Why Almost Everyone Believes in Political Authority and Why This May Change

1. In the paleolithic period, organized brute force was the only game in town in the context of inter-tribal rivalry. Thus, natural selection favored those who were obedient to tribal alpha males. The disobedient were simply killed off.

2. The way to make tribal obedience psychologically bearable and prudentially beneficial was to rationalize it. Thus, the obedient came to view their rulers as necessary for coordinating collective action and/or concerned with the welfare of the tribe. This was the earliest manifestation of the Stockholm Syndrome. Again, natural selection favored those who succumbed to this syndrome especially easily.

3. The rulers realized that, being a numerical minority, they need legitimacy to maintain their rule. Thus, they set out to cultivate and strengthen the Stockholm Syndrome among their subjects. The pinnacle of their achievement in this regard was the invention of democracy – a universal invitation to join the ranks of rulers, which decisively blurred the distinction between the rulers and the ruled, and ushered in a system where everyone is expected to feel entitled to live at the expense of everyone else.

4. As famously noted by Lord Acton and infamously demonstrated in the Stanford Prison Experiment, power is extremely corrupting. With the advent of democracy, the corrupting effects of power became particularly widespread, even if not necessarily particularly pronounced. This, coupled with the complementary effects of global Stockholm Syndrome, made belief in (political) authority – i.e., the belief that some people have a right to rule other people – practically universal.

Why This May Change

1. The exponential development of the global Internet culture, intensifying global migration processes, and the rapid development of communication and transaction technologies may jointly result – sooner than most would anticipate – in the dissolution and eventual disappearance of the presently dominant nationalistic, “patriotic”, and other worldviews based on morally arbitrary, tribal divisions.

2. The disappearance of the abovementioned worldviews coupled with the emergence of unprecedentedly effective opportunities for developing grey market entrepreneurship (bitcoin, seasteading, 3D printing, etc.) and the practically universal availability of independent, non-ideological education (MOOCs, private online academies, etc.) would likely lead to the disintegration of the structurally insolvent nation states. All resources under their control could then be auctioned off and transferred into the hands of private entrepreneurs or placed in newly created private equity or mutual funds, the shares in which would be distributed among the members of local communities.

3. Consequently, a world divided into states, nations, and political institutions would be replaced by a world composed of hundreds of thousands or even millions of independent economic zones, neighborhood associations, charter cities, and other forms of contractual, propertarian arrangements integrated through free trade and the global division of labor. With the disappearance of institutionalized, large-scale aggression of states and the balkanizing national conflicts, as well as with the strengthening of a global culture based on respect for individual liberty and property, there would be an explosion of a practically infinite variety of voluntary, bottom-up social institutions, both for-profit and non-profit. The disappearance of the conviction that everyone has a right to live at the expense of others would result in the strengthening of the family bond, the neighborly bond, the professional bond, and the universal, philanthropy-inducing human bond. The human race would not become perfect, but the evolutionary process of technological progress, development of free enterprise, universalization of access to free knowledge, and increasing cultural interconnection would lead it to reject the most irrational and destructive elements of its Paleolithic heritage. Considering a rapid increase in the pace of development of the above processes, all of their consequences described here may, with a bit of luck, fully materialize within the next couple hundred years. Let us keep working towards bringing them about sooner rather than later.

[Reprinted from LewRockwell.com]

A Short Note on Bitcoin, Stupidity, and Evil

A contemporary example illustrating the difference between stupid and evil: a stupid person calls Bitcoin a Ponzi Scheme and says that this is why it will collapse; an evil person recognizes Bitcoin as a politically uncontrollable medium of exchange and says that this is why it should collapse.

On the Austrian Theory of Common Goods

My paper "Non-excludability, Externalities, and Entrepreneurship: An Overview of the Austrian Theory of Common Goods" has just been published in the first issue of the Journal of Prices & Markets. You might want to read it if you are interested in topics such as monopoly, common goods, and externalities.

A Short Note on the Legacy of Ayn Rand

Butler Shaffer wrote of Ayn Rand that she "rescued philosophy from its academic prisons, and returned it to the minds of ordinary men and women to assess the conditions in which they choose to live". As I come to think of it, this concise description is right on the spot - I can't think of any 20th century philosopher, let alone any 20th century academic philosopher, who accomplished anything even remotely similar. As far as I'm concerned, for that alone she deserves huge respect, regardless of what intellectual disagreements one might have with her views.

Please Consider Making a Bitcoin Donation

If you enjoy reading my blog, you can now make me a bitcoin gift. My bitcoin address is 1MWWmpo5PsREZD3CMrQSuq6LkhxWxz2q1U. Thank you all in advance for your generosity and support.

Living in the World of Statist Quo Bias

Possibly the worst aspect of any form of statism is not that individuals are treated instrumentally and their property rights are regularly violated, but that the vast majority of both the victims and the perpetrators of these happenings consider them as "normal" and "uncontroversial", as if propelled by some form of anthropological necessity. They do not normally think that siding with such a system requires asking oneself very seriously some fundamental economic (do I believe that institutionalized, regularized violence and coercion can generate or safeguard prosperity?) and moral questions (do I condone institutionalized, regularized violence and coercion, especially if perpetrated by myself?), nor do they normally conceive that such a system can be fundamentally contested on the basis of answering such questions in the negative (here is my take on why this is the case).

In other words, the problem is not that the vast majority of statists answer certain fundamental questions in the way that, for various reasons, might be thought of as misguided or wrong. The problem is that they grow into a world view that removes such questions from the ambit of questions worth asking or even thinking in the first place. To put it differently, the intellectual isolation of a libertarian consists not in the fact that he or she is in the minority, but in the fact that, at least as of now, the majority does not even think of the relevant issues in terms of majority and minority positions. This does not make the task of the libertarian hopeless, but it certainly makes it all the more formidable.

