Тег: Panarchy

About One Objection to Panarchy

Here, Georgiy Freeman made an interesting observation about panarchy:

The problem with panarchy as an optimal world order, in my view, lies in the realm of human psychology. It’s predictable that liberal jurisdictions will be more economically successful and materially wealthier than socialist ones. And it will inevitably happen what has already occurred in the world with closed sub-communities like Jewish groups. Unsuccessful, impoverished extraterritorial jurisdictions will invariably blame wealthy liberal jurisdictions for their misfortune: “they parasitize us,” “they rob us,” “they live off our backs.” And this will inevitably lead to irrational conflicts, wars and pogroms. And ultimately, to the destruction of the ECU and panarchy as an idea.

The problem with panarchy as an optimal world order, in my view, lies in the realm of human psychology. It’s predictable that liberal jurisdictions will be more economically successful and materially wealthier than socialist ones. And it will inevitably happen what has already occurred in the world with closed sub-communities like Jewish groups. Unsuccessful, impoverished extraterritorial jurisdictions will invariably blame wealthy liberal jurisdictions for their misfortune: “they parasitize us,” “they rob us,” “they live off our backs.” And this will inevitably lead to irrational conflicts, wars and pogroms. And ultimately, to the destruction of the ECU and panarchy as an idea.

Indeed, on the example of this assumption we see a fascinating phenomenon of human psychology. The answer to the expressed concern is already contained in the description of the concern itself, however it is ignored. “If people will walk down the streets, dressed festively and sending everyone to hell, then they will quickly encounter violence against them, so the institution of walking down the streets will soon be destroyed, as an idea.” But why not just not send everyone to hell.

Similarly, respected G. Freeman suggests paying attention to the disastrous fate of closed extraterritorial sub-entities and immediately prophesies the same fate for open sub-communities. A liberal extraterritorial jurisdiction is not a secret club with seven degrees of initiation, but simply clients of courts and other legal infrastructure working according to liberal norms, namely respect for freedom and private property. Any communist jurisdiction client can enter a liberal jurisdiction if, of course, the communist masters let him out, allocating his due share of public communist property. And if they don’t let him out, then claims will, presumably, not be directed at liberals.

The problem described by G. Frijman is quite typical of prosperous territorial communities with developed redistribution in favor of the poor: the poor, for some reason, strive to infiltrate such communities, and those who have already infiltrated them suddenly stop loving migrants and demand that borders be closed. Of course, after closing the borders, this territorial community begins to be perceived by many neighboring communists as a fattening on neighbors’ accounts, an education that is subject to destruction. However, until there is mandatory social support within this territorial community, there are no problems with migrants in it: they simply flood into it, hoping to earn a living, and many of them succeed.

Network State

The friendly channel Russian Crypto Frontier has begun translating the recently published book by Balaji Srinivasan, Network State. So far, only the preamble has been posted, but feel free to encourage Yuri in the comments and shake him down for donations to make his work more enjoyable.

I read a brief list of the book’s concepts. The author develops panarchic ideas floating in the air and proposes the idea of a network state as a startup combining elements of the cryptocurrency community, role-playing games, and a national diaspora. This is not at all like the other trendy idea of creating charter cities, but in some places, it strongly resembles the Montellibero project — we also have developed tokenomics, a real population on the ground, an extensive diaspora outside Montenegro, and our own set of traditions, self-governance practices, and dispute resolution.

In short, I will follow the translation process with interest and occasionally announce the appearance of new translated chapters.

As for tomorrow, I want to post the translation of a new chapter from Eric Mack — Alex Dvoretsky donated for it on Boosty a couple of days ago, so there you go, I’m almost finished.

