As I understand it, the point is that in the article about the targeted offer of libertarianism, 14 groups were listed, including conservatives, who were told that the state is a poor ally against evil homosexuals, but homosexuals were not included, so it is unclear how to reach their hearts, and this point should be clarified. Very well, here it comes.
1. Any private discrimination pales in comparison to the horrors of state discrimination, not to mention such madness as court-ordered stoning or extrajudicial family executions to wash away the shame of the lineage.
2. Private attempts to use violence against you because of your non-violent sexual habits in a libertarian society can be resisted with weapons in hand, and most people will support you.
3. It is the conservatives in a libertarian society who will have to move to some separate territorial community if your very sight irritates them. You, however, will have every right to live wherever is most convenient and behave as you please, as long as you do not initiate violence.
4. But you will still have to tolerate all that “you just haven’t had a normal man/woman,” depending on whatever your gender is. So in that regard, it won’t get better, but it won’t get worse either.
If you have followed Donald Trump’s election campaign, you have likely heard of his method of tailoring the political program to each group of voters. Every person has points of vulnerability in their position, and by pressing them, one can win them over. Mikhail Svetov also advises using this approach in his lecture Propaganda Tools in the 21st Century.
Let us attempt to identify large electoral groups and work with their primary fears regarding the state. Our goal is to evoke in these people a hatred for the institution of the state as a territorial monopoly on violence and to interest them in the ideas of libertarianism.
Many people belong to several categories at once; accordingly, libertarianism can be promoted to them from multiple positions simultaneously (for example, parents with children who are also entrepreneurs).
Some regulations described in the article may be absent in the country of residence of our “libertarian candidate.” For example, Russian legislation lacks liability for criticizing LGBT, which exists in Switzerland, while it conversely imposes liability for the propaganda of non-traditional sex. Here, one should explain to the person that any state regulation has a property of “position inversion.” It does not matter which side the state is currently on regarding a specific issue; the very fact that this area is regulated means that tomorrow the regulation may change to the opposite, because for currently oppressed groups, the state may seem like a natural tool for fighting for their interests, and they will use it. In the middle of the 20th century, the state repressed Alan Turing for homosexuality, but a few decades pass, and in the same country, they repress critics of LGBT. In West Germany, until 1977, the state prohibited women from working without their husband’s permission, and now it punishes men even for complimenting a girl within the framework of anti-harassment legislation. Thus, it is important to make people understand: the complete absence of state regulation is better than state regulation in your favor.
Now, let’s go through the groups
Entrepreneurs
1. State regulation prevents entry into the market or creates severe obstacles to doing business. You have an idea, but you cannot implement it due to prohibitions from the state. The state forces you to obtain licenses for many types of business, which consumes a lot of time and resources. Constant inspections (fire, sanitary, labor inspectorate) interfere with business operations. Infrastructure monopolies (electricity, gas, etc.) make business uncompetitive. Even if the building is your property, you often have no right to install a suitable sign or paint the building the color you want without permission from the local authorities.
2. High taxes prevent the ability to develop the business. Everything goes to the state rather than to the development of your enterprise. This is especially relevant in Russia for businesses where the primary share of costs consists of salaries.
3. The labor code significantly complicates the hiring and firing of employees. If an employee does not bring you profit, you cannot simply fire them; they can force you to reinstate them in the position through the court. You have to find various workaround maneuvers, which also increases your costs. You have no right to allow an employee to work more than a certain number of hours, even if they want to. The ability to hire for a probationary period is limited.
4. As soon as your asset seems interesting to some enterprising security officer, they can initiate criminal prosecution against you and seize the business. To prevent such an outcome, funds must also be spent, and this cannot provide a full guarantee of safety.
5. Bribes, kickbacks, and other non-tax costs increase the cost of doing business, complicate accounting, and carry risks of criminal prosecution.
6. Copyright and patent laws prevent you from conducting business normally (patent trolls, channel blocking of video bloggers for quoting or using music and video without complex procedures for acquiring rights to them).
7. If a new breakthrough industry appears that is not yet regulated, by default, many government officials consider such activity prohibited, so the business community has to ask for the introduction of regulations just to be allowed to work somehow. This applies, for example, to the use of cryptocurrencies or the sharing economy (Uber, AirBnB, energy).
Youth
1. Due to the obstacles faced by business, youth experience difficulties finding employment, let alone starting their own business.
2. For guys, conscription slavery is relevant, which has no practical sense in conditions where large conscript armies are completely ineffective.
3. State regulation of education means that one must study according to unified programs that took a long time to coordinate and have since become obsolete. Many subjects serve the function of indoctrination instead of transmitting current knowledge and skills. The humiliated position of teachers prompts them to vent aggression on equally powerless students. Schooling is paid for through taxes; parents who wish to homeschool their children do not receive tax deductions for this, so very few can afford an alternative to school. As a result, classes are formed by compulsion, and people forcibly driven into a collective are always in a prison, with corresponding rules.
4. A number of professions imply the mandatory presence of a state-standard higher education diploma, so even after school, the choice of further education methods is artificially hindered by the state.