A Short Note on the Volatility of Bitcoin

The volatility of bitcoin should not be in the least surprising, since - given its very small capitalization and marketability relative to its intended role as a currency - its size and liquidity is curently roughly equivalent to that of a penny stock as compared with major exchange-listed companies, and its growth prospects and the attendant uncertainty roughly equivalent to that of an early-stage biotech company. In other words, it meets all the characteristics of a highly speculative financial instrument, especially given its additional advantage of being a hedge against rapidly inflating fiat monies. It will gradually lose these characteristics as its capitalization, marketability, and liquidity grow, and its price will subsequently stabilize.

Dwa popularne antylibertariańskie chochoły (niemożliwość samoposiadania, nieużyteczność etycznych aksjomatów) i odnośne odpowiedzi

Chochoł nr 1: Samoposiadanie jest niemożliwe, gdyż relacja własności występuje zawsze między dwoma obiektami - właścicielem a własnością - a w przypadku samoposiadania mamy do czynienia tylko z jednym obiektem. Aby uniknąć powyższego problemu, potrzebne jest przyjęcie kontrowersyjnych tez o dualizmie ciała i jaźni bądź mózgu i umysłu, albo też stworzenie odpowiednio skomplikowanej, ale wciąż tautologicznej relacji tożsamości między podmiotem działającym a jego właścicielem.

Odpowiedź: Samoposiadanie jest nietautologiczną relacją zwrotną niezależną od przyjętej filozofii umysłu. Wygląda ona następująco: "podmiot działający X = właściciel podmiotu działającego X". Istnieje mnóstwo zupełnie niekontrowersyjnych relacji analogicznych, np. "kochający X-a = kochany przez X-a" (narcyzm) albo "X odczuwający ból = X zadający ból" (masochizm). Ostentacyjny fizykalista może sobie za "podmiot działający X" podstawić "mózg umieszczony w ciele X" i w żaden sposób nie zmieni to logicznego charakteru tej relacji. Jest ona nietautologiczna dlatego, że polega na syntetycznym a priori wydedukowaniu albo intuicyjnym zrozumieniu tego, że dwa różne ujęcia (senses) danego zjawiska odpowiadają temu samemu jego podmiotowi (reference).

Chochoł nr 2: Zjawiska i pojęcia graniczne bądź nieostre (pełnoletność, warunki konieczne pierwotnego zawłaszczenia, itp.) wykazują sprzeczność logiczną albo przynajmniej praktyczną nieużyteczność aksjomatów nieagresji i samoposiadania.

Odpowiedź: Aksjomaty z definicji opisują pojęcia abstrakcyjne (liczby, kształty, relacje, wartości, itp.), a więc pojęcia nieostre w odniesieniu do empirycznej rzeczywistości. W związku z tym stwierdzenie, że zjawisko nieostrości wyżej wspomnianych pojeć w danej sytacji empirycznej może dowodzić sprzeczności aksjomatu jest elementarnym błędem kategorialnym. Dla libertarianina lockowsko-rothbardiańskiego aksjomaty nieagresji i samoposiadania są fundamentami logicznej struktury interpretacyjnej, którą można nastepnie odnosić do poszczególnych nieostrych sytuacji empirycznych, tak samo jak aksjomaty arytmetyki czy geometrii są takimi fundamentami dla inżyniera czy przyrodnika. Etatysta, w tym również etatysta konserwatywno-liberalny, nie posiada żadnych tego rodzaju niearbitralnych fundamentów - wydaje mu się, że kontekst może w danej sytuacji posłużyć za logiczną podstawę swojej własnej interpretacji, ale tak być nie może, bo fakty empiryczne (w przeciwieństwie do faktów logicznych) nie mogą interpretować samych siebie ani dostarczać sobie samym jakichkolwiek niearbitralnych kryteriów normatywnych (etatystyczne kryterium "ad baculum" jest oczywiście z moralnego punktu widzenia całkowicie arbitralne).

A Realistically Optimistic Scenario for the Future

1. The exponential development of the global Internet culture, intensifying global migration processes, and the rapid development of communication and transaction technologies will jointly result - sooner than most would anticipate - in the dissolution and eventual disappearance of the presently dominant nationalistic, "patriotic", and other worldviews based on morally arbitrary, tribal divisions.

2. The disappearance of the abovementioned worldviews coupled with the emergence of unprecedentedly effective opportunities for developing grey market entrepreneurship (bitcoin, seasteading, 3D printing, etc.) and the practically universal availability of independent, non-ideological education (MOOCs, private online academies, etc.) will lead to the disintegration of the structurally insolvent nation states. All resources under their control will be auctioned off and transferred into the hands of private entrepreneurs or placed in newly created private equity or mutual funds, the shares in which will be distributed among the members of local communities.

3. A world divided into states, nations, and political institutions will be replaced by a world composed of hundreds of thousands or even millions of independent economic zones, neighborhood associations, charter cities, and other forms of contractual, propertarian arrangements integrated through free trade and the global division of labor. With the disappearance of institutionalized, large-scale aggression of states and the balkanizing national conflicts, as well as with the strengthening of a global culture based on respect for individual liberty and property, there will be an explosion of a practically infinite variety of voluntary, bottom-up social institutions, both for-profit and non-profit. The disappearance of the conviction that everyone has a right to live at the expense of others will result in the strengthening of the family bond, the neighborly bond, the professional bond, and the universal, philanthropy-inducing human bond. The human race will not become perfect, but the evolutionary process of technological progress, development of free enterprise, universalization of access to free knowledge, and increasing cultural interconnection will lead it to reject the most irrational and destructive elements of its Paleolithic heritage. Considering a rapid increase in the pace of development of the above processes, all of their consequences described here can, with a bit of luck, fully materialize within the next couple hundred years.

