not for me, I don’t believe in fairy tales.
Regarding the movement toward minarchism, even from a purely cybernetic point of view, it is impossible to go far on a path where, as one moves forward, the incentives for further progress fall and the incentives to move backward grow. It is impossible to reach minarchism through reforms, only through catastrophe.
In a sated society of abundance, people are more loyal to various projects of helping their neighbors and plundering for these purposes. Abundance is excellent soil for building a social state, and certainly not ancap.
I believe a bit more in agorism as a tactic for moving toward ancap, since history knows examples of the victories of informal practices over state prohibitions. The impossibility of defeating drugs eventually led to their gradual legalization in many countries, and the same happened earlier with prohibition. But these were all problems that were not critical to the existence of the state, and prohibition was actually harmful to state finances, diverting huge sums of money from the budget. I would not underestimate the state’s ability to fight threats that are critical to it. Officials of different countries easily find a common language when it comes to money: they defeated offshore zones that were beyond the control of large states, and even forced Switzerland to liquidate bank secrecy, as improbable as it seemed. If Bitcoin becomes seriously dangerous, states will physically destroy the infrastructure that supports it, up to rocket attacks on mining farms or cutting communication lines. And they won’t care that this is the case in many countries—they will agree on joint actions. And you cannot go entirely into the network: as long as you are even slightly in reality, you are vulnerable to the state, especially regarding the possession of weapons. Here, the “deterrence doctrine” gives me optimism, although it is not part of agorism. But imagine that the successes of agorism led to the total bankruptcy of the state: eight million Russian “siloviki” (security forces) are left with nothing. What will they do? Peacefully go home? No, not all, but some of them will create hell in reality, they will simply engage in looting, we will have to buy them off, and again we come back to the roofs.
You indicate that not much time is left to wait. Can you outline in broad strokes how the transition to the ECU system will occur?
Yes, alright. In my text “Insurance States,” this section exists, but it is unfinished and has probably become outdated over 10 years; now, in short, my thoughts on this are as follows:
1. Traditional territorial states have many beneficiaries: intelligence services, the army, the police, the entire military-industrial complex, politicians, civil servants, budget employees, pensioners—it is impossible to imagine that they will “surrender without a fight.” Therefore, all realistic scenarios look catastrophic, meaning they are accompanied by chaos—from which a new order will emerge. How roofs appear, how “natural selection” occurs among them, how their scale grows, and how a hierarchy of roofs emerges is absolutely clear. The top-level roofs will likely be nuclear aircraft carriers, managing satellite groups from on board in continuous motion. These will be “roofs of roofs,” operating through Lloyd’s; private individuals will not deal with them and often will not even know they exist. It remains for us to find out how and why the “slide into chaos” will occur.
2. At the most general level, the reasons for the slide into chaos are not difficult to describe. In all times, elites try to “rake in all the material values they can reach, then fold the space, cocoon themselves and stop time” (Strugatsky brothers). That is, being satisfied with their position, they try to freeze the situation in which they achieved success, i.e., to stop progress. Progress, however, does not wish to stop, since it is a side effect of entrepreneurial activity—the eternal and indestructible desire to get rich. Plus the desire to become part of the elite, plus the unwillingness to give up assets. That’s it.
3. The devil is in the details. Life-extension technologies and medical successes in general will destroy state pension systems, which are already cracking under the retirement of baby boomers. Alternative energy sources, especially renewables, thermonuclear fusion, but also new designs of nuclear power plants (currently stalled by regulators) and shale—they drop the prices of oil and gas, bringing down the countries that produce them (especially important for the Middle East, which is potentially very conflict-prone). New (non-centrifuge) technologies for uranium enrichment (laser isotope separation, nanotechnology).
