Тег: Responsibility

Transaction insurance, supplement

I want to supplement Voluntarist’s yesterday’s post on transaction insurance.

In the Telegram comments, several points were quite rightly noted.

First, classical individual insurance is always based on statistics and probabilities, so it will primarily be applied where transactions are standardized and risks are sufficiently random. It is quite difficult to imagine, for example, insuring a bank against a borrower’s intentional non-payment of a loan while prohibiting the insurance company from forcibly recovering that very loan. If such an insurance service were provided, there would be a fairly strong temptation for bank employees to organize a scheme of issuing non-repayable loans to shell companies for kickbacks, with the bank subsequently receiving insurance when the loan is not returned.

Second, the use of escrow accounts is usually imposed on transaction participants by the platform owner who sets the trading rules. If transactions occur without an intermediary, the use of an escrow scheme is unlikely, especially if the freezing of funds is expected to be long, as in the case of shared construction agreements.

Third, I was reminded of my year-old post about, suddenly, juvenile justice, where I noted certain difficulties with liability insurance.

In this regard, I want to mention another convenient way to reduce the risks of contract non-performance that is not related to violent coercion. These are the good old insurance groups, meaning archaic collective responsibility. In the old days, a person’s entire kinship, tribe, clan, or community—in short, a group of relatives and possibly neighbors—was responsible for them. Therefore, one didn’t have to worry much about personal reputation; instead, a person was judged by who they belonged to.

Of course, in a stateless society, there is no need to necessarily restore communal living, although the factor of belonging to an insurance group would be a compelling reason to cluster in such a way. Then again, there is certainly no need now to organize specifically by kinship, as friends and like-minded people play the role of the kin today. But I want to discuss not interest-based circles, but how transaction risks can be further reduced.

Entrepreneurs wishing to earn the trust of potential counterparties can form associations. Admission to such an association can be based on various criteria. Some may be accepted for an already established good name. Others—for promises to conduct business with impeccable honesty and a large deposit. Others—under the guarantee of respected members of the association. For external counterparties, the association acts as a group guarantor for the transactions of its members.

Every member of the association is, on one hand, interested in the growth of its membership, because this means that in the event of collective responsibility, the losses of each member are reduced. On the other hand, everyone is interested in ensuring that only honest and reliable entrepreneurs enter the association—those who insure others rather than parasitize the collective. The association will cover the costs of a breached contract not only for classic insurance events, but also in cases of force majeure, and even if a member of the association turns out to be a fraudster. But, of course, in the latter case, it would mean a “wolf’s ticket” (blacklisting) for such an entrepreneur.

Finally, I will note that the proven, well-known dishonesty of an entrepreneur by no means means that he will die in a ditch because no one will sell him anything and no one will hire him for anything. It simply means he will not be taken at his word, and all transactions for him will operate on a “money upfront” principle.

Any attempts to depict a stateless society as something totally cannibalistic imply either an incredible scarcity of resources for which people must tear each other’s throats out, or a post-totalitarian syndrome of complete mutual distrust. Naturally, the gradual dying out of non-violent practices in general and the state in particular cannot be accompanied by such catastrophic symptoms.

Interview for admission to the association of agricultural producers

Liability of the solicitor of a crime

While recently answering a series of questions in a blitz format, I touched upon the topic of the responsibility of the person who orders a crime, and this sparked a discussion in the Facebook comments. So, I will try to reason through this in more detail.

Let’s consider a sequence of situations.

1. The client demands that the perpetrator commit a crime, threatening sanctions in case of refusal: causing harm to the perpetrator themselves or to some hostages. The perpetrator does as required, thereby avoiding the threat.

2. The client demands that the perpetrator commit a crime, threatening sanctions for non-compliance and promising a reward for completion. The perpetrator does as required and receives the reward.

3. The client asks the perpetrator to commit a crime, offering a reward in return. The perpetrator carries out the request and receives the promised reward.

4. There is a highly competitive market for crimes where many perpetrators compete to offer their services. The buyer chooses the perpetrator who offers the service that is optimal in terms of price and quality, and purchases it.

5. The perpetrator commits a crime, reports it, after which interested parties pay them donations for it.

I have tried to arrange the situations in descending order of the client’s degree of responsibility and ascending order of the perpetrator’s degree of responsibility—from the full responsibility of the former to the full responsibility of the latter.

In a situation where the perpetrator faces a serious threat for failing to fulfill the order, we can de facto consider them a mere tool. That is why, for example, it is quite logical to completely exempt conscripted soldiers from responsibility for participating in a war if they acted within orders and it is customary in that army to execute for desertion or failure to follow orders.

But in a situation where the perpetrator of a crime has the opportunity to resign, or to stage a work-to-rule strike by demanding written instructions for every unlawful order—but does not do so—they share responsibility with their superiors for all crimes committed. This is the case of the Belarusian OMON, for example. In conditions where those who resign can also count on the support of society, the responsibility of those who did not resign naturally increases.