Realnie optymistyczny scenariusz przyszłości

1. Wykładniczy rozwój globalnej kultury internetowej, intensyfikujące się globalne procesy migracyjne oraz skokowy rozwój technologii komunikacyjnych i transakcyjnych doprowadzą wspólnie - szybciej, niż większość przypuszcza - do rozpuszczenia i zaniku dominujących obecnie światopoglądów nacjonalistycznych, "patriotycznych" i innych opartych na moralnie arbitralnych, plemiennych podziałach.

2. Zanik wspomnianych wyżej światopoglądów w połączeniu z bezprecedensowo skutecznymi możliwościami rozwoju wolnej przedsiębiorczości w szarej strefie (bitcoin, seasteading, druk 3D, itp.) oraz praktycznie uniwersalną dostępnością niezależnej, nieideologicznej edukacji (MOOCs, prywatne akademie online, itp.) doprowadzi do rozpadu przytłoczonych strukturalną niewypłacalnością państw narodowych. Wszystkie znajdujące się pod ich kontrolą zasoby zostaną zlicytowane i przekazane w ręce prywatnych przedsiębiorców lub umieszczone w nowopowstałych prywatnych bądź spółdzielczych funduszach akcyjnych, udziały w których zostaną przekazane indywidualnym członkom lokalnych społeczności.

3. Świat podzielony na państwa, narody i instytucje polityczne zastąpi świat złożony z setek tysięcy lub nawet milionów niezależnych stref ekonomicznych, stowarzyszeń sąsiedzkich, miast czarterowych i innych form suwerennych obszarów własnościowych zintegrowanych na bazie wolnego handlu i globalnego podziału pracy. Wraz ze zniknięciem zinstytucjonalizowanej, wielkoskalowej agresji państw i bałkanizujących konfliktów narodowych, a także wraz z umocnieniem się globalnej kultury opartej na poszanowaniu indywidualnej wolności i własności powstanie praktycznie nieskończona w swojej różnorodności gama dobrowolnych, oddolnych instytucji społecznych - zarówno biznesowych, jak i charytatywnych. Wraz ze zniknięciem przeświadczenia, że każdy ma prawo żyć kosztem drugiego umocniona zostanie więź rodzinna, więź sąsiedzka, więź zawodowa i sprzyjająca nastawieniu filantropijnemu więź ogólnoludzka. Ludzkość nie stanie się doskonała, ale ewolucyjny proces postępu technologicznego, rozwoju wolnej przedsiębiorczości, upowszechniania się dostępu do wolnej wiedzy i coraz ściślejszego przenikania się kultur doprowadzi ją do odrzucenia najbardziej irracjonalnych i niszczycielskich elementów swojego paleolitycznego dziedzictwa. Biorąc pod uwagę wzrost tempa rozwoju powyższych procesów, wszystkie opisane tu ich skutki mogą przy odrobinie szczęścia zmaterializować się w pełni już w ciągu najbliższych kilkuset lat.

On the Perennial Topic of Austrian Apriorism

The perennial topic of Austrian apriorism started to trend in certain quarters of the Internet once again (no names will be named), so I'm using this opportunity to restate my position on it, especially given the fact that there still seems to be a great deal of confusion surrounding even its more easily interpretable aspects.

My position, which I take to be the position of Ludwig von Mises, Carl Menger, and most of their classical predecessors who worked on economic methodology (including J. B. Say, Nassau Senior, and John Cairnes), is that pure economic theory is aprioristic, i.e., logically deducible from self-evident premises embedded in and necessary to make sense of the surrounding reality of empirical contingencies.

In other words, pure economic theory is a tool to interpret empirical reality and make it intelligible in terms of the categories of human action, not a replacement for the investigation of its empirically contingent features. It provides a set of non-trivial, necessarily true statements regarding the logical structure of human action – nothing more and nothing less. It cannot and does not attempt to prove its relevance to any particular case rooted in the contingencies of the empirical world. The business of establishing such relevance belongs to other analytical tools, mental faculties, and areas of knowledge. An entrepreneur is in the business of making forward-looking judgments of relevance. A historian is in the business of making backward-looking judgments of relevance. But they both have to accept the logical (a priori) correctness of economic theory (or, for that matter, mathematical theory) if their judgments of relevance are not to be arbitrary leaps in the dark.

An economic theorist can deduce, say, the law of demand, in a purely aprioristic fashion, since it follows from a sound reflection on the logical structure of human action. This, however, does not in any meaningful sense make him an intellectual oponent of, say, a behavioral economist. If the quantity demanded of a given good rises with its price, then the theorist knows that it is not the case that the law of demand has been invalidated, but that the ceteris paribus clause built into it has been violated - in other words, the good in question is not the same good any more (the relevant social facts have changed). Then it is the job of the behavioral economist to find out what caused the change in the relevant social facts, how stable it is likely to be, how reasonable it seems to extrapolate from it, etc. To put it differently, the job of the behavioral economist is to establish what factors are capable of violating the ceteris paribus clauses of economic laws. This, however, he can do only if he accepts that in the absence of any such intervening factors the law holds as a matter of logical necessity. This does not in any sense imply that the supposed economic law is an infinitely malleable, ad hoc mental construct, since the realization that every rule has its preconditions in no way invalidates the concept of rules, their utility in describing the empirical world, or their applicability to it.

In sum, the fact that aprioristic pure theory has to be empirically embedded in order to be empirically relevant does not make it empirical. Otherwise everything of practical value (including logic and mathematics) can be called empirical and the word becomes meaningless, which is not a position that even the most hard-core empiricist could reasonably hold. For an empiricist, the sole purpose of a priori theory is to define and explicate concepts. For an Austrian, the purpose of a priori theory is to interpret the facts and to impose logically necessary constraints on their investigations. None of this can be understood - and these are in fact crucial things to understand - by thinking of economic theory as scientifically useful only to the extent that it is "empirical" or "falsifiable". Mises understood this well. So should those who question his methodology.

