I completed 4.5 game prototypes, 3 web tools, and 2 video editors in 73 active days. Based on prior experience, comparable output without AI would have taken 8–10 months. Equivalent quality—matching the actual architecture and test coverage—would likely exceed 12 months. I base this estimate on the experience I have of making web and video game projects over the last 20 years. The estimate implies that my Q1 work for 2026 used at least 30% less energy than the same work would have done without LLM assistance.

If your reaction to the counterfactual estimate is "Why should I trust this guess from a stranger?" then 1. I suspect you haven't done much work with current LLM tools yet, because this isn't an outlier in productivity gains estimates and 2. fair enough! The without-AI timeline is inherently subjective, I can't conclusively demonstrate to you that I know my work well enough to give a reasonable estimate and that I'm being honest.

Here's a different approach: pick your own productivity increase factor.

The only way the AI-energy-economy conclusion reverses is if the projects would genuinely have taken 3 to 4 months without AI rather than 8 to 10. I hope you can agree that this is hard to square with my testimony combined with the fact that millions like me are seeing enough value to pay monthly for access to LLM agents.

Example Projects

One of the Q1 projects was a complex game prototype that was half completed at the start of 2026. Based on my experience developing Axe Ghost, a game with some similarities, I estimate that unassisted, the full prototype would have taken about ten months; the half I finished in 2026 would have consumed five months on its own. Another project was a reimplementation of an old web experiment, FaceMaker, based on crowd-sourced artificial selection. The first time around it cost me about two months. If I had reimplemented it by hand, with everything I learned the first time, I might have been done in three weeks. The AI-assisted reimplementation took two days. These two projects alone would have exceeded Q1.

Energy Use

The most defensible with-AI figure is day-based: 73 active days at ~2 kWh/day local workstation energy, plus 73 days of model energy at Simon Couch's median daily rate of 1.3 kWh/day. This avoids token-level energy weights entirely.

A token-weighted estimate using Couch's category-specific weights gives a lower total:

With local energy: ~145 kWh + ~35 kWh = ~180 kWh. I treat this as a speculative lower bound, not a more precise figure.

For the without-AI case: 8–10 months at 5 days/week ≈ 175–215 workdays, or ~350–430 kWh.

Caveats

Model energy. Couch's cache weights are extrapolated from Anthropic's sparse disclosures. Cache operations drive roughly 96% of the token-weighted model total. Given current disclosure quality, the model total could plausibly range from ~10 kWh to ~100 kWh. The day-based estimate (~95 kWh) sits at the high end of that range and is the more reliable anchor because it does not depend on cache weights.

Counterfactual time. The 8–10 month estimate reflects superficially similar output. The true no-AI baseline would likely be higher, not lower, because the counterfactual has no AI assisting with architecture, refactoring, and test coverage.

Workstation intensity. The 2 kWh/day figure is a midpoint drawn from component power estimates (laptop ~90–180 W, monitor ~33–75 W in typical use). A longer solo project might land above or below that midpoint depending on build/test intensity and research overhead.

Active days. The 73 with-AI days are any day with at least one logged Claude request, not necessarily full 8-hour sessions. The 175–215 no-AI days are estimated standard workdays. Both figures are uncertain: the with-AI local total could be lower if many sessions were short, while the no-AI total could be higher if a longer timeline involved more overhead.

Scope

This comparison is about energy, not carbon. Grid intensity varies by location (~300–400 gCO₂/kWh in the Netherlands), and Anthropic's data center energy mix is not disclosed. A carbon comparison could flip depending on where inference runs.

Method Notes

Workstation sources: Samsung energy sheet (33W SDR, 104W HDR), Tom's Hardware (75W at 200 nits), Notebookcheck Legion measurements (~150–230W under load).

Hamas terrorists promise no end to the rape and bloodshed.

There are two falsehoods in these ten words.

Hamas has promised an end to the bloodshed. Their demand, since their 2017 Statement of Principles and Policies, reduces to: Israel must abide by international law. Which implies relinquishing all control of the occupied territories. Israel is in violation of this requirement, and has been for decades. Not only has the 'International Order' failed to act to end Israel's criminality, this occupation has been materially enabled by the Western hegemony, chiefly the US, during all that time.

And there was no rape, as far as we know, on October the 7th. A year later the endlessly echoed anecdotes have not been substantiated by any stronger evidence of rape, and no victim claiming to have been raped was ever found, not for want of trying. Israel forbade an independent investigation into the matter. None of this is what we would expect if the rape stories were true.

The Palestinian cause in its essence is a cause of an occupied land and a displaced people. The right of the Palestinian refugees and the displaced to return to their homes from which they were banished or were banned from returning to – whether in the lands occupied in 1948 or in 1967 (that is the whole of Palestine), is a natural right, both individual and collective. This right is confirmed by all divine laws as well as by the basic principles of human rights and international law. It is an inalienable right and cannot be dispensed with by any party, whether Palestinian, Arab or international.

Hamas Statement of Practices and Principles 2017

You write:

The New York Times is happy to call Hamas terrorists “militants,” infected as they have long been with the mind virus of social justice.

The uncooperative reality is that these people are militants, and are resistance fighters. They remain resistance fighters even when they commit war crimes. And their war crimes do not erase or excuse the crimes of their oppressors (the correct word). If you want to call Hamas terrorists on the basis of their crimes that's your call. But if you're honest you must acknowledge that the occupiers who they are resisting are also terrorists by the same standard, and are part of an institutional apparatus that has illegally imposed systematic terror on a victim population for more than half a century.

Their medieval worldview compels them to sacrifice the children of three Abrahamic faiths, which includes their own.

It's striking that you invoke a 'medieval worldview', without mention of the messianic Zionism motivating many of the Israeli occupiers. Did you really not notice this slanting when you wrote it? Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant recently told Yeshiva students in Tel Aviv "The gates of heaven have opened and the time has come".

Why should we accept your framing that condemns resistance fighters for loss of life, but is silent about the culpability of the illegal occupiers who are the object of that resistance?

You missed out Israel in your accounting. The state that treats international law with contempt, that massacred and expelled thousands, that never fulfilled its UN obligation to guarantee the survivors' 'right of return' after accepting membership.