Users of medical services
1. State clinics and hospitals have no interest in providing quality services, as their existence is already paid for by taxes, and customer reviews have no influence on funding. Those who wish to receive paid treatment pay twice — for compulsory health insurance and for paid services.
2. The cost of medicines is greatly inflated due to state regulation of their market entry, patent privileges, import restrictions, and customs duties.
3. An unjustifiably high entry threshold into the profession due to requirements handed down from above creates a shortage of specialists.
Public sector employees
1. The state, acting as an employer, often imposes restrictions on workers that are not written in any employment contracts. Forced participation in pro-government rallies and election falsifications, self-censorship in expressing one’s political position — all of this is quite humiliating.
2. The state hinders private business from developing, which is exactly why a person has to seek a safe harbor in public sector positions, although the pay is low and the worker is not respected.
3. In public sector professions, one spends more time filling out papers than actually working: the utility of the work for society becomes near-zero, and one works only for the approval of the superiors.
Communists
1. The state, according to Marx, is an instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling class. It is impossible to get rid of class oppression without getting rid of the state. Any ideas of nationalization are the transfer of the means of production from the people into the hands of the state, i.e., the ruling class of bureaucrats; therefore, on the contrary, one must demand the transfer of all means of production to the people.
2. In the nineties, there was a correct people’s privatization when members of labor collectives received shares, but the state retained control over the courts, police, and monetary emission, and over time either took property away from the people or depreciated it.
3. Bitcoin is the correct communist money. State slips of paper are issued in any quantity the state desires, while cryptocurrency is honestly backed by kilowatt-hours, in full accordance with the labor theory of value.
1. The state forces you to pay for abortions through taxes (thus taking indirect part in them), and in wealthier countries — for hormone therapy during gender reassignment surgeries for transgenders.
2. You are forbidden from refusing service to people (homosexuals, migrants, representatives of certain ethnicities and religions) with whom you do not wish to have any dealings (employment, renting housing, providing services), as your right to private discrimination is not recognized.
3. LGBT have already achieved a ban on their criticism in many Western states and will strive for this in Russia. Attempting to preserve existing state norms regarding the curtailment of their rights means waging a fruitless war; it is better to exclude such an unreliable ally as the state from the conflict before it stabs you in the back. Moreover, the conflict will resolve itself afterward.
4. In the nineties, there were sexual education lessons in school. Now — basics of religious cultures and secular ethics. Tomorrow they will invent some other mandatory requirement. You can never guess which lobbyist will be stronger; it would be more reliable to simply deregulate education so that everyone can choose which cultural norms their child will assimilate. Otherwise, we will reach a point where children undergo gender reassignment surgeries without your consent, as in Canada.
5. The state prohibits the possession of effective means of self-defense, and even on the path to acquiring permitted, low-effectiveness means, it has placed a heap of administrative hurdles. This not only deprives you of the right to self-defense but also undermines the defense capability of the entire country.
6. You are forbidden from killing an attacker, even if your life is in danger. Despite clarifications from the supreme court, real law enforcement practice is such that successful self-defense usually leads to a criminal case for exceeding the limits of necessary self-defense, which ends in long sentences. The state refused to adopt the Castle Doctrine, although the petition for its adoption gathered the necessary 100 thousand signatures on ROI.
7. Due to the peculiarities of how democracy functions, the state often gives in to various well-organized radical currents and groups. For example, under the influence of radical feminists, tomorrow you may be held accountable for harassment if you simply pay the bill for a woman at a restaurant. And under the influence of radical Islamists, you can already today be forced to apologize to Ramzan Akhmatovich.
Left-liberals, social democrats, supporters of social justice
1. The problem of corruption exists worldwide. Even in advanced countries like Sweden and Finland, corruption exists in large volumes; it is simply on a different level (large business) and very rarely becomes known. Soil for corruption arises wherever an official has the right to make a decision at their own discretion.
2. The state destroys “sanctioned” food products and prohibits entrepreneurs from distributing expired products for free (although they may be perfectly fit for human consumption). This is lobbying for the interests of owners of agro-holdings and food industry enterprises.
3. You hope in vain that a progressive income tax will help establish social justice: in countries with a progressive tax, wealth inequality remains very high. This happens because large business has many tricks to reduce the tax burden, and the primary weight of taxation still falls on the middle class. You do not have the opportunity to move your business offshore, classify restaurant dinners and business jet flights as representative or travel expenses, or secure state subsidies and benefits. You will be assured that robbery is useful because the rich will be robbed more, but no, it is you who will be robbed more.
4. The state spreads unscientific nonsense about the harm of marijuana, resulting in many harmless consumers sitting in prison and research on its medical use being stalled.
5. The minimum wage, the ban on discrimination during hiring, and other labor market regulations only increase unemployment, as they complicate obtaining a job for those whose labor would bring the employer less benefit at the same pay. People with disabilities, women with children, pre-retirees, and people without work experience simply will not be able to find employment, although they could do so if they had the opportunity to dump their prices on the labor market.