My Talks from Summer Austrian Seminar 2013

My talks on the Optimal Currency Area theory and its Austrian critique, and on Regime Uncertainty and Legal Entrepreneurship, both delivered at the Summer Austrian Seminar 2013 in Poland.

Why Almost Everyone Believes in Authority

1. In the paleolithic period, organized brute force was the only game in town in the context of inter-tribal rivalry. Thus, natural selection favored those who were obedient to tribal alpha males. The disobedient were simply killed off.

2. The way to make tribal obedience psychologically bearable and prudentially beneficial was to rationalize it. Thus, the obedient came to view their rulers as necessary for coordinating collective action and/or concerned with the welfare of the tribe. This was the earliest manifestaton of the Stockholm Syndrome. Again, natural selection favored those who succumbed to this syndrome especially easily.

3. The rulers realized that, being a numerical minority, they need legitimacy to maintain their rule. Thus, they set out to cultivate and strengthen the Stockholm Syndrome among their subjects. The pinnacle of their achievement in this regard was the invention of democracy - a universal invitation to join the ranks of rulers, which decisively blurred the distinction between the rulers and the ruled, and ushered in a system where everyone is expected to feel entitled to live at the expense of everyone else.

4. As famously noted by Lord Acton and infamously demonstrated in the Stanford Prison Experiment, power is extremely corrupting. With the advent of democracy, the corrupting effects of power became particularly widespread. This, coupled with the complementary effects of global Stockholm Syndrome, made belief in (political) authority - i.e., the belief that some people have a right to rule other people - practically universal.

All of Sound Social Science Consists of Footnotes to Bastiat

Whitehead once remarked that all of Western Philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato. I would argue that all of sound social science consists of footnotes to Bastiat. In a global society that outgrew its destructive irrationality and reached the level of informed decency, Bastiat would be synonymous not only with common sense, but with the best kind of wisdom - transparent, modest, and timeless - that the human mind can produce.

"Either fraternity is spontaneous, or it does not exist. To decree it is to annihilate it. The law can indeed force men to remain just; in vain would it would try to force them to be self-sacrificing."

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

"The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else."

"No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate)."

"It seems to me that this is theoretically right, for whatever the question under discussion—whether religious, philosophical, political, or economic; whether it concerns prosperity, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, cooperation, property, labor, trade, capital, wages, taxes, population, finance, or government—at whatever point on the scientific horizon I begin my researches, I invariably reach this one conclusion: The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty."

The Contractarian Quadrilemma

If the social contract can be made in the state of nature, then the state is redundant.

If the social contract cannot be made in the state of nature, then the state is impossible.

If no social contract is in fact made in the state of nature, then the state is unjustified.

If no social contract needs to be made in the state of nature, then the state is a fiction.

I'll Take a Gordon Gekko Over a Central Banker Any Day

Yes, tweets from multi-billionaire investors can temporarily move single stocks by a dozen percentage points, but actions of central bankers can turn entire markets into multi-year bubbles and generate catastrophic business cycles. So much for the dangers of "concentrated economic power" as compared to those of concentrated political power.

And yet, the typical attitude of a layperson - or, worse still, a pseudo-professional - is to cry for ever more "regulation" of those who wield the former by those who wield the latter, as opposed to the other way around. So much for the persuasiveness of economically-informed comparative institutional analysis vis-a-vis the power of a large-scale Milgram effect combined with a large-scale Stockholm Syndrome.

This, my friends, sums up the extent of the intellectual, psychological, and cultural challenge we face. Best of luck to us all.

A Libertarian Allegory of the Cave

A statist reacts to liberty the same way a prisoner who spent his entire life locked in a pitch-black dungeon would react to light - he recoils from blinding discomfort. Which hardly proves that it's better to sit in the dark. More often than not, to see is to overcome artificially induced blindness.

A Slow But Steady Movement Toward a Voluntary Society

Bitcoin, 3D printing, independent online learning, charter cities, increasing cultural interconnection, optimistic prospects for seasteading, growing black market entrepreneurship, boom in homeschooling, growing distrust of state-sanctioned media, unsustainable state debt. A confluence of positive factors is setting the stage for the development of a voluntary society and for the gradual withering away of the burdensome, dangerous, and embarrassing anachronism of statism. There are reasons to look into the future with cautious optimism.

Why Do Libertarians Oppose the Welfare State?

A libertarian does not oppose the welfare state because he does not care about the poor, but because he cares about them too much to believe they deserve being caught in the web of lies, empty promises, perpetual dependence, hate-mongering, and cultural degradation created by self-serving, power-hungry crooks.

Regime Uncertainty and Legal Entrepreneurship

Politicians and bureaucrats undermine entrepreneurship and private investment when they create uncertainty about the security of property rights, contract law, and other “rules of the game.” The risk of regime uncertainty would be significantly smaller under a contractual, polycentric legal order shaped by market entrepreneurs.

[Read More]

Now That's a Crazy Story if I Ever Heard One

Someone seriously suggested to me the other day that the following accurately describes our condition: once upon a time marauding warlords took over the world, divided it into separate dominions, imposed exploitative levies on every productive inhabitant of the land they controlled, built a vast infrastructure of roads to acquire easy access to their serfs, created an immense apparatus of propaganda, designed to brainwash the serfs into believing that only under the rule of the warlords can they be free men and women, destroyed their dignity, self-reliance, and natural communal bonds by a system of periodic handouts, and finally blurred the distinction between themselves and the serfs by inviting the latter to join the ranks of the former, thus initiating a great, neverending spectacle of everyone trying to live at the expense of everyone else in a vicious cycle of mutual theft and collective hatred. What a crazy thought! Thank God that the compulsory civic education I received for free from the public school system administered by my democratic government inoculated me against such kooky conspiracy theories.