As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called for refugee return, property restitution and compensation (resolution 194 (II)). However, 75 years later, despite countless UN resolutions, the rights of the Palestinians continue to be denied.
https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba

Israel, the entire reason Hamas exists; from the radicalisation it engenders by inflicting decades of humiliation, torture, killing, maiming, and theft, to Netanyahu's strategic support of Hamas, believing this would undermine efforts towards Palestinian sovereignty:

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
Benjamin Netanyahu 2019

Given the scale of these crimes, and how easy it is to learn about them it's weird that you omitted all criticism of Israel in your piece Max. And weirder still that you left your article unedited, uncorrected, for a year now. What are you doing?

You included a startling excerpt from the 1988 Covenant of Hamas in archaic language bolstering the impression of the faction as insatiable bloodthirsty antisemites. You neglected to mention the appropriate passage from the more relevant 2017 document.

Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
Hamas Statement of Practices and Principles 2017

You wrote:

When “Israel’s 9/11” portends more of the same on US shores, it’s nauseating to turn for security to a vast protection racket—one that censors us, surveils us, imprisons us, and puts its K-Street dinners on our expense account.

I agree that it's misguided to look to the security state for protection. But it's striking that you were concerned about October 7th as a portent of attacks against the US, while missing the fact that Operation Iron Swords guaranteed massive radicalisation against Israel and its sponsors, and bloody reprisals for decades. This is easier to see now, but I was telling this to anyone who would listen during the week of October 7th too. It was clear on the basis of the unabashedly genocidal statements by Israeli leadership. Now the whole world has seen Israel and the US's total corruption and moral bankruptcy more clearly than it's ever been laid out before. The absolute lower bound on the killing in Gaza is equivalent to fourteen 9/11s, 40,000 killed. That was the number of recorded deaths caused directly by Israeli military action when reliable records stopped being updated months ago. The real death toll is much, much higher. That's where the future blowback is coming from.

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. [...] We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly
Yoav Gallant. Israeli Minister of Defence

I'm not certain that I'm right about this but it looks as though you are too timid to speak frankly about the central, undeniable, role of Israel in all this Max. You didn't mention it in the article you wrote, nor at any time during the year that followed it. The year in which Israel has carried out its genocide in Gaza. Your article, more nuanced than most on the topic, was nevertheless part of a wave of media that ended up manufacturing consent for the ongoing genocide. In your case this was by repeating lies that help legitimise Israeli hatred of Palestinians, and by repeating a framing that dishonestly erases Israel's ongoing crimes and creates the impression that it is a blameless party. If you can't speak honestly on this topic, perhaps because personal or professional ties would be threatened by doing so, you shouldn't speak on it at all.

Yes it is absolutely a genocide. I understand that many don't want to hear that. But we're in an unprecedented moment where anyone with a constitution strong enough for the job can validate this for themselves. All they need to do is watch the hundreds of videos of dismembered Palestinians, read the Israeli telegram channels mocking images of pulverised Palestinian bodies, watch the hundreds of videos showing gleeful IDF soldiers demolishing entire neighbourhoods, and read the hundreds of genocidal statements by Israeli politicians, Israeli military commanders, Israeli Journalists, Israeli celebrities.

Yes Max, the world is run by sociopaths, and among the little we can, and must, do is to speak truthfully about what is happening.

This is a response to an article by philosopher Michael Huemer on AI risk, and why he believes the most dire concerns are unwarranted. I stand by my endorsement of Huemer's work in other fields, but I believe he's wrong on this subject. I hope to show why.

In the comments of a facebook post made on 18 february 2023, about doomsday cults, Huemer answers a question about AI risk by linking to his 2020 post Existential Risks: AI. Huemer's reference to this article suggests that at the time of writing he believes the arguments presented therein are sufficient to dispel concerns about the possibility of catastrophe for humankind caused by (autonomous) artificial intelligence.

The motivation of an AI

Huemer writes:

the way that most people imagine AI posing a threat -- like in science fiction stories that have human-robot wars -- is anthropomorphic and not realistic. People imagine robots that are motivated like humans -- e.g., megalomaniacal robots that want to take over the world. Or they imagine robots being afraid of humans and attacking out of fear.

Advanced AI won't have human-like motivations at all -- unless we for some reason program it to be so.

I don't know why we would program an AI to act like a megalomaniac, so I don't think that will happen.

Computers will follow the algorithm that we program into them.

The important mistake here is assuming that creating an AI is a similar process to traditional software engineering; Where humans write explicit instructions telling the program how to behave at any point during runtime. If the program ends up behaving unexpectedly it's because a human has made a mistake that can be fixed through debugging.

But software based on Large Language Models (ChatGPT, Bing), and presumably more powerful things that might get called AIs, are chiefly the product of machine learning with neural networks, not traditional software development.

A neural network consists of layers of interconnected nodes, neurons, that are capable of processing and transmitting information. When a neural network is trained, it's fed a lot of data and its outputs are scored against some criteria. During this process the weights of the connections between neurons are programmatically altered by a simple algorithm which iteratively nudges the network towards giving higher scoring outputs–being better at what we intend it to do.

gradient descent is an optimization algorithm that searches over the space of neural net parameters to find a set that performs well on some objective.

AN #58 Mesa optimization: what it is, and why we should care

Unlike a traditional computer program that's amenable to debugging, a trained neural network is effectively a black box; an inscrutable set of nodes with connections of different weights–float numbers–between them. We can look at an input and compare it against the output, but as humans we can't understand what the network is doing by looking at the topology and the numbers.

When the goal of training is small and well defined, like having a neural network reliably recognise hand-written numbers, this is fine. We can easily tell whether or not the network is working as we hope, and there's no possibility of disaster. But in the case of a future general intelligence, which can take autonomous action in the world, where we might try to train to the directive "don't covertly have goals that most humans would object to", that's much harder.

This isn't only a theoretical concern. Alignment problems have been demonstrated in simple video game models. For instance, subtle statistical differences between the training environment and the 'deployment' environment revealed that a model had adopted a misaligned goal, that worked well in training but gave unwanted (at least to its makers) results afterwards.

Update. I misunderstood Huemer in this section. Where he uses the verb 'program' he intends it more broadly than I assumed, to include the process of training a neural network. But I'll leave the above section unedited in case it's useful for others. Huemer replies:

Re: "The motivation of an AI": What I had in mind was that the programmers wouldn't train the AI for megalomaniacal behavior; anything like that in the training period would be labelled "bad". We know why humans (esp. men) have that behavior, but nothing like that explanation would apply to AI.