4. Not just technology. Territorial states presume a certain uniformity of the subject population, ideally: one language, one nationality, one culture, one religion. Almost none of this remains. National diasporas, landsmanshafts, ethnic districts, and even cities. Leftists, by encouraging “otherness,” abolished the “melting pot” concept. Diversity is growing in the world, and traditional states are not designed for it. Riots in Britain and Germany showed that authorities can already barely cope with Muslims, and sometimes they simply surrender (recall the mass rape of German women by migrants in Cologne and Merkel’s appeal not to provoke the “guests”). In other words, the state has already discredited itself as a protector of law and order; it only remains to discredit itself as a “source of benefits” (pensions, subsidies, etc.), and it will become useless to everyone except politicians and soldiers.
5. In summary, the softest realistic scenario: Muslims in the West, through mass riots and with the support of the left, achieve the abolition of local state jurisdiction over them, create their own courts and police, and stop paying taxes to the state, after which the local whites, under the slogan “why are we any worse?”, begin to fight for something similar for themselves, and from there everything spirals out of control. A precursor to this was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who proposed giving Muslims the opportunity to litigate in their own courts—he was forced to resign; he was ahead of his time.
6. Slightly more likely is that certain non-state Middle Eastern groups (state borders there are completely arbitrary, all groups there are transborder), using new technologies and disregarding the “non-proliferation regime,” acquire nuclear weapons and begin to demand their own “piece of power” (most likely a revision of borders, but not necessarily). Everyone is against everyone there: Shiites against Sunnis, everyone against Jews and the USA—something will inevitably explode somewhere, especially against the backdrop of declining revenues from oil and gas exports. Then, millions of refugees in Europe, and see paragraphs 4 and 5.
7. It is slightly different in the USA. Of course, there are many Latinos and Blacks there just waiting for an excuse for mass riots (recall the flood in New Orleans). But the main conflict is brewing between Democrats and Republicans. Social networks stimulate the clustering of people by beliefs; everyone seeks support for their point of view and finds an echo chamber—a place where a crowd echoes them, reinforcing the confidence in their own rightness, which leads to the polarization of society. On any controversial issue, everyone is divided into camps; people are like they are in trenches, dialogue is practically impossible, everyone is sure of their own rightness and considers the opponent either an idiot or a malicious scoundrel. And these people pay taxes to one government. Can this continue for long? Either it’s a civil war or they go under different “roofs”—I won’t venture to predict the details, but chaos is inevitable. For now, the situation is saved by a certain abundance; everyone has enough of everything. If disruptions in pensions and benefits begin, each side will blame the other, and it’ll be off. Chaos in the USA would instantly lead to the collapse of the “non-proliferation regime.” The States are currently the main keeper of the Westphalian peace; any serious weakening of them will lead to the collapse of the current world order. But their aircraft carriers are also ready top-level “roofs.” Deprived of funding during a crisis, I hope they will go freelance and become the backbone of a new world order.
Can I say something optimistic? Yes. Current territorial states are disgusting; they enslave people in the territories under their control and domesticate them like cattle—shearing them, and sometimes slaughtering them. The widespread proliferation of WMDs will make territorial entities impossible, because no one wants to be a large, stationary target. Exterritorial states, at the very least, will not enslave, and they have no reason to exterminate anyone en masse; it is costly and scares away clients. The future world will not be as disgusting as the current one. Not everyone will survive, but they will cease to be slaves. That is good.
That was powerful)
In their time, Marxists were faced with a complaint: if history is driven by objective economic laws, why do you fuss and try to outrun your time and arrange a revolution where society is not yet ripe for it? A similar question arises for libertarians, who assume that the radical restructuring of society will happen on its own, under the influence of objective contradictions embedded in the construction of the territorial state, which does not correspond to modern realities. So why conduct any propaganda of libertarian values and develop the theory at all, if it is enough to follow in the wake of changes and adapt to them?