Four Types of Leaders, Ranked from Best to Worst

1. Humanitarian entrepreneur (public-spiritedness + voluntariness)

"The paramount virtue of capitalism is that it fosters progress through diversity and freedom without sacrificing efficiency, justice, and charity. One can be even stronger: it is also more efficient, more just, more charitable, and more egalitarian than any other viable system. Provided only that there is effective dispersal of power, the capitalistic order is driven by competition in manifold ways, in the field of ideas as well as commodities." - G. Warren Nutting

"Business is fundamentally ethical, because no one has to trade. Business is fundamentally noble, because it elevates humanity. Business is fundamentally heroic, because it ends poverty." - John Mackey

2. Prudence-only profit-seeker (self-centeredness + voluntariness)

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages." - Adam Smith

"Innumerable speculative thinkers, inventors, and organizers, have contributed to the comfort, health, and happiness of their fellow men — because that was not their objective." - Isabel Paterson

3. Pragmatic tyrant (self-centeredness + coercion)

"The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a 'protector,' and that he takes men's money against their will, merely to enable him to 'protect' those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these." - Lysander Spooner

"If one had no choice but to be a slave, private slavery as in antebellum America would be preferable to the kind of collective slave ownership that Eastern Europe recently experienced." - Hans-Hermann Hoppe

4. Would-be philosopher king (public-spiritedness + coercion)

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis

"Absolute monarchies disposed with less fickleness of the fortunes of one individual than popular absolutisms dispose of the destiny of entire social classes." - Nicolas Gomez Davila

Dziesięć powodów, dla których przyszłość należy do libertarianizmu

1. Libertarianizm jest jedyną filozofią społeczną, która przypisuje najwyższą wartość jedynej wspólnej cesze wszystkich istot rozumnych – wolności osobistej. 

2. Jest to jedyna filozofia społeczna, która poważnie traktuje prawa jednostki, konsekwentnie odmawiając ich poświęcania w imię kolektywnych fikcji.

3. Jest to jedyna filozofia społeczna konsekwentnie odmawiająca gloryfikowania rzekomo koniecznego zła, za jakie uchodzi zinstytucjonalizowana agresja, przemoc i przymus, nie ignorując jednocześnie kwestii organizacji skutecznej przeciw niemu obrony.

4. Libertarianizm nie widzi w nikim koniecznego wroga, niezdolnego do uczestnictwa w dobrowolnej współpracy społecznej z powodu swojej przynależności klasowej, rasowej, płciowej czy kulturowej.

5. Obnaża on domniemany konflikt pomiędzy spontanicznością a porządkiem jako całkowicie fałszywy i wyjaśnia zasadniczą między nimi komplementarność.

6. Obala on mit, jakoby relacja między wydajnością a sprawiedliwością była grą o sumie zerowej.

7. Obejmuje on wszystkie filozofie społeczne w swoich pokojowych wariantach.

8. Nigdy nie będzie można wystosować wobec niego uzasadnionego oskarżenia o to, że został wypróbowany i zawiódł, gdyż nie proponuje on żadnego wielkiego, wszechogarniającego planu – jego sukcesy są tak liczne jak indywidualne próby podejmowane przez niezależne istoty rozumne w celu uczynienia jak najlepszego użytku ze swojej naturalnej wolności, a jego porażki tak liczne jak niezależne istoty rozumne, które odmawiają podejmowania takich prób.

9. Libertarianizm ucieleśnia najbardziej prozaiczny i oczywisty zdrowy rozsądek, zgodny z naszymi najbardziej codziennymi wyobrażeniami na temat zasad przyzwoitości w kontaktach międzyludzkich, znanych większości z nas już od najwcześniejszych lat: trzymaj ręce przy sobie, nie bij innych, nie łap się za cudze, żyj i daj żyć innym. Tym samym jest to stanowisko tak wolne od ideologii, jak tylko jest to możliwe w przypadku filozofii społecznej.

10. Libertarianizm nigdy się nie zestarzeje, gdyż dobrowolna współpraca jest źródłem nieskończonej kreatywności i może przyjąć nieograniczoną liczbę form.

Abortion, Libertarianism, and Evictionism: A Last Word

This paper is my last word, in the present journal, in the debate I have been having with Walter Block on the subject of evictionism as an alleged libertarian “third way,” capable of transcending the familiar “pro-life” and “pro-choice” dichotomy. In this debate, I myself defended what might be regarded as a qualified “pro-life” position, while Block consistently argued that the mother is morally allowed to expel the fetus from her womb provided that no non-lethal methods of its eviction are available. While my position articulated in this paper contains an element of what Block might consider a concession on my part—i.e., an explicit declaration that abstaining from lethal evictions of fetuses conceived as a result of rape is a libertarian duty, but only an imperfect one—I continue to regard the unqualified support of evictionism as indefensible on libertarian grounds.

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Yet Another Word on What Libertarianism Is

Libertarianism is this thing that is as far away from crony capitalism as it is from social-democratic egalitarianism, and as far away from feudal conservatism as it is from technocratic "progressivism", and as far away from colonial militarism as it is from domestic paternalism, and as far away from militant nationalism as it is from internationalist statism. And if it puzzles you that such a thing may exist, then it is high time that you make the acquaintance of this other thing called individual liberty.

A Frightening Scenario That Will Never Happen

What if marauding warlords took over the world, divided it into separate dominions, imposed exploitative levies on every productive inhabitant of the land they controlled, built a vast infrastructure of roads to acquire easy access to their serfs, created an immense apparatus of propaganda designed to brainwash the serfs into believing that only under the rule of the warlords can they be free men and women, destroyed their dignity, self-reliance, and natural communal bonds by a system of periodic handouts, and finally blurred the distinction between themselves and the serfs by inviting the latter to join the ranks of the former, thus initiating a great, neverending spectacle of everyone trying to live at the expense of everyone else in a vicious cycle of mutual theft and collective hatred? What a terrible thought! Thank God we have democratic governments and welfare states to save us from such scenarios.