This doesn't rule out that some crazy behavior might emerge in novel circumstances. It's just unlikely to be crazy in the way crazy humans are crazy. It's more likely to be something that makes no sense to us. Or so I would guess.

Mesa optimisers

There's no guarantee that when you use gradient descent to optimise for a particular thing, that the general intelligence that you eventually get also wants that same thing.

I am a mesa-optimizer relative to evolution. Evolution, in the process of optimizing my fitness, created a second optimizer - my brain - which is optimizing for things like food and sex.

Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It

The material on (deceptively aligned) mesa-optimisers in AI is particularly interesting here. I won't repeat more of it here but I recommend taking a look.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it nobody has the technical knowledge to control, in detail, what a powerful AGI ends up caring about. In a situation that couldn't arise in traditional software engineering, our ability to create (proto) AIs outstrips our ability to reliably instill in them human-like ideas about acceptable behaviour, and the prospects for changing that state of affairs don't look good.

you run myopic gradient descent to create a strawberry picker. It creates a mesa-optimizer with some kind of proxy goal which corresponds very well to strawberry picking in the training optimization, like flinging red things at lights [the light reflecting off the bottom of the metal bucket]

"While speculating about the far future, it realizes that failing to pick strawberries correctly now will thwart its goal of throwing red things at light sources later. It picks strawberries correctly in the training distribution, and then, when training is over and nobody is watching, throws strawberries at streetlights.

(Then it realizes it could throw lots more red things at light sources if it was more powerful, achieves superintelligence somehow, and converts the mass of the Earth into red things it can throw at the sun. The end.)"

Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It

Megalomania and instrumental convergence

Huemer writes:

The desire to take over the world is a peculiarly human obsession. Even more specifically, it is a peculiarly male human obsession. Pretty much 100% of people who have tried to take over the world have been men. The reason for this lies in evolutionary psychology (social power led to greater mating opportunities for males, in our evolutionary past). AI won't be subject to these evolutionary, biological imperatives.

Instrumental convergence is a concept in artificial intelligence that suggests that as an AI becomes more intelligent and capable, its goals and motivations are likely to include a certain set of objectives, regardless of its primary goal.

For instance, an AI might notice that in order to optimally achieve its goal it's important not to be interrupted by being turned off, so it would be good if it could eliminate the risk of that from happening. And it might notice that the more of the universe's resources it can control, the more effective it will be at pursuing its primary value. Both of these things will tend to create megalomania.

I hope I've satisfactorily indicated how it's reasonable to consider future AGI a real threat to humanity in itself, even before it gets into the hands of people who are evil or negligent.

Here’s what yourlogicalfallacyis.com has to say.

The burden of proof lies with someone who is making a claim, and is not upon anyone else to disprove. The inability, or disinclination, to disprove a claim does not render that claim valid, nor give it any credence whatsoever.

But I hope to show this isn't correct; the burden of proof never comes from something a person says, and there isn't a 'The burden of proof', singular.

What is it then?

I'm claiming that:

A person has a burden of proof when–and only when–they want to persuade another.

Which implies that both parties in a discussion can have a burden of proof at the same time; and that a burden of proof can lie with a person who has not made a positive claim, but wants to persuade someone who has, that they're mistaken.

I take on the burden of persuading you I'm right about the burden of proof

If we use burden of proof to mean what I say it means, it's not a very useful phrase. It doesn't make sense to haughtily tell someone the burden of proof is on them. You already know if they want to persuade you about something–if they do they'll already be trying to, already shouldering the burden. And if they're not trying to persuade you then you have to assume they're not interested in doing so, and they have no burden.

But is this a new problem? I don't think so. I think the meaning that yourlogicalfallacyis.com ascribes to burden of proof is just as useless, but more harmful.

Useless

If I'm in a conversation with someone, and a claim comes up that we disagree about, there are two possibilities:

1. I'm sufficiently motivated to try and persuade the other party that my opinion is correct.
2. I'm not sufficiently motivated to do that.

In the case of 1 I'm already trying to persuade the other; there's no need for either of us to talk about the burden of proof. In the case of 2 the other party can complain that the burden of proof is on me all they like. It doesn't matter. I'm not going to be moved to plead my case to them because I don't care about persuading this person.

In neither possible case is the legacy meaning of burden of proof helpful.

Harmful

On top of being useless, yourlogicalfallacyis.com's definition misleads people into believing they have grounds to demand that another present a case to them against their wishes. This leads to all kinds of entitled misbehaviour.

I believe the uselessness, plus the harm to clear thinking, disqualify the legacy meaning of burden of proof.

In the wild

Some examples of people using the phrase from Twitter.

The burden of proof should be on religious organizations to prove that they are tax exempt by not being involved in politics.

A clearer way of saying the same would be:

Authorities should require evidence from religious organisations that they are not involved in politics before granting them tax exemption.

But proving a negative is famously problematic.

first you need to prove that God exists. The burden of proof lies on you for making a claim that something is real.

A functionally equivalent and less antagonistic response would be:

I don't believe that God exists. Do you want to try to persuade me?

no one ever clearly defines what “Russian Asset” means. It’s meant to create public stigma about the accused while removing the burden of proof from the accuser

An accusation doesn't automatically imply a burden of proof to begin with–since such a burden comes from your desire to persuade another, which you might not feel. I'd write the above this way instead.

“Russian Asset” is a vague term meant to create public stigma about the accused, while avoiding specific claims that could be decisively contradicted.

Scott Alexander writes (edited for brevity):

Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well.

But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake.

A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate.

They all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit…

A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.

This sucks. Naturally, Scott is commenting here on how a commons is a very fragile thing, and not presenting this as a slam-dunk against any specific way of arranging society more broadly.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like this is the core of my objection to libertarianism, and that Non-Libertarian FAQ 3.0 will just be this one example copy-pasted two hundred times.

Oh

The furious copy-pasting implies this is a problem libertarianism specifically has a hard time with; Without a state with a big stick to compel cooperation, a libertarian society is doomed to universal defection and everything bad that comes with it.

I don't think so. Because there are simple social technologies that are attractive for individuals and which solve these coordination problems for groups - at least if the state isn't around to forbid their use.

It's the ownership

Individual fish farmers want private ownership of the lake they use. They want this because private ownership gives them a way to penalise, and receive restitution from, polluting parties through private tort complaints. These conditions keep their businesses viable.