Bravo! You have answered the question yourself as to why I hardly write new texts and hardly discuss anything with anyone. I see no point in it. One would have to be an utterly enthusiastic romantic optimist to believe that the few thousand smart, active libertarians in the world (there are far more passive ones, but they are of no use) can seriously change such powerful and fundamental historical processes. On the other hand, Russia is the armpit of the world; one cannot rule out that something special is possible on the periphery. After all, there is Somalia. That is, I do not rule out the possibility that somewhere apart from the rest of the world, libertarians might achieve something. The Bolsheviks are not an analogy here, because back then Russia was among the top three world powers and was not the armpit of the world.
Another reason why theoretical and practical developments may make sense is that when a new order begins to form from the chaos, the costs will be lower if the players know what they are striving for, what should eventually result, and do not make unnecessary movements.
If one is to be a complete optimist, one could assume that the experience of the periphery will show the world a path by which catastrophe can be avoided. I don’t believe it, but I don’t rule it out; there is still a one-in-a-thousand chance.
So isn’t that the secret of why people prefer not to publicly acknowledge your theory? Once you acknowledge it—that’s it, intellectual honesty forces you to stop fussing and start calmly waiting for the nuclear aircraft carriers to arrive and take your “roof” under their “roof.” But if you don’t acknowledge it, you retain an incentive for active action and the propaganda of your views. Minarchists need this to conduct louder political campaigns, agorists to build a trust network and arrange life around themselves according to ancap principles—and panarchists have to hope for a deus ex machina…
Now, whether the “deus ex machina” will happen on its own, or whether one must fight for it, is not part of the theory. Part of the theory is the analysis of stability, the analysis of incentives acting on actors, the analysis of evolution. This is a theoretical-sociological study of a possible world. Minarchism, however, does not include a theory of its achievement. Neither does ancap. Agorism, by the way, is not a separate branch of libertarianism, but a tactic for achieving ancap. So the hypothesis about the link between public non-recognition and the supposedly resulting inaction is incorrect. Moreover, one can simply disagree with me that the “deus ex machina” will fall upon us on its own and that we don’t need to fight for it. The doctrine of deterrence is quite appealing in itself; I even think it is implementable somewhere on the periphery. I repeat, Somalia exists; there is quite a territorial “roofing” system there—Zolotorev describes it roughly in my terms.
In recent years, you have become much less active. Perhaps this is because you have already formulated and published most of what you had to say. Unfortunately, it turns out that you conveyed your thoughts to your own generation, but with those who became interested in libertarianism recently, old libertarians find a certain communication gap.
Perhaps there is a gap; I don’t really know what the youth are thinking. But my sizable circle of communication does not show any gap. Well, I don’t know, the admins of a ten-thousand-member public page Freedom Pride know who I am, the leaders of the LPR know that I’m the “main man,” Svetov sometimes quotes me almost verbatim, although he doesn’t mention me. My “Insurance States”(I post a compiled single-file collection of all texts on this topic from the author’s LiveJournal – Ancap-tyan) is the most detailed Russian text on the “deus ex machina,” and everyone interested in the topic finds it. Or so it seems to me. To be honest, I don’t care; I am indifferent to fame, and the “deus ex machina” is not the only thing I deal with. I am probably the main Russian critic of democracy from the right. I wrote “terminal” texts about the problems of minarchism and ancap, after which it is difficult to take them seriously. I have a dozen other favorite topics. I am interested in truth, not fame or the number of readers.
As for the decrease in activity… Do you know who Leonid Nikonov is?
I just found him on Facebook; there is nothing interesting on his wall.
About seven years ago, he was a bright libertarian from Barnaul who swept through our circles like a meteor. He organized the first Adam Smith readings in St. Petersburg, dragged me there, held events in Moscow, wrote texts, and then somehow burnt out, I guess, in a couple of years, stopped his activity, and pursued an academic career. And I’ve been writing for fifteen years—even if it’s just a couple of texts a year, I write; I haven’t burnt out. No one can write like I do: briefly, point by point, closing the topic. The main character of “The Bison” said that books are written about incomprehensible things, but when everything becomes clear, a short article is enough. I think so too. Some topics spin in my head for five to seven years until they become clear. Perhaps I’m just slow.