Can Artificial Scarcity of Data Be Economically Beneficial from the Anti-IP Perspective?

Data is not scarce, but it can be made artificially scarce by: 1) coercive regulation 2) unique individuation and encryption. Resorting to 1) is immoral and hampers economic development, but resorting to 2) can be an instance of entrepreneurial innovation. Suggestion: the creation of what comes to be accepted as a digital non-fiat currency, where each currency unit is a unique string of encrypted data, is precisely an instance of entrepreneurially-created, economically beneficial artificial scarcity of data. A potentially surprising conclusion: economically beneficial artificial scarcity of data is not a contradiction in terms, even from a consistent anti-IP perspective.

10 Reasons Why Libertarianism is the Way of the Future

1. It is the only social philosophy that places the highest value on the only common characteristic of all thinking beings - individual liberty.

2. It is the only social philosophy that takes individual rights seriously, consistently refusing to sacrifice them in the name of collective moral and legal fictions.

3. It is the only social philosophy that consistently refuses to glorify the allegedly "necessary" evils of institutionalized violence, aggression, and coercion, while not ignoring the problem of organizing effective protection and defense against these evils.

4. It does not see anyone as an inherent enemy, deemed unsuitable to participate in voluntary social cooperation due to his class, race, gender, or culture.

5. It exposes the alleged tension between spontaneity and orderliness as fundamentally false, and explains the essential complementarity between the two.

6. It explodes the myth that there is a tradeoff between efficiency and equity.

7. It is inclusive of all social philosophies in their peaceful varieties.

8. It can never be justifiably accused of having been tried and failed, since it does not propose any overarching grand scheme, its successes being as numerous as individual attempts of independent thinking beings to make the best of their natural liberty, and its failures as numerous as independent thinking beings who refuse to make such attempts.

9. It embodies the most mundane and platitudinous common sense, consistent with our most ordinary notions of interpersonal decency, known to most of us since our sandbox days - keep your mitts to yourself, don't punch others, don't grab other people's stuff, live and let live - thus being as non-ideological as any social philosophy can be.

10. It will never get old, since voluntary cooperation is endlessly creative and can assume an infinity of forms.

Dziesięć powodów, dla których nawet najbardziej amoralny leseferyzm jest lepszy niż kierująca się nawet najlepszymi chęciami socjaldemokracja

1. Szczera pogoń za zyskiem jest zawsze lepsza niż szczere przypochlebianie się zazdrości i zawiści.

2. Pokojowy egoizm jest zawsze lepszy niż napastliwy altruizm.

3. Merytokratyczna nierówność jest zawsze lepsza niż zadufany w sobie egalitaryzm.

4. Dobrowolna segregacja jest zawsze lepsza niż przymusowa integracja.

5. Ostentacyjnie rozrzutny miliarder jest zawsze lepszy niż polityk popierający w dobrej wierze wydatki deficytowe.

6. Nieczuły fabrykant-wyzyskiwacz jest zawsze lepszy niż moralnie zaangażowany wyborca-ignorant.

7. Bycie nieżyczliwym wobec drugiego jest zawsze lepsze niż bycie życzliwym wobec drugiego przy użyciu zagrabionej własności trzeciego.

8. Żądza pieniądza jest zawsze lepsza niż żądza władzy nad cudzym pieniądzem.

9. Mizantropiczna ironia jest zawsze lepsza niż humanitarne pustosłowie.

10. Droga do piekła nie jest wybrukowana samolubną obojętnością.

If You Want Peace, Stop Loving War and Violence

This link leads to the list of people known throughout history as "The Great". This link leads to the list of winners of Gallup's annual most admired man and woman poll. The overwhelming majority of people on those lists are rulers - kings, emperors, tyrants, dukes, tsars, presidents, and prime ministers - that is, professional wielders of institutionalized violence, aggression, coercion, subjugation, expropriation, and oppression, as well as professional peddlers of propaganda, demagoguery, and tribal hatred.

If you ask why people can't just get along and cooperate peacefully, without wars, enslavement, genocide, tribal prejudice, and ceaseless attempts to grab each other's property, then here is the answer: they actually like all these things, their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

In a world where there are so many individuals to respect, admire, and emulate - entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, artists, thinkers, and humanitarians - the majority of people consistently lavish the greatest praise and admiration on warlords, warmongers, tyrants, oppressors, propagandists, and demagogues. In conclusion, it's no surprise that the world is undersupplied with liberty, peace, and cooperation, since the greatest demand among people has consistently been for their very opposites.

Collective Action, Cooperation and Collusion

One of the more sophisticated challenges that libertarians are sometimes confronted with says the following: assuming that voluntary cooperation can successfully solve the collective action problem, it has to be capable of solving it regardless of the moral qualities of the motives that drive the solution. Thus, if it is possible to successfully produce public goods on a voluntary, decentralized basis, it must also be possible on the same basis to create stable cartels capable of reaping monopoly gains and frustrating consumer sovereignty. Conversely, if harmful cartels are to be thought of as inherently unstable and thus short-lived, it must also be concluded that the temptation of underselling one's competitor will thwart any attempts to successfully produce public goods on a voluntary, decentralized basis.

And yet, there is a good reason to believe that there is a fundamental asymmetry between the viability of beneficial and malevolent cooperation. In short, the former is normally profitable both in the short and the long run, while the latter is profitable only in the short run. And conversely, opposing the latter is normally profitable both in the short and the long run, while opposing the former is profitable only in the short run. If X bundles the production of private goods with the production of public goods, his offer is more attractive than the offer of those who focus exclusively on the production of private goods, thus generating short-term profits for him. But apart from tangible profits, such a business approach also generates favorable reputation, which gives X additional competitive edge and makes his business even more profitable in the long run.