Morazanograd and Montelibero

I recently read an interesting article by Spencer McCallum on the friendly site panarchy.ru with the tedious title The Community Enterprise: Market Competition, Land and the Environment. Alexey Korshunov, who posted this article, claims that one of the three private contractual jurisdictions in Honduras, Ciudad Morazán—which he refers to in a Russian style as Morazanograd—operates on the principles described in it, and in which he, as it happened, became the first resident. (By the way, not long ago he crowdfunded a ticket to the most famous Honduran ZEDE called Prospera, traveled there, and subsequently posted a report on the state of affairs in this flagship project)

Briefly, McCallum’s article contains the following ideas. The value of a piece of land can be defined as the sum of external effects directed toward that plot from all other property objects. If the landowner is separated from its immediate use and rents it out to several tenants, they are usually extremely interested in maximizing the rental income, and therefore have market incentives to create the most favorable environment possible for the tenants. For this reason, the author argues, where land is occupied by individual houses or, worse, apartment buildings where the apartments are owned by the residents, each owner maximizes their own living convenience; however, where significant areas are rented out to numerous tenants, a lush variety of ways to use these spaces begins to flourish, from cafes and shops to coworking spaces and laboratories. The task of the administrator of a particular business center essentially boils down to providing utilities to tenants and minimizing friction between tenants and the state. A kind of “protection racket” for the healthy person.

Morazanograd is designed to provide its residents with the maximum possible security for Honduras, acceptable living conditions, and a place to earn money. In creating the Montelibero settlement, we are not entirely following the recommendations laid out in the article: instead of leaving all the land under the ownership of the foundation, developing it centrally, and renting it only to residents, we sliced approximately two-thirds into small private pieces for independent development, while the rest was indeed left for rent. Thus, we should end up with a field experiment to see which concept works better. In any case, we are still at the stage of laying the centralized infrastructure, much like Morazanograd, except that we are not building a fence around the settlement, as Montenegro is not a place where one should fear the neighbors.

Dear-to-the-heart Morazanograd construction hassles, we still have all this ahead of us

State 2.0

In a friendly project Libertarian State (formerly called Anti-State, which sort of hints at the evolution of thought), a translation of Aviezer Tucker’s article Panarchy: State 2.0 has been released. The article is not particularly remarkable, as it outlines the main ideas in defense of panarchy established by the originator of the term, Émile du Châtelet.

Following this, Wed Neuman, who actually runs this channel, released his own article on state 2.0, where he begins with a critique of Tucker and then develops his own theoretical constructs, moving from the original ideas of panarchy to the concept of charter cities.

To start, Wed redefines the concept of the state. Instead of the representation of the state as a monopolist of legitimate violence, which repels libertarians, he proposes to define the state as a stably maintained infrastructure for human habitation on a certain, not necessarily strictly fixed, territory. This is a far more “herbivorous” understanding of the subject, which brackets out all sorts of discussions about stationary bandits and other journalistic rhetoric, focusing instead on the actual organization of life.

The main prediction of the article is that as charter cities spread, state 1.0 will increasingly be reduced to the role of a concierge, receiving a fixed payment for this.

Regarding strategy, Wed still sees Paul Romer’s approach as the most optimal: on clean, uninhabited territory, from scratch, preceding construction by obtaining firm guarantees from the state, and detailing their own charter, on the basis of which further interaction between state 2.0 and its citizens will be built.

It is not hard to see that we, in Montelibero, are acting suboptimally according to Wed: we haven’t officially notified the state that we are conducting political experiments on its territory, but instead try to seep through stealthily and, if necessary, legalize ourselves only after we have developed. I don’t know, it seems to me that this is actually more reliable: it is much easier to gain factual recognition than prior permission. Imagine if Satoshi-sensei had asked someone if he could launch Bitcoin…

A few reviews

I have returned to Montenegro from a three-week trip to Albania; during this time, a lot of unread and unwatched material has accumulated, so I will go through it briefly.

On the Adam Smith Readings channel, recordings of speeches from the Constitution of Liberty conference have been posted, which, as is easy to see from the name, is primarily dedicated to Hayek.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuhWCrj1ep6ErVO5viiPGnxCmDw80uZX3

Kapelyushnikov – a good introductory lecture introducing listeners to Hayek and his main achievements.

Nureev – an introduction to the problems of implementing Hayek’s idea about the introduction of certain abstract universal rules of fair behavior (did I translate Eric Mack’s book on libertarianism for nothing – there is a chapter about all of this).