With the state no longer disallowing the lake to become privately owned, private ownership could take different forms. The farmers could jointly own the lake and have a contractual agreement among themselves that any of them found polluting the lake would be required to compensate the others. The contract could specify that repeat offenders be barred from using the lake altogether.

Or the farmers might each claim ownership of the parcel of lake around their own farm, with another portion remaining unowned. In this arrangement they'd be able to bring torts against polluters whose actions harmed their own parcel.

The farmers would separately, or collectively, claim ownership of the previously unowned lake in accordance with the local homesteading norms. That might mean visibly fencing off parts of it, demonstrating that it contains their equipment and animals, and otherwise demonstrating that it's 'land' that they are making routine use of.

Guilt

In principle, this is all the groundwork needed to hold a polluter liable. But in practice, at least at first, it might be technically challenging to correctly identify the polluter. Even then though, with the threat of tort, a farmer could no longer afford to pollute casually. And the longer this regime persisted, the more opportunity there'd be for social and technical innovation to deliver systems allowing the identification of polluters, all without centralised political power.

Perhaps in the future farms have the option of paying a small fee to one of several competing organisations that audit production operations and award a certificate if the firm's pollution is below an accepted threshold. As a farmer, presenting such a certificate is a convenient way to establish innocence in case of pollution complaints, but more importantly it probably becomes part of the cost of doing business; If I were running an insurance firm catering to industry, I'd want to know as much as possible about the risks I was taking on via my clients. So I'd structure my contracts to  make pollution liability payouts contingent on the client's continuous ability to show a valid 'good industrialist' certificate.

That's how in Ancapistan - a libertarian society with private law and no state - coordination problems like the one faced by Scott’s fish farmers are solved organically by private ownership and torts.

We were guided and hosted by Willem Fonteijn, Stella Stok, Paul Soons and Sanne de Burger. The Essence retreat format uses a set of activities that make it possible to quickly feel at ease in a group, and even to feel close to these recently-strangers; essential for reaching the level of openness and vulnerability that the ceremony asks of you. The group format has advantages over a solo journey that I didn't fully appreciate beforehand. For processing and integrating what you've seen it's helpful to be among people who've just had a similar experience. They're the ones most able to give full attention and credence to what you're describing. And hearing their accounts with openness can end up shedding light on aspects of your own experience. You can find more information about the Essence format on their website.

Preparation

The reading material suggested by the institute was valuable. In the weeks leading up to the retreat I read The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide by Jim Fadiman and How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Both useful, but the latter much more so for me. And so well put together. I think many will enjoy it even if they have no plans to use psychedelics. The accounts of people's journeys and practical information about how to maximize their usefulness were most interesting to me.

Here are some excerpts from Pollan's book that seemed important to keep in mind during the ceremony.

The flight instructions advise guides to use mantras like “Trust the trajectory” and “TLO—Trust, Let Go, Be Open.” Some guides like to quote John Lennon: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.

If you feel as if you are “dying, melting, dissolving, exploding, going crazy etc.—go ahead.” Volunteers are quizzed: “If you see a door, what do you do? If you see a staircase, what do you do?” “Open it” and “climb up it” are of course the right answers.

“Think of yourself as an astronaut being blasted into outer space,” Richard Boothby recalled him saying. Boothby is a philosophy professor who was in his early fifties when he volunteered at Hopkins. “You’re going way out there to take it all in and engage with whatever you find there, but you can be confident that we’ll be here keeping an eye on things. Think of us as ground control. We’ve got you covered.”

The main thing is to surrender to the experience, even when it gets difficult. Surrender to your fear. The biggest fears that come up are the fear of death and the fear of madness. But the only thing to do is surrender. So surrender!

Many of the volunteers I interviewed reported initial episodes of intense fear and anxiety before giving themselves up to the experience, as the guides encourage them to do. This is where the flight instructions come in. Their promise is that if you surrender to whatever happens (“trust, let go, and be open” or “relax and float downstream”), whatever at first might seem terrifying will soon morph into something else, and likely something pleasant, even blissful.

The Ceremony

After an illuminating breathwork session in the morning, and a light lunch, the ceremony began.

We were gathered in the hall, dressed in white, and sitting on our mattresses. The music on Willem's playlist had begun.

Following our instructions I put one and a half packets of mashed High Hawaiians Magic Truffles into my glass. 33 grams, a high dose. Paul came round adding ginger tea to our glasses. We stirred and pressed the truffles with our spoons until the tea had a milky look.

We drank the tea, lay down, and put our eye masks on. I didn't leave the mattress for the next six hours. I've forgotten many details and scenes. What follows are the parts that stand out the most strongly for me two days later.

Soon I felt unusual sensations including tingling in my hands and feet. I saw the beginnings of motion and imagery. The music changed in an unpleasant way; a harsh metallic echo had appeared. I felt like anaesthetic was spreading through my brain and that my thoughts were malfunctioning. I felt anxiety. The thought came up that it was a mistake to use psilocybin again after the bad experience I had with it in my teens.

The visuals developed into vast underground spaces. Dark, with three dimensional arrays of repeating objects stretching as far as I could see. A succession of these spaces presented themselves. The atmosphere was oppressive but also awe inspiring.

Following Willem's instruction to approach whatever threatening thing we encountered I imaginatively stretched my arms wide in a literal embrace and swam into the darkness.

Quickly the scene changed. I emerged onto a light-filled plateau. Again arrays of geometric forms stretched away endlessly. The light intensified towards a brilliant center. The sense of threat was gone. Instead there was overwhelming awe and joy. I felt like the most fundamental level of reality was revealing itself and I was continuous with this glowing environment. I whispered 'Oh' many times in wonder. I cried with happiness. I stayed here for what felt like a long time.

From this point onward gratitude and wonder were the feelings anchoring the journey.

Stella placed a hand on my shoulder and asked me how it was going. Smiling broadly I said "Good". "It looks like it's going good" she replied warmly. "Keep going".

My two year old son appeared several times during the journey after this point. He was wearing his favourite bag/hat on his head and carrying his favourite stick. He said, in Dutch, "Ja. Uh-huh" and nodded. Sometimes he used carefully pronounced English; "Yes. Uh-huh". These are the self-confirming phrases that often follow his announcements in daily life.

In the journey my son's confirmations carried the meaning: Notice and accept the fundamental goodness and beauty of existence. Many times during the rest of the journey I would nod my head both during intense happiness and sorrow. Following my son's example and gratefully accepting both.