I don’t understand why one should write texts without novelty, long ones that don’t close the topic. Propaganda of ideas? That’s not for me. It must be boring to engage in propaganda for many years; you’d get tired, your spirits would sink, you can’t outperform the state system of indoctrination (schools and media). In Russia, it’s generally impossible to convince anyone of anything because everyone is sure they have discovered the truth themselves. A country of people who have grabbed God by the balls. Although Russia is not the only one; this is a consequence of egalitarian ideology and democracy, where the opinion of Joe Blow is no less important than the opinion of Einstein. I look at many overly active people and doubt that they won’t burn out in a couple of years, like Leonid.
As for burnout, it’s easier for me; I’m anonymous. Having lost taste for the project, I’ll simply hand it over to someone else.
Many value panarchy (more in the Shustov version than in yours) because it allows for a peaceful separation based on values, instead of trying to ensure the dominance of one’s own group and subjugating the opposition. In connection with this, a rapprochement with left-wing anarchists has even begun to emerge (yes, I’m leaning towards the commies)—specifically around the idea of protocols for horizontal interaction, without attempting to eat each other. In your idea of insurance “roofs,” the possibility of ideological diversity is not indicated at all; they look like homogeneous objects, a simple set of firms in the market. Is the absence of this layer in the description a simplification, or a postulate that only one type of jurisdiction will survive?
I touched upon this question somewhere. Of course, there will be competition between the “roofs,” as a result of which they will begin to diverge into niches, that is, specialize in clients of different religious and other convictions.
I will quote my “Insurance States”: To speculate on what “tariff plans” the roofs will have and what “service packages” will be included—I won’t undertake that; I think they will be very diverse and will be determined by the imagination of producers, consumer preferences, and the level of competition. Currently, in countries with developed insurance, up to a quarter of family income goes toward buying insurance, plus taxes to the state, so there will be considerable money in this business. Which “niches” insurance companies will drift into—I don’t know either; I don’t even rule out religious or “ideological” ones, and we may observe the construction of, say, communism not in a separate country, but in a separate contractual jurisdiction. (My feeling is that the differences will not be that strong, but I cannot deny the existence of extremes, which will probably be as marginal as kibbutzim in Israel or punk communes in the USA).
The Libertarian band team, with whom I collaborate, released a series of videos on YouTube as an introduction to libertarianism. Could you take a look at five short clips, about five minutes each?
In the scripts for them, I tried to show that there are three different paths to ancap, and there is no need to limit oneself to only one while rejecting the others. I would like your review of this concept, which, it seems to me, develops both your ideas and those of many others.
Gorgeous videos, I watched all five. But I’m already in the loop; I’m not the target audience, and I don’t know how people far removed from the topic will perceive them. I think for marketing purposes it’s worth mentioning the terms “exterritorial state” and “contractual jurisdictions” more often, so that people get used to them and Google them. And insurance companies capable of protecting against Vova P. are not just companies. Nuclear weapons are not mentioned once. There is no comparison with the Churches, which also once lost their territorial monopoly, and nothing happened—the world didn’t collapse. But overall, everything is good there; you can’t fit everything important into four minutes.
In your old posts, you write that Hoppe deals with the critique of democracy in the book “Democracy: The God That Failed,” but the book was not translated, and you had not read it. Since then, the book has been translated. Have you had a chance to read it, and if so, what could you say about it?
And as it happens, during our conversations, after reading the introduction to my “Insurance States,” I remembered that Hoppe was translated and decided to read him, so I’m reading him now, but slowly—10 pages a day. So far it’s fine, but I’ll review it later.
This autumn Hoppe is coming to Moscow. What would you like to ask him?
I’ll think about what to ask Hoppe; is it similar to the Smith Readings, will he come for that?