Conversely, cooperating with a cartel generates short-term profits for its members, but it by the same token makes their activities very disreputable, which further aggravates the inherent instability of their association, makes them subject to social ostracism, undermines their trustworthiness and thus reduces the number of their potential business allies, gives outside competition extra incentive to put the cartel out of business, etc. Breaking the cartel agreement, however, allows the breaker not only to gain short-term profits by underselling his erstwhile partners, but also to gain a favorable reputation, the reputation of an honest businessman who opposes collusion, which is likely to generate additional long-term profits for him.

In sum, overcoming the collective action problem to benefit oneself by harming others pays in the short run, but backfires in the long run, while overcoming it to benefit oneself by benefiting others pays in the short run and in the long run. Thus, there is a good reason to believe that, on the whole, voluntary cooperation can not only successfully solve the collective action problem, but also make the effects of the majority of voluntarily undertaken collective actions unambiguously beneficial.

Libertarianism, Coercion, and Lifeboat Situations

Is libertarianism a deontological or a consequentialist theory? It can be either, but it can also be both, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the best way to think about it. Does libertarianism say that it is immoral and criminal to use coercion against peaceful individuals in the so-called "lifeboat situations" (e.g., unless I threaten you with a gun, thereby coercing you to row a boat, we will all drown)? Yes, it does. But does it say that it is not moral to try to save people's lives in lifeboat situations by coercing them to do certain things? No, it does not. In effect, what it does say is that while it is always immoral and criminal to use coercion against peaceful individuals, it is likely that in most cases reputable private arbitrators would treat being in a lifeboat situation as an extenuating circumstance sufficient to pardon the coercers, provided that, in hindsight, the coerced agree that the consequences brought about by the act of coercion were positive.

The same principle applies to much more mundane situations as well - think, e.g., of a defense agency that initiated coercion against a suspected burglar, who eventually turned out to be innocent. In such a case, what the agency did was certainly criminal according to the libertarian law, but that does not change the fact that its initiation of coercion against the suspected burglar was required by the contractual obligations that it entered vis-a-vis its clients, thus potentially becoming fully pardonable, provided that the wrongly coerced person is sufficiently compensated.

In conclusion, while libertarianism allows for pardoning acts of coercion against peaceful individuals, it by the same token refuses to decriminalize such acts, thereby recognizing their very limited and highly qualified applicability and tolerability. In other words, it says that individual rights are inviolable, but in certain extreme situations their violations can be retrospectively pardoned by the affected parties in view of their overwhelmingly positive consequences. Thus, libertarianism is perfectly capable of dealing adequately with lifeboat situations and other dilemmatic scenarios involving irresolvable conflicts of values without sacrificing any of its core tenets.

The Free Market is the Only Real Public Good

The free market is the only real public good, since, as the sum total of voluntary interactions between people, it is the only good whose creation and perpetuation meets the criterion of strictly unanimous, and thus genuinely public acceptance.

There Are No Such Things as Positive Rights

There are no such things as "positive rights". Rights, by definition, are universal, meaning that everyone can exercise them, even simultaneously. But since exercising a "positive right" means coercing another to provide one with a specific good or service, everyone attempting to exercise a "positive right" simultaneously results in no one being able to exercise it, since where everyone wants to take, there is no one left to take from. Thus, "positive rights" are either logical contradictions or disguised privileges.

What Makes Anarchy Peaceful or Violent?

Imagine a world in which all members of the ruled class - that is, ordinary individuals who do not belong to the structures of power - suddenly disappear without a trace, the only people remaining being the members of the ruling class - politicians, bureaucrats, and their enforcers. Now, since in order to be a ruler, one needs to have someone to rule over, those people, logically speaking, could not be considered as rulers any more. Thus, they would end up in a state of anarchy vis-a-vis each other, but since, qua former rulers, they would be accustomed to earning their living through coercive exploitation rather than through production, free exchange, and entrepreneurship, they would likely start fighting with each other until a victorious group emerged and turned the losers into a new ruled class. In this particular case, anarchy could be truly said to lead to conflict and chaos.

Now imagine a different world - a one in which it is the rulers who disappear, not because the propensity to coercively control others was eradicated, but because the ruled class, to use la Boetie's phrase, "resolved to serve no more" and, to use another popular phrase, successfully "starved the beast". Unlike in the previous case, the state of anarchy that they would subsequently find themselves in would be unlikely to result in a conflict over power vacuum, because, to quote Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, "the same social consensus, the same institutions, and the same ideological imperatives that had gained them liberation from their own state would be automatically in place to defend against any other states that tried to fill the vacuum".

Thus, it turns out that what prevents peaceful coexistence from degenerating into violent conflict is, contra the Hobbesian myth, not the presence of rulers, but precisely their absence.

A Critique of Buchanan on the Theory of Choice

"Neither the consumer in the supermarket nor the construction engineer [building a dam] faces an economic problem; both face essentially technological problems. [Thus], the theory of choice (resource allocation) must be removed from its position of eminence in the economist's thought processes, [since it] assumes no special role for the economist, as opposed to any other scientist who examines human behavior." - J. M. Buchanan, "What Should Economists Do?"

Perhaps it is true that, provided that his preference scale is intertemporally fixed, the consumer in the supermarket faces what might be described as a more complex variety of the technological problem. However, from the point of view of advancing economic theory this is beside the point. What matters in this context is that the situation faced by the consumer in the supermarket, unlike the one faced by the construction enginner building a dam, can be described within the economic framework, and thus used to derive or illustrate many fundamental laws of economics.