I decided to visit sorrow. Immediately I saw my Polish grandparents and felt a powerful wave of grief for their fear, pain and suffering at the end of their lives. I sobbed heavily.

Willem placed a hand on my shoulder and said softly "It's good. Go into it". "Yes, thank you" I replied through the crying. I knew that the goodness and beauty of existence can carry - and coexist with - any amount of grief.

I cried for the suffering of my father who died alone of cancer.

I cried for my mother's care for - and her worry about - me and my brother.

I cried for my wife and the hurt we've caused each other in our relationship.

I cried for my eldest son, and for how I've so often failed to be patient and compassionate with him the way I want to be.

Throughout the journey I could hear everything around me in the hall; the sighs, crying, and laughter of the other participants. I heard the low conversation between our guides about how to proceed in supporting a voyager who was having a difficult time. I could hear and feel their footfalls as they walked between the mattresses. None of this felt threatening or distracting. I noticed these goings on with a feeling of safety and interest.

Later, laughter from other participants was coming in waves. I smiled and nodded each time it came, sometimes laughing out loud with the others, helpless not to. I felt the dampness of my tear-soaked eye mask on my cheeks. I began to notice soreness in my stomach from sobbing and laughing. Eventually I became interested in deliberately moving my hands, feet, and head.

I heard Willem announce to the hall that the team was bringing food round for us. I took off my mask as others were doing the same and understood the journey was ending. I wiped my face and ate fruit from the platters that Willem, Paul, Stella and Sanne offered. I felt exhausted and at deep peace.

Results

So far, a few days on, I've noticed a very welcome lightness of mood - I feel less serious, more playful. It's much easier to be mindful. I still have negative feelings and reactions but they no longer have me; there's a good deal more optionality in whether I indulge them. I find it much easier to be patient and compassionate towards my children.

I often think back on the experiences I had and am moved by them again. I also notice with sadness how they're fading from my memory.

At Willem's suggestion I've begun doing very short mindfulness exercises while sitting, walking or biking.

The tape measure disagrees but I feel taller and as though there's a lightness at the top of my head where there used to be pressure. Perhaps least expectedly I can touch my toes - and easily - for the first time in my adult life.

I've made a note to revisit this post in six months to add a section about any changes that have persisted in the longer term.

Cryptoart.wtf's content has recently been replaced with a holding page for unrelated reasons, but its mistaken conclusions feature in many articles critical of the ecological footprint of NFTs on the Ethereum network. I hope this post helps set the record straight.

The calculation

On this page Memo explains how the energy cost of a piece of cryptoart is calculated on the site. The calculation depends on adding up the gas costs of all transactions associated with the artwork being analysed. He writes:

Since the energy required and footprint of mining a block is independent of its contents and number of transactions, the Gas required by a transaction is representative of the portion of a block’s footprint it will incur

From the total amount of Ethereum Gas and energy consumed by the Ethereum network over a period we can calculate the energy footprint per unit of Gas. Then we can calculate the footprint of a particular transaction from the amount of Gas that it used.

At first glance this looks odd when you know that gas used in a block and energy used to mine that block are largely independent; Empty blocks cost as much energy to mine as full ones under the same network conditions. It might look like this invalidates any attempt to apportion eco impact to transactions. But if a transaction increases the amount of future mining that occurs it may still be possible to assign it an energy footprint.

The air travel analogy

We calculate emissions footprints for plane tickets. Can the same approach be applied to transactions to the Ethereum network? Memo writes:

There is a common fallacy along the lines of “The same energy will be consumed whether a block is empty or contains your transaction, thus a transaction has no impact on the energy consumption of a block being mined, or on the environment”. This is based on a gross misunderstanding of what a carbon footprint is.

This statement is analogous to claiming “when a 500 tonne airplane flies from NYC to LA, it consumes the same amount of fuel whether I ride it or not (because the weight of a person is negligible compared to the weight of the plane). Thus my flying has no impact on the environment”.

It is true that one person deciding to fly (or not) does not have an immediate effect on emissions. However, there is a footprint associated with a seat on a plane.

Each ticket sold is effectively a signal telling the airline Keep scheduling flights! This is how buying a ticket can be causally linked with emissions even if physically travelling on the plane didn’t increase the emissions of that flight at all (or if you simply missed the flight).

How well does this approach map to the Ethereum network? There’s an important difference between the incentive structure faced by an Ethereum miner and that faced by an airline that complicates things.

Captain pollution

Imagine that an airline received a large financial reward from a mysterious eco-villain for each flight it completed. The reward was issued whether or not any seats on the flight were occupied. Imagine too that this reward was many times greater than the revenue from the tickets sold for any fully-booked flight.

Under these circumstances it wouldn’t be appropriate to apportion the entire ecological impact of a flight only to those who’d bought tickets, because this ignores the incentivizing effect of the reward. Indeed the eco-villain is incentivizing the airline to schedule flights more than the ticket buyers are.

Memo's calculations on cryptoart.wtf are doing the equivalent of ignoring Captain Pollution's reward.

Incentives to mine

Successful miners on the Ethereum network are currently rewarded in two ways.

1. By receiving a block reward, which is an amount of newly created ETH
2. By receiving transaction fees (gas fees), an amount that users of the network send along with their transaction. This source of revenue looks set to be dramatically reduced by an upcoming change to the network

Here’s a breakdown of miner revenue into block reward (Subsidy) and transaction fee parts for the last several years. For most of Ethereum's history the subsidy part has been close to 100% of total revenue. Recently it has approached 50%.

The Ethereum block reward is analogous to the eco-villain's reward to the airline company. Successful miners receive the reward regardless of what’s in the blocks, and it’s usually very large compared to the revenue from transaction fees (which are analogous to ticket sales in our thought experiment).

For the same reason that it wouldn’t be appropriate to ignore the eco-villain’s reward and divvy up the entire ecological impact of a flight between ticket buyers, it’s also not appropriate to apportion the entire energy footprint of block mining to those making transactions within those blocks.

Cryptoart.wtf incorrectly calculates as though transaction fees are the only incentivizer of mining. The block reward is a major and largely independent incentive too.

TLDR

What I’m not arguing in this article:

• It’s wrong to be critical of proof of work systems
• Cryptoart NFTs are unambiguously a great idea

What I am saying, specifically: Cryptoart.wtf’s reports of the energy use of NFTs are wrong; the calculation used there isn’t valid, and any article depending on them is also in error. This truth should be relevant to anyone considering this topic regardless of their stance on Ethereum or NFTs.