Sazonov – a similar report with a presentation on the entrepreneurial theory of property; he had already given it earlier in St. Petersburg, and I summarized it briefly, and even the listeners’ questions partially overlap. At the time, I was wondering whether to include elements of the presented theory in my book – and in the end, I decided not to. Not because I disagree with the author, but simply because I don’t dig that deep into the philosophical foundations of property rights in the book.

Bystrov – republicans trolling libertarians, funny, but not very substantive.

Bazhenov – a minarchist trolling ancaps and agorists, plus an exposition of those same Hayekian principles stating that uniform universal legal norms are necessary for the efficient functioning of a free market. Also, some excursion into the classification of goods by alienability and exhaustibility.

Travin – a talk primarily about the subject of historical sociology, as well as an explanation of why there is room to apply Hayek even in this field.

Zemtsov – a talk about how democracy is understood and valued differently in different places, while there is a clear inverse correlation between the development of democracy and its declared value, for which political science provides no unambiguous explanation, so we are offered to choose from six different explanations.

Also on the same channel, a continuous eight-hour broadcast of the Ayn Rand Readings was released, but I will probably wait until it is neatly edited into clips before I watch it.

A video titled Inhibition of Violence was released on the Libertarian Band channel. It completely repeats numerous materials on the same topic posted by Bitarkh on my channel, specifically, the one from literally yesterday. So, it can be recommended as a brief explication of the ideas put forward by Bitarkh, and at the same time, it is an opportunity to admire the cool print on the presenter.

A competing translation of David Friedman’s book titled Mechanisms of Freedom has finally been made publicly available, although only in the pdf format, which is not the most convenient for reading. I skimmed through it and can say that, except for the poems, it is quite good. If I were more of a perfectionist, this would be a reason to go through my own translation again and polish certain parts, but perhaps it would be more appropriate for me to spend time on more urgent tasks.

An article by Alexey Korshunov on the current state of affairs in Honduran charter cities was posted on the Libertarian State channel. Following that, he also posted an analysis of the initiative to create a charter city in Somaliland, where he wonders about the violation of their creation principles without specifying the reasons why this is being done. In our Montelibero, of course, the scale is more modest, but things are moving forward as well; I plan to post a fresh digest of project news soon.

Defragmentation

In February, I reposted an announcement about a short story competition regarding free private cities. I never actually managed to produce a story for the contest myself. I had an idea to compose something in the spirit of an Icelandic saga, but about the colonization of Mars: there lived a man named Elon, who was the son of X Æ A-Xii, son of Elon, son of Errol — and so on. But instead of focusing on the plot, I got bogged down in trivialities, such as studying whether Bitcoin mining would be possible on Mars, given the finite speed of light, or if there would be their own corporate currencies — and in the end, I just gave up. However, Wed Neuman, from whose channel I made the repost, did not give up. His competition entry was recently published, and I have read it.

You can feel that the author is more comfortable with a larger form, and he would have gladly expanded the plot to roughly twice the volume. I have always envied this ability; I personally run out of steam quickly when writing long texts, and if I do it in pieces, I first need to reread the previous fragments before writing the next one.

To be honest, the plot seemed rather strained to me; the emphasis was clearly on the world rather than the story. Nevertheless, the plot has its own charm, and the work as a whole is quite an easy read. The world looks like a kind of benevolent version of cyberpunk, where shady corporations also handle some incomprehensible business beyond the reach of mere mortals, but without the grim brutalism. In short, it is worth reading.

Free Private Cities, book summary

In the Russian Frontier channel, which I recently promoted, a brief summary has begun to be released of Titus Gebel’s book “Free Private Cities.” The ideas covered in the book are currently being used in the construction of a contractual jurisdiction such as Prospera. It is possible that some of them will be applied in Montellibero in the future.

So those who are too lazy to read the book itself can subscribe to the channel and gradually absorb the material along with its author.

Currently, the summary of the first chapter is available.

Panarchy World

The post was preceded by a donation of 0.00004388btc

It turns out that the libertarian party has had a YouTube channel since 2008, and a quite crowded one at that. Later, during one of the splits, the channel left the party, renamed itself RLN (russian libertarian network), and existed in that form for many years. Now, the RLN Telegram channel has gone to the Montelibero project, and the YouTube channel has been renamed Panarchy World.

