Тег: KYU

States are not private organizations

Vitaly Tizun’s Column

When criticizing the state, it is very common to hear that if you don’t like it, you should just leave for another “pen.” The argument is that states are also private competing organizations; they survive on funds paid by their clients (meaning citizens), and every person has a choice among many states, which means we already live in a free society. In reality, this is a very inadequate explanation of what the state is and how it works. Why? Let’s find out!

What does replacing one private agent with another usually mean? You need to terminate the old contract and enter into a new one with another agent. Of course, this process can sometimes encounter some difficulties, but overall it does not carry any unacceptable burdens. In this matter, you most likely will not even have to change your place of residence. And if you do (for example, you decide to change residential complexes or find a job in a neighboring city), the environment surrounding you still will not change fundamentally.

What does changing a state mean? You need to renounce your culture, your language, your loved ones and acquaintances, your familiar living environment, incur significant monetary expenses, fulfill a series of conditions regarding the termination of your previous citizenship (sometimes difficult to fulfill; I know one person who could not renounce Russian citizenship due to the need to “pay the debt to the Motherland”), and also fulfill a series of conditions to obtain new citizenship (you cannot move to another country simply by buying housing or finding a job—meaning, while getting the approval of some local residents, you still need permission from the state), and so on.

The process of changing states faces significant costs. An ordinary person will not move to another country simply because they have a poor knowledge of the local language and lack sufficient funds. Most people will flee their country only if the government starts simply shooting everyone indiscriminately (however, such governments usually also close the borders). In any other situation, no matter how bad it is, the majority of the population remains where they were.

One might say that you simply should not belong to the majority, that you need to develop yourself, strive, learn other languages, accumulate funds for relocation by all possible means, prove your reliability and usefulness to another state, and then everything will work out—and if you don’t do this, it means you don’t really want to change anything in your life.

However, even if you strive and successfully move to the territory of another state, this still provides no guarantees regarding the policy of the new sovereign. Regardless of the circumstances, the majority of the population of any state (the very ones who will never move) will not escape paying taxes and obeying state regulations. The state has the ability to use these people and their resources to pursue its own goals. This gives it the opportunity to make mistakes in its policy, or even adopt very inadequate and irrational decisions, since it always has the means to cover the resulting costs.

A private organization needs to function as efficiently as possible because it lives entirely on the sale of its goods and services. Any manifestation of inefficiency is unacceptable for it, as this would lead to the goods it provides being either more expensive or of lower quality than those of its competitors; it would thus lose clients and its income.

The state, however, does not need to strive for maximum efficiency. A specific government only needs to conduct a policy that is efficient enough to keep citizen indignation below a certain critical level. But no more than that.

States in no way resemble private organizations; they do not compete for people, but exploit the population belonging to them. The state is always slavery. To say that states are market and competing organizations is nonsense!

Ancap-chan’s Comment

Any analogy should not be taken completely literally. Of course, states compete for people, although this does not at all negate the thesis that they strive to exploit them for the purpose of obtaining income—if there were no such goal, there would be no sense in competing. Citizenships of different states have different values, although, of course, different people value different advantages provided by one citizenship or another.

But with equal success, we could consider the preferences of slaves regarding which master it is better to be owned by. It is known that some slaves successfully changed masters according to their preferences, although the bulk of them were unable to do so, or did not even perceive it as a need.

In short, the slogan “if you don’t like it—leave” should never be dismissed. In this regard, I want to remind you of an excellent article by Savva Shanaev, Mathematics in the Service of Libertarianism, as well as my brief comment on this article.

How will people interact, for example, in a village or in a city where every house is in a different contractual jurisdiction?

анонимный вопрос

Here, it seems to me, the confusion is caused by the claim about contract jurisdictions—that they will replace the state. “Yeah,” a person says, “so every house in the village will belong to a different state; what kind of mess is that going to be?”

What does the fact that a person’s house is in a certain jurisdiction actually mean for them? It means that if the house becomes the subject of a conflict, or if a conflict occurs on its territory, the resolution of that conflict (if the homeowner for some reason decides not to do it themselves) is handled by the jurisdiction.

The only case where a conflict arises with such an approach is a boundary conflict. For example, there is a dispute over who owns the fruit from a branch of a tree growing on one plot that overhangs another plot. In this case, both jurisdictions would have to be involved, and it becomes their task to agree on how to resolve the conflict.

And, obviously, if a client is not satisfied with how their contract jurisdiction handles conflicts, they look for one that presumably will do it better and enter into a contract with it. In general, fundamentally, nothing here differs from buying home insurance or a contract with a provider for connecting a home to the internet, gas, water, or electricity. Except that changing a jurisdiction is much easier than changing a gas supplier.

If the apple example seems trivial, what would you say about a boundary conflict over an oil field?

Mathematics Guarding Libertarianism: Brief Conclusions from the Article

Since I have started talking about experimental confirmations of the libertarian doctrine, it is worth mentioning mathematical modeling as a way of verifying claims.

I recently read a very good article on Freedom Pride about how a model was built with fairly realistic assumptions, and depending on the input data, it demonstrated what works better: contractual jurisdictions, democracy, or ancap.

The point of modeling is to see how the costs for members of society decrease depending on what mechanisms they have for adapting to and influencing society.

The conclusions in the article are written in rather cumbersome language, so I will translate them for myself in simpler terms.

  1. Democracy is a poor mechanism for optimizing one’s costs of existing in a society. Here, I cannot help but refer to my own longread on the subject.
  2. Instead of seeking changes through democratic mechanisms, it is much more reliable to reduce costs by voting with your feet—leaving the society that does not suit you and moving to one that does.
  3. The lower the relative costs of financing public goods, the more advantageous ancap is. The higher they are, the more advantageous contractual jurisdictions are. And for this last conclusion, I am very grateful to the authors of the article: they claim this is an argument for CJ, but for me, it means that as technical progress advances, ancap will become increasingly advantageous.