Notes

This post grew from a Twitter thread. In that thread I didn't address the possibility that transactions can validly be assigned eco footprint based on their incentivization of future mining work. I believe this post does a better job of characterizing the problem with the calculation.

While outside the scope of this post, I'm not convinced that the Ethereum (or Bitcoin) networks currently use too much energy, since this implies to me that the costs of those networks outweigh their benefits - or that they could have successfully bootstrapped without implementing proof of work systems. I believe the benefits of decentralized currency and computing for humankind are hard to overstate.

Another source of miner revenue is MEV (Miner Extracted Value). Because much MEV activity cannot currently be detected, the upper bound of MEV is unclear. This means that even if cryptoart.wtf's calculations were altered to account for the effect of the block reward incentive on mining behavior and known MEV, this arithmetic could only establish an upper bound on the energy footprint of a set of transactions.

Thanks to Justin Goro for corrections and suggestions. Any mistakes that remain are my own.

One commits the Fallacy of Perverted Analogy when one misreads an opponent’s analogy to make a far more sweeping comparison than the opponent needs or intends.

Examples

A "Some people feel disgust at the sight of men kissing. But it doesn’t make sense to condemn a person merely for feeling disgusted. You probably feel disgust when you think about some sex acts too — for example people who enjoy eating shit"

B "It's your comparison of two men kissing to eating shit that's disgusting. It's bigoted and makes no sense. The two things are worlds apart!"

B "You use the services that the state provides. That means you consent to being taxed."

A "If a slave accepts a meal from his master does that mean he’s consented to his enslavement?"

B "You're comparing paying taxes to being a slave?! This conversation is over."

In the examples speaker A is not suggesting that the things being compared are similar in every way, or even most ways. They believe they’re similar in a limited way that’s relevant to the topic of the discussion.

B might be able to show differences between the things being compared that are relevant to the conversation at hand. Those differences might make the analogies invalid. But just pointing out that differences exist, even large differences, is not enough to dismiss the analogy.

Evan believes, like his peers, that there are no significant biological differences between any two populations of humans. At least none that are caused by the expression of genes that relate to personality traits or cognitive ability.

In Evan’s view, with respect to these aspects at least, there’s a sense in which every healthy human begins as a blank slate. He’s convinced that environmental circumstances are overwhelmingly responsible for how the personality and cognitive ability of every human being develop. Evan believes this view is well supported by studies in the relevant fields.

This outlook also gives him hope that a very thoroughgoing kind of equality is possible through the right kinds of social program.

Evan also believes that it’s fair to describe statements that contradict his blank slate position as sexist or racist, depending on the kind of population the statement relates to. People who believe such statements are racists or sexists.

This combination of beliefs has Evan backed into a corner.

Even if we assume that none of the current findings that get grouped under the human biodiversity (HBD) umbrella have any merit, there’s much more enquiry to be done in these fields. We don’t know what will be found.

Evan isn’t free, psychologically, to go wherever the evidence takes him though. Going down one of those paths, in his view, also means accepting one of the most shameful and damaging labels in his society. In this context Evan is very strongly motivated to ignore or otherwise find a way to reject any future evidence he comes across that suggests that there are important differences, in aggregate, between how the minds of different human populations work.

Critics of the blank slate position sometimes refer to the inconvenient counter-evidence, the kind we can expect Evan to work hard to reject, as hate facts.

I think it’s unwise to attach normative judgements to empirical claims about the world that might turn out to be true.

To the extent that people like Evan care about the truth, and want to protect their ability to pursue it, I hope they reassess how they’re using the terms racist and sexist.

See also Moldbug’s caution against IQism.

But maybe the long-term equilibrium at the end of this contest is omniveillance — a situation in which everything of importance is observed, recorded, and retrievable by anyone who cares to look for it.

David Brin is a writer who believes this future is inevitable. Can we indefinitely maintain our freedoms by staying one step ahead of the surveilling powers, being better at hiding than they are at seeking? In Brin’s view, this approach isn’t sustainable.

Hiding will not work. Sure, protect your passwords as a short term, practical matter. But over the long term only one thing will keep you free. Aggressively, militantly empowering yourself and your neighbors to see!

This points to an asymmetry that stands out to me: Surveillance technology is becoming ever more powerful, hard to detect and ubiquitous, while the observable physical footprint a person leaves on the world is at least as large as it ever was, and shows no sign of shrinking.

Encryption might allow us to hide our tracks in the digital realm, but at least for now we still live in meatspace and soon the spies will overtake our ability to evade them here.

Our near-future will be filled with hidden sensors. Some will be descendants of technology we’re already familiar with, like car plate readers and CCTV networks linked to machine vision software. Others are just coming into view over the sci-fi horizon; autonomous drone mosquitos, smell sensors, gene-hacked spy plants.

Eventually these systems, and new ones we haven’t imagined yet, will be writing data to logs that can be accessed arbitrarily far into the future.

Why would it happen if no one wants it?

We’ll get to omniveillance, even if most people would prefer to live in a different kind of world, because of a collective action problem. While you may bristle at the idea of being observed yourself, it will be irresistible to use this kind of technology to your own advantage.

Initially this might mean monitoring your own property and neighbourhood in case of theft or vandalism. Later it might mean watching your local police department or politicians in case of brutality or corruption.

The nascent omniveillance infrastructure might get its start when a future MySpyCorp extends an offer: “You can access our large, and growing pool of observed data either by paying a subscription fee, or (our most popular plan) by having your devices log their data to it.”

Perhaps multiple such datastores will exist. Over time competing stores will be incentivised to merge their data together to offer their customers a spotlight capable of shining on a bigger part of the world.

A few years later, the fantastically successful MySpyCorp is involved in a scandal. Maybe they’ve been found to be censoring data pertaining to members of their management, business associates or friends in politics.

Whatever the details, eventually the dangers of having this kind of data under the control of trusted gatekeepers will be felt urgently enough that there will be a demand for this kind of data delivered in a trustless, decentralised form.

Manufacturers of surveillance hardware who are alert to this opportunity will create the open omniveillance backbone. And because their products are designed to interface seamlessly with it, they will reap the market’s rewards.

Eventually we’re at a point where I can find out anything you’ve done, and vice versa, through a conveniently browsable interface.

Is this state of affairs necessarily a dystopian nightmare? Brin doesn’t think so.