Pirates
Intellectual property protection laws hinder the free exchange of information and its accessibility to underprivileged strata of the population. They also limit the possibilities for creativity (due to the ban on creating derivative content) and scientific research (many scientists are unable to pay for access to collections of scientific articles and journals). Patents on medicines make them prohibitively expensive for low-income citizens, and many of them die from diseases that could be cured. So-called intellectual property is simply state privileges. You are trying to forbid the state from establishing such privileges, but why not consider the possibility of removing the state as such?
Copyright-lobbyists
Along with intellectual property protection, you will inevitably receive censorship of your content from the state. Moreover, the lion’s share of funds will still be appropriated by various intermediaries forcibly introduced by the state, such as RAO, while you will get pennies. Or you might even be forced, for example, to publish in a scientific journal at your own expense, but the journal will keep all rights to use the publication, and the state will fully support it. Would it not be better to practice non-violent methods of monetization instead of involving such an inconvenient intermediary as the state? The state will bring you more costs from a ruined reputation than you will gain benefits from how it protects your intellectual property.
Eco-activists
1. Environmental protection is of little concern to the state. An official is more likely to allow an oligarch friend to destroy the environment for a large bribe (or even for the prospect of increasing tax collections as a result of “economic growth”) than to give in to environmental activists.
2. Private ownership of forests, lakes, and hunting grounds will create a powerful incentive to protect the environment and engage in the breeding of endangered species of animals and plants. There is no need to fear that the owner will forbid you from walking in the forest, picking mushrooms, or having a picnic; they will more likely make efforts to ensure that people vacation specifically on their property and will try to provide them with decent service.
3. If a private company causes damage to nature and people suffer because of it, it can at least be sued, but when an ecological catastrophe is caused by the state, there is no one to hold accountable.
Parents with children
1. The state forbids you from choosing the style of upbringing that you consider more correct.
2. There is a mandatory educational program with many subjects that do not provide current knowledge and skills but simply serve as indoctrination. You can only manage additional education, which will finally take away the remnants of your child’s leisure time.
3. If you wish to provide your child with quality home education, no one will reimburse you for the taxes paid for the maintenance of state schools.
4. Child protective services can take your child (even forever, depriving you of parental rights) for quite harmless things — lack of renovation in the apartment, a child’s complaints that parents did not buy them a gift, an untidy appearance of the schoolchild, and so on. The quite sound idea that a child has a right to protection not only from strangers but also, if necessary, from parents, has resulted in the fact that often the family as a whole is repressed.
Unemployed
1. The state has over-regulated the labor market and burdened salaries with huge taxes, so an employer cannot afford to hire you officially, and if they break the law anyway and hire you “under the table,” it is more profitable to take an illegal migrant; they are cheaper and will not go to the labor inspectorate to complain. This corrupts employers and demotivates them from creating humane working conditions.
2. In return, you receive a pittance of a benefit from the state if you register as unemployed. You will be tossed the most illiquid vacancies from the state employment exchange, be slowly trained in courses with no guarantee of employment afterward, and be required to constantly prove that you are still unemployed; thus, if you get a temporary unofficial part-time job, you will have to hide this fact from the state to avoid losing your status.
Victims of repression and victimless crime laws
This is a very broad and diverse group. This includes political prisoners, those held accountable for the use of psychoactive substances, violators of various licensing restrictions, those accused of pedophilia for claiming that maturing happens differently for everyone and the age of consent is a harmful thing — and even those fined for crossing an empty street on a red light.
To them we explain: it is impossible to replace bad repressive laws with good ones; they can only be abolished, otherwise not you, but someone else will become their victim. If no private person suffered or was put in danger, then there is no need for punishment. If you yourself suffered or were put in danger due to your actions (for example, not wearing a seatbelt), then it is even more pointless to punish you additionally — you have already punished yourself. Therefore, one must demand from the state the abolition of all laws implying punishment for a victimless crime, and if it resists, this is an excellent reason to abolish the state: its very existence is already a punishment for innocent people.
Pensioners
This is the most difficult category of people for the promotion of libertarianism. But even pensioners can be interested in the dismantling of the state.
Every working resident of Russia contributes 22% of their earnings to the Pension Fund of Russia (PFR). In 2018, the average salary in Moscow was 80 thousand rubles, and the average pension was 19 thousand rubles. Suppose a person works from age 25 to 60 with some breaks, and as a result, pays contributions to the PFR for 30 years. If they had not paid insurance contributions to the PFR but instead saved them in their own bank account (for simplicity, let’s assume that the deposit interest rate equals inflation, meaning it can be ignored in calculations), they would accumulate 80,000 * 0.22 * 12 * 30 = 6.3 million rubles. As of 2018, the average life expectancy in the Russian Federation is 73 years. The remaining life expectancy after retirement is thus 13 years. Accordingly, if you were not the state, your annuity would be 6,300,000 / (13 * 12) = 40 thousand rubles. This amount represents the state’s real obligations to you.
How then to ensure the fulfillment of these obligations? It is necessary to demand the total privatization of state property. A program clear to any pensioner: “seize and divide.” Seize from the state, divide among those whom the state has robbed. And, of course, stop the robbery for the future, though that is a concern for the young, which, however, is also close and clear to pensioners. All that remains is to conduct a discussion on the methods: how to seize and divide so that everything is not stolen in the process.