At what point can we confidently assert that the client should bear no responsibility at all? Clearly, this is only possible in cases where the perpetrator acts entirely voluntarily, but is it so in all such cases?

Any voluntary exchange is based on the division of labor. I do not do everything I need myself; instead, I exchange a part of what I need less for something that is difficult for me to obtain on my own. The purchase of an illegal service is the exact same division of labor. But since the labor is divided, so is the responsibility for the damage that this labor caused to someone. Logical? Logical. And what if we continue to complicate the division of labor?

One studied the target’s daily routine. A second purchased the equipment. A third planted the bomb. A fourth sent a text message at the right moment, and the bomb blew up the victim along with the car and three random passersby. A fifth negotiated with the client and coordinated the group’s work. The sixth is the client himself. The seventh is the primary beneficiary in whose interests the client acted. And let’s add payment schemes. And let’s add explosives suppliers. And someone else bought these guys donuts…

A court in the wonderful Ancapistan of the future will have to assess the level of awareness of each person involved in the offense, the degree of unlawfulness of the actions they were directly involved in, the possibility of backing out, cooperation with the investigation, and so on—everything we already see in our usual boring reality. Except that the idiotic practice of imprisonment for the sake of imprisonment will be mostly replaced by monetary compensation or their in-kind equivalents.

Knowledge of principles will not provide a precise solution for all cases in life. It only allows one to have something to be guided by when evaluating a given situation in all its complexity. Therefore, please do not turn the non-aggression principle into a dogma; it doesn’t work that way.

Here you have the direct perpetrators, the filming of a video for the report to the client, and a whole chain of decision-making behind the scenes. The division of responsibility is the most typical practice in the modern state.

Responsibility for Conception

Recently, on a stream, Svetov rashly claimed that a woman has the right to dispose of her own body and get rid of an embryo that causes her discomfort, but in the case of a voluntary and conscious sexual act, doesn’t the responsibility for conception and for the child ending up in such a dependent position lie with the parents?

Margo

As I have already written on another occasion, a right is a claim that is tolerated. A prenatal child does not make claims, therefore “the rights of prenatal children” is a claim made by third parties, which the parents of such children either acknowledge or they do not. Each side can present its own arguments.

Here are examples of arguments from the attacking side:

  • abortion is murder
  • childbirth is beneficial for the body
  • childbirth is beneficial for demographics

And for comparison, here are examples of arguments from the defending side:

  • my body, my choice
  • the embryo violates the NAP
  • there is no money to live on
  • the marriage has fallen apart, so the “child” project is no longer relevant

Generally speaking, people tend to present similar arguments to parents whose child has already been born, but whom they, in the opinion of critics, are raising in an improper manner.

Svetov’s arguments boil down to the fact that in any case, the resolution of such conflicts cannot be entrusted to the state. But the state cannot even be trusted to take out the trash, so let’s immediately imagine that it has long been gone, while people’s claims toward each other regarding the treatment of children, born or unborn, remain, and they must be resolved in some way privately.

So, some outsider crosses a woman’s path and demands that she not do what she considers her right. She, naturally, asks how this concerns him at all. Any arguments along the lines of “you are responsible for the conception” are dismissed with the objection “yes, I am, but not to you.” Attempts at forceful coercion lead us one way or another to a picture of a legal proceeding, where the defendant has to prove why, specifically in the matter of abortions, his opinion as an outsider on what a woman should do with her own body is valid in any way.

The only argument against abortion that would sound convincing in a free market society is “if you kill the child, I won’t be able to buy it from you.” Only after such an answer to the question “what business is it of yours?” can the woman breathe, take her finger off the trigger, and begin to bargain. Ultimately, a transfer of parental rights occurs with the drafting of a contract for gestation services, and the rest is just a matter of technique. The woman trades the possibility of an immediate exit from pregnancy for compensation, and the moralist acquires guardianship duties over the child and that very responsibility for its further upbringing.

Of course, the moralist would be better off hiding his desire to buy a prenatal child at any cost, otherwise getting pregnant and crossing his path with a brochure for an abortion clinic would become a temptingly profitable business—no one cancelled the cobra effect. So it is more likely that various charitable organizations will mainly rely on non-material motivation, such as “do not commit a sin, give birth to God’s child and give it to be raised in the church of witnesses to the commandment Be Fruitful And Multiply.”

One way or another, anyone who hopes to talk a woman out of an abortion with words about responsibility to the child must be prepared, at the very least, to take that responsibility upon themselves, and ideally, also to compensate the woman for the costs associated with agreeing to their persuasion and condemning herself to several more months of pregnancy.

Of course, abortion is bad and all that blah-blah-blah, but we are not discussing anyone’s moral character here. Only responsibility for one’s decisions.

The clip has no direct relation to the topic of the post, but watch it anyway