Hope through ‘sousveillance’

The idea of sousveillance contains the key to understanding Brin’s hope for a humane, transparent society. Transparent in the sense that access to information illuminates in all directions.

The term “sousveillance”, coined by Steve Mann, stems from the contrasting French words sur, meaning “above”, and sous, meaning “below”, i.e. “surveillance” denotes the “eye-in-the-sky” watching from above, whereas “sousveillance” denotes bringing the camera or other means of observation down to human level, either physically (mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings), or hierarchically (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching).

If everyone is able to watch everyone else, then the least powerful can watch the most powerful, who have more to lose. We know from today’s high profile scandals that powerful figures can be laid low quickly if enough people become convinced they’ve behaved unacceptably.

The discipline of Mutually Assured Snooping

When an act of snooping is itself subject to watching eyes, and indelibly etched into the public record, is it still worth it? Brin believes that under these conditions, a strong live-and-let-live norm would emerge — Don’t snoop without Good Reason if you don’t want to be subject to the same treatment yourself.

Perhaps there’d be an attitude that, under normal circumstances, it’s not okay to access data on a person gathered from places traditionally regarded as private (e.g. within their own home). It’s possible that attitudes about the threshold for justifiable snooping would be inversely linked with the perceived power of the subject in society. For instance, assuming the nation state lasts that long, politicians might reasonably expect scrutiny at all times and places.

Weirdos

How widespread is preference falsification? Do all members of a community secretly do that one taboo thing, each believing they’re the only one? If they do, perhaps their mental health would benefit if they knew they were not alone in that, and no longer had to maintain the secret. The journey towards omniveillance seems likely to trigger any such latent preference cascades that might exist. To me this sounds like a good thing.

On the other hand perhaps it really is just you that does that one weird thing. Depending on who else is in your community, your life could become very unpleasant if your preferences became widely known. More generally it’s conceivable that omniveillance could strengthen social control in some contexts.

On the upside that might mean better social cohesion and trust. On the downside it could mean increased persecution of outliers, dissidents and dissenters — more pressure to conform. While the inmates of Bentham’s panopticon modify their behaviour because of the presence of a distinct class of unseen observers, everyone in an omniveillance society is a potential victim of the tyranny of the aggregate.

I don’t think we can confidently cheer or jeer about the likely effects of an omniveillance society on human wellbeing yet. Like a Rorschach test, maybe one’s gut feeling about the outcomes of radical transparency will mirror their general affective stance towards other people.

Epistemic Effort: I thought about this on-and-off for three months. I spoke to three smart friends about technological challenges and likely social/political effects. I read papers on emerging decentralised alibi technology and surveillance theory. I spent about four hours writing different versions of this post. Everything written here is highly speculative.

What is free will?

Based on how I hear people use the term most often, I consider free will to be a quality an agent can possess such that the agent could have deliberately decided differently, for any actual decision they made. My complaint with compatibilism is that it doesn't speak to this sense of the term free will, which I believe is the most relevant because of how widespread it is.

By could have decided differently, I mean if the state of the universe was somehow rewound to just before I chose to drink that last beer, everything identical to the first time around, free will would make it possible for me to deliberately choose not to drink the beer instead.

Why is the deliberately part important in this definition? If we imagine a system in a person's head that resolved decisions solely on the basis of some kind of quantum randomness, there’s a sense in which that agent could have chosen differently in an identical universe, but they would not seem to be the authors of these differences. The differences wouldn’t be the product of deliberate thought, and so not the product of will. And since free will is a kind of will, we have to be able to describe its decisions as deliberate.

Could have deliberately decided differently

The Deliberately refers to the will part of free will. This is where the idea links to the continuity of the self, and an agent’s sense of owning the decision.

The Differently invokes the more mysterious free quality of free will, the idea that there’s some part of decision making that’s unconstrained by the prior state of the universe.

Will is prior brain state

A decision is mine, it’s the product of my will, to the extent that the prior state of my brain causes it. That state includes my preferences, habits of thought, memories, goals and everything else that makes me me.

To the extent that a decision is the product of anything else (which it would need to be, to be free in the relevant sense), it’s not recognisable as mine, not recognisable as a product of my will.

Will can’t be free, and free can’t be will.

How does free will reach its decisions?

For any decision there are three possibilities:

1. The decision is fully caused by the prior state of the universe, including the agent’s brain (determinism). This allows deliberacy, but not freedom in the free will sense. So this decision isn't the product of free will.
2. The decision is made entirely on the basis of non-deterministic randomness. This allows freedom but not deliberacy. So this decision can't be the product of free will either.
3. The decision is partly the product of the prior state of the universe, and partly the product of non-deterministic randomness.

In the case of possibility 3, neither contributing part can be called free will (prior state determinism on the one hand and randomness on the other). A decision making system that combines a bit of each of these doesn’t unlock the elusive power of could have deliberately decided differently either.

An analogy: A traffic control system might behave perfectly predictably given the same input. It makes simple decisions about how to control the stop lights at a junction. We don't get this system any closer to having free will by incorporating the results of a random number generator into its decisions, making them less predictable. This is true even if the RNG could harness something like quantum randomness.

What is going on?

We have a blind spot. We can’t be aware of the causes of the thoughts that we experience as the self. So to us these thoughts seem uncaused. Free will is the flattering illusion that the self is an uncaused cause.

Sometimes I talk with parents who are skeptical about the wisdom of allowing this freedom. One objection I hear is that school ought to prepare a child for the real world, and in the real world you often have to do things you’d rather not. The implication is school should get kids used to this reality by systematically requiring them to do things they’d rather not, and schools without mandatory classes and assignments fail to meet this requirement.

I'm going to talk about a few of the reasons this objection isn't compelling.

The real world?

I think the language of the objection is interesting. If school is preparation for the real world, then a child's world, while they are in school, is in some sense not real. This might seem like a trivial detail, but I think it reflects a common attitude that is harmful.

I believe children are already real people, living real lives, in the real world, whether they're in school or elsewhere. Their experience (including their suffering) during this time is as real as that of an adult.

The idea that children are not yet living real lives fits a tendency to unwittingly diminish and dismiss the experience of children and to treat them as less than full persons.

A less problematic way of phrasing the objection is that school prepares kids for later life. More on that idea in a minute. For now let's note that the costs and benefits of schooling, immediate as well as long-term, count and come to bear on real life, in the real world.

Here's Teacher Tom reflecting on the life/school dichotomy.