Having a multiplicity of goals and a supply of homogeneous means at one's disposal results in a situation whose analysis allows for deducing the law of diminishing marginal utility. Having a multiplicity of goals while facing scarcity of time implies the existence of an intertemporal ranking of preferences, and thus the existence of positive time preference, which in turn sheds light on the phenomeneon of interest rate. In the absence of a uniform scale of exchange value expressible in terms of cardinal numbers and reflective of socially meaningful utility appraisals, i.e, the free market price system, the consumer is unable to evaluate the opportunity costs of his decisions, even if he is otherwise omniscient. And so on for many other economic theorems and phenomena.

In other words, pure theory of choice, understood as abstracted from uncertainty and genuine market exchange, can still provide us with a rich source of specifically economic insights, and it most certainly does not commit us to a mechanistic vision of human action. Thus, it has to be concluded that Buchanan, as well as Kirzner, were mistaken in their assessment of Robbins as a neoclassical maximizer rather than as a Misesian praxeologist, since while it seems reasonable to assume that it is catallactics that contains the most significant and eye-opening truths concerning the nature of human action (and interaction), it is mistaken to conclude, as Mises understood all too well, that the theory of market exchange exhausts the domain of economics.

A Short Dialogue from a More Civilized World

A: You know, this whole system of "ordered anarchy" and "voluntary society" leaves much to be desired. We have homeless in the streets, some people have access to much better healthcare that others, charities can only do so much to help, there are occassional gang fights going on, etc. I was thinking that perhaps it might be a good idea to set up an open-access, majority-elected monopolistic apparatus of violence and coercion endowed with the power to collect compulsory contributions so that these issues could be effectively addressed - high-quality public healthcare provided to everyone in need, public housing constructed to shelter the homeless, gang wars eliminated through tighter control of access to assault weapons, and so on.

B: And what if instead of doing all these things this open-access, majority-elected monopolistic apparatus of violence and coercion uses its power to hand out monopoly privileges to its favored clients, disincentivizes people from taking responsibility for their own lives, creates ghettos of subsidized crime, disarms us so that it can exploit us more effectively than even the most well-organized cartel of gangs, and starts issuing warrantless orders to spy on, expropriate, or assassinate people like you and me for whatever reasons its rulers might come up with?

A: All right, I see. Bad idea. Sorry.

Buchanan as a Proto-Dehomogenizer?

"What, then, does Barry mean (and others who make similar statements), when the order generated by market interaction is made comparable to that order which might emerge from an omniscient, designing single mind? If pushed on this question, economists would say that if the designer could somehow know the utility functions of all participants, along with the constraints, such a mind could, by fiat, duplicate precisely the results that would emerge from the process of market adjustment. By implication, individuals are presumed to carry around with them fully determined utility functions, and, in the market, they act always to maximize utilities subject to the constraints they confront. As I have noted elsewhere, however, in this presumed setting, there is no genuine choice behavior on the part of anyone. In this model of market process, the relative efficiency of institutional arrangements allowing for spontaneous adjustment stems solely from the informational aspects.

This emphasis is misleading. Individuals do not act so as to maximize utilities described in independently existing functions. They confront genuine choices, and the sequence of decisions taken may be conceptualized, ex post (after the choices), in terms of "as if" functions that are maximized. But these "as if" functions are, themselves, generated in the choosing process, not separately from such process. If viewed in this perspective, there is no means by which even the most idealized omniscient designer could duplicate the results of voluntary interchange. The potential participants do not know until they enter the process what their own choices will be. From this it follows that it is logically impossible for an omniscient designer to know, unless, of course, we are to preclude individual freedom of will." - J. M. Buchanan, A note stimulated by reading Norman Barry, "The Tradition of Spontaneous Order," Literature of Liberty, V (Summer 1982), 7-58.

In the above fragment the late James Buchanan appears to hint at the notion that the informational deficiencies of a hypothetical central planner (the focus of what has come to be known as the Hayekian "knowledge problem") are distinct from and in an important sense less fundamental than the central planner's inability to evaluate his decisions against the benchmark of consumer sovereignty expressed in freely demonstrated preferences, i.e. the benchmark provided by the free market price system (the focus of what has come to be known as the Misesian "calculation problem").

In other words, even if the central planner can be hypothetically assumed to know everything that is logically knowable to him (i.e., everything about the available supply of consumer goods, producer goods of various orders, and the existing technological possibilities), he is still bound to lack any intersubjective yardstick for assessing the extent to which his decisions satisfy the desires of the consuming public, since these desires can be acted upon and meaningfully reflected only within the institutional arrangements whose existence is logically incompatible with any top-down economic design (notice Buchanan's very Misesian emphasis on the logical impossibility, rather than the practical unworkability, of rational central economic planning).

In sum, the fragment quoted above seems to suggest that, similarly to Coase, Buchanan understood, even if not as explicitly as the proponents of the Mises-Hayek dehomogenization thesis, that these two authors' arguments against the unfeasibility of central planning are perfectly compatible, complementary, and stronger in tandem, but nonetheless essentially different.

10 Reasons Why Even the Most Amoral Laissez-Faire Capitalism Is Better Than the Most Well-Intentioned Social Democracy

1. Honest profit-seeking is always better than honest envy-pandering.

2. Peaceful egoism is always better than violent altruism.

3. Meritocratic inequality is always better than self-righteous egalitarianism.

4. Voluntary segregation is always better than forcible integration.

5. An ostentatious billionaire wastrel is always better than a well-meaning deficit spender.

6. A cold-hearted sweatshop owner is always better than a morally concerned rational ignoramus.

7. Being uncharitable is always better than being "charitable" with stolen goods.

8. Greed for money is always better than greed for political power over the money of others.

9. Misanthropic irony is always better than humanitarian bluster.

10. The road to hell is not paved with selfish indifference.