Тег: spontaneous order

What is the difference between natural law and positive law?

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.

Rule-making without the state

Everything is clear with the economy — it’s based on blockchain. But what about the ideology? Not in terms of party differences, but how to self-organize? Who produces politics?

Gastello

If there is no state, by what laws will criminals be judged? And who will issue the laws?

Bvl72

From the perspective of the state’s creators, it must be a monopoly on legitimate violence and a monopoly on making final decisions. This is required to perform the two key functions of the state: robbery and arbitrary rule, namely taxation and rule-making. And while in the economic sphere it is generally clear that it is better without robbery than with it, and that any economic benefits the state strives to provide would be provided better and cheaper by a private individual in a free market, many reach a deadlock regarding rule-making: who will ensure that everyone follows a single set of rules?

Fortunately, this problem does not need to be solved. Rules do not have to be uniform; they have to be convenient. The concept of rules is embedded in humans literally at a biological level. Even young children develop rules for playing in a sandbox. The more established a company becomes, the clearer and more developed its rules are. Rules appear in any chat or other club, and people actually appeal to them with even greater seriousness than to state laws, because state laws are for lawyers to study, while people need the rules themselves.

Rules can exist as text or simply as a set of assumptions. Compliance with rules can be monitored by a specially appointed moderator, or simply by everyone. Rules can be immutable, or they can be regularly revised. For breaking the rules, one might be expelled from the collective, hit on the forehead with a candelabra, or have an eleven-meter penalty kick taken against them. But what would definitely not occur to anyone without a state is to collect absolutely all rules into a single code, from football and preferance to the order of taking out the trash and washing dishes in the family.

Nevertheless, for greater efficiency in creating rules, certain general principles are usually laid as the foundation for their composition. For example, if there are different roles in a collective, different standard powers may be provided for them, but within a single function, it is more convenient for its holders to be subject to the same norms, whether it be football or organizing production. When organizing a competition, it is appropriate to ensure equality of conditions for the competitors, whether it be preferance or an auction. It is appropriate to explain existing norms to a newcomer, and until they have mastered them, it is appropriate not to hold them to the full severity of the rules, whether it be an internship in production or mitigated criminal penalties for teenagers. If a judge is appointed to monitor compliance with rules, they must not have an interest in the process they are judging, or they must not have the right to judge themselves.

The question of what happens if different groups have different rules is also contrived. The rules of football and chess do not conflict; each is created for its own game, and if a football player and a chess player go to a bar, they follow the rules of behavior in a bar. If it suddenly turns out that people are in a situation where there are no rules, or everyone is used to following their own, they either try not to bother each other or they develop common norms. For instance, newlyweds quickly set aside what their own parents taught them and form their own norms. For instance, meeting on a mountain path, people look at each other and silently decide who will press against the rock and who will squeeze past them closer to the cliff. For instance, farmers will agree among themselves how long to wait for the owner of an abandoned plot to appear before it is appropriate for a neighbor to claim it, and how to proceed if the previous owner does appear afterward.

But, of course, in a complex and global world, uniform norms can certainly exist for millions of people, or even for the entire population of Earth. For example, popular languages have hundreds of millions of users; very few connector standards for external devices connected to computers have taken hold worldwide, and there is only one markup language for web pages. Global rules can be quite detailed, and their development can be handled by entire consortia involving many companies. Such standards will be followed simply because it is more convenient.

Some sensible norms are also contained in the existing legislations of individual states. Some of them will continue to exist after the state, if using the ready-made ones proves more convenient than developing them from scratch.

Bet you can come up with great rules for the game in this picture in five minutes?