Today, a video was released there explaining what panarchy is .

In my opinion, Libertarian Band also did a pretty good job in its time, but I am biased.

Nevertheless, for me, collaboration with Libertarian Band is already in the past, but collaboration with Panarchy World will quite likely be established soon. So you can subscribe in advance, mention in the comments that you came from Ancap-chan, and this will be a signal to the channel owners that it makes sense to invite me. Of course, not exclusively, but simply as one of the content creators.

The state wins, anarchism does too

The Anarchy+ channel, from which I continue to draw ideas from time to time, demonstrated a creative application of game theory to the anti-statist movement. As I have mentioned repeatedly, game theory is used not for proofs, but merely as a tool to illustrate the logic of one’s reasoning.

The reasoning there is roughly as follows. We are constantly presented with someone like Mad Max as an example of anarchy, and we get angry and try to show that we are “white and fluffy” and want something entirely different. The proposed model breaks down the outcomes of the war between anarchists and the state into a simple matrix, where our desired state of anarchy is the outcome “anarchism won, the state lost,” and the amorphousness we are warned about is the outcome “the state lost, anarchism lost as well.”

At the end, the article leaves a question hanging regarding what to put in the “state won, anarchists also won” square. If the state is defined as a system of centralized coercion and anarchism as a system of distributed deterrence, the author interprets the win-win situation as unattainable.

Of course, panarchists respond to this: nothing of the sort. Federalization, the transition to a system of extraterritorial contractual jurisdictions or functional overlapping competing jurisdictions, is precisely what the sought-after win-win means. The state wins because it is preserved as a system of centralized coercion, while its legitimacy increases sharply. Anarchism wins because the state is decentralized, the influence of citizens on politics is strengthened due to the drastic simplification of changing jurisdictions, and the state’s susceptibility to systems of distributed deterrence also increases.

Will contractual jurisdictions, each of which involves only individuals with similar views, lead to the eternal conservation of all social institutions and the cessation of the development of philosophical thought?

Siberian Extremist

This question had been pending for a while, and it came back to me in connection with the publication of Farid Khusainov’s review of Rodion Belkovich’s book on the history of American radicalism. The main point of the review (though not necessarily the reviewed book itself) is that individual freedom must be defended both from the central government and from enthusiasts of cozy conservative communities. I agree with this general conclusion, but now I want to understand how real the danger is that philosophical thought in a world of closed communities will cease to develop.

Indeed, isolated communities—as far as we can judge by the isolated communities we can observe—are not prone to a riot of ideas. This could be the Amazonian Indians, the aboriginals of the Andaman Islands, or the Amish beloved by Mikhail Svetov. These are very stable societies, capable of existing for centuries without any changes at all.

The example of ancient Hellas is quite telling in this regard. It consisted of many compact poleis, meaning territorial jurisdictions, united into leagues, which were contractual jurisdictions of a higher level; within the polis, there were phyles, demes, and other heteriai, which turned out to be extraterritorial jurisdictions, some contractual and some not. We know ancient Hellas as an example of a society with an exemplary explosion of philosophical thought. But even there, there was an island of stability: Lacedaemon.

It is well known what protected the Spartans from the corrupting influence of outsiders: a radical reduction of external trade contacts. You cannot trade much when your obols—monetary units with a value roughly equal to “one snack”—consist of hefty iron bars. Other poleis traded actively, and through this, they were open to mutual cultural influence. It is easy to see that the same characteristic is observed in modern stable communities: their external trade turnover is extremely low.

Will a world of many ECUs exist without trade relations between members of different ECUs? Highly doubtful, except perhaps as an exception. The extraterritoriality of jurisdictions further facilitates various connections with participants of other communities. And where there is trade, there is a search for profit. Where there is a search for profit, there is entrepreneurship. Where there is entrepreneurship, there is a constant readiness to observe and adapt others’ ideas. Rest assured, philosophical development will not disappear under panarchy.

Philosophers in search of new ideas