If we really want to prepare children for life, wouldn't that be better accomplished by letting them live it? When children are allowed to play together, when the adults are there to guide and inspire, rather than direct and judge, then they are really living the life that exists beyond the artificial confines of school.

In later life there's only one place like school

School is different from later life in ways that are relevant to the question of whether it's a good preparation for it.

In later life people don’t generally solve problems and do otherwise unnecessary work to gain the approval of an authority figure. Usually the work people do in later life is motivated, one way or another, by personal interest and/or a desire to improve a situation for oneself or for others.

This artificial arrangement in schools, I claim, alienates students from their innate curiosity, and encourages the suppression of natural interests. Here's Peter Gray.

Schools thwart passions by:

Requiring everyone to do the same things at the same time. It’s not possible for all the children in a room to be passionately interested in the same thing at the same time.

Replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivators, such as grades and trophies. To pursue a passion you have to focus on what YOU want to do, not try to impress others or win honors.

Threatening students with failure or embarrassment, which generates fear. Fear freezes the mind into rigid ways of thinking and negates the possibility of passionate interest.

Teaching that there is one right answer to every question, or one right way to do what you are supposed to do. That’s a surefire way to nip any possible emerging interest in the bud.

Teaching children that learning is work and that play, at best, is just a break from learning. But anyone involved in a passionate interest knows that play and learning and work are one and the same.

In later life you usually opt in to social settings, and can usually opt out again. Even if you take a job you dislike, you have the ability to save up and quit, and search for something else. On the other hand, a young child doesn’t generally choose his school. And once enrolled he cannot leave without his parents' cooperation. Unlike an adult, he's not free to exit a situation that's a bad fit for him.

Most adult lives don't include situations that are anything like being at school. Here's Peter Gray's provocative comparison.

The only difference I can think of is that to get into prison you have to commit a crime, but they put you in school just because of your age. In other respects school and prison are the same. In both places you are stripped of your freedom and dignity. You are told exactly what you must do, and you are punished for failing to comply. Actually, in school you must spend more time doing exactly what you are told to do than is true in adult prisons, so in that sense school is worse than prison.

Further still, the real world of today is very different from the real world of fifty years ago. The internet allows freedom of association to be exercised to a much greater degree than ever before. Meanwhile mainstream schooling has changed very little in the last fifty years. School was already very different from the real world, and it resembles it even less today than it did in previous eras.

Your real world or mine?

When a person worries that school is a necessary preparation for the real world they’re inevitably talking about ‘the world as I know it’.

In the real world as I know it, my school career has not been a helpful starting point. These following abilities have been crucial for my journey in adult life so far:

• The ability to freely follow my interests
• to be critical and express dissent,
• to exercise freedom of association and exit situations that weren’t optimal for me.

I've been able to do these things in spite of my school career, which incentivised:

• suppressing my interests
• self-censoring my dissenting views
• and resigning myself to spending every weekday with people I disliked.

First, do no harm

Even if school was similar to later life, it’s still not clear that it would be desirable as preparation for it.

If we believe a person will be systematically dehumanised, alienated from their work, and compelled to do things they don’t enjoy later in life (a disliked job), are we confident that we'd be helping this person by systematically dehumanising them, alienating them from their work, and compelling them to do things they don’t enjoy while they're a child? (traditional school).

The attitude of ‘this is just the way the world is, better get used to it’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Students habituated to asking permission and deferring to arbitrary authority will be less able, I claim, to change the world for the better.

Not walking the walk

Do people really believe that the hardships of school are good, character-forming preparation for real life? Often I’m not convinced that they do. Or at least there seem to be limits on how far this principle informs people's behaviour, and other considerations are more important.

I don't think parents making some version of the real world objection usually seek out the most authoritarian school in their locality, for instance, even though this one would be the best bet (the reasoning seems to go) for hardening their children up to weather the demands of bosses in uninspiring jobs later in life. Being hypocritical doesn't mean being wrong, but it seems that the real world objection isn't one that really motivates the people who make it.

Two environments

We want our children to be resilient, resourceful, inventive and able to delay gratification for long-term goals. These are the characteristics that will serve them well in the real world (and yes, that will include following directives from others when necessary). Which environment do you think is more likely to foster these traits?

1. An environment which requires a high degree of conformity. Where permission is required from an authority figure even to carry out basic body functions (eating, drinking, using the bathroom). Where the teacher is the final arbiter of ‘the right answers’, and your goal is to gain their approval by providing them.
2. An environment with a high degree of autonomy, where a child is responsible for figuring out what it is they want to do and doing it. Where they learn quickly because they've been allowed to follow a passion for the topic they're diving into. Where it’s up to the child to negotiate with others to realise their plans, with help from adults if they choose to seek it.

I'm convinced that if we want to prepare our children for the real world, we can do a lot better than sending them to school.

You don't own your body, you are your body!

There's no conflict between the two ideas. To varying degrees you are your body (you are your brain to a much greater degree than you are your little toe), while you are also the owner of your body. You have the exclusive right to determine how your body may be used. This is what ownership means, at least in the context of scarce rivalrous resources like human bodies.

Granting this, there’s no obvious difficulty with going further. If you own your brain, and also the lock of hair you cut from your head then perhaps you can be the owner of things physically more distant still. These owned things might include what some call the means of production.

Just because someone doesn’t want to get raped doesn’t mean they believe in “private property rights”.

I agree. I’m saying that people generally believe that they have a right to exclusively control how their body is used by others–not merely that they have preferences about how it may be used (they do have such preferences of course). That belief about a right to exclusive control is a belief in private ownership. When we talk about a right we’re talking about a claim that we believe the use of force is justified in enforcing (when enough people agree, this right will be reliably enforced).

If the idea of rights is a sticking point we can decompose the claim like this:

A person considers a thing his property if he believes he’s justified in using force to exclude others from its unauthorised use.

People consider themselves justified in excluding others from the unauthorised use of their bodies, so it's clear they consider their bodies to be their property.

I understand the impulse to oppose private property from a wish to improve the situation of the have-nots, and minimise the advantage of the haves. But I think this approach gets things backwards. The right to private property is one of the most important protections of the poor against the wealthy. Absent any legal protection of property rights, the advantage that the wealthier person has over the less wealthy one increases at least in the following sense: the wealthier of the two always has more means with which to take the poor person’s property by force. The institution of private property helps level the playing field to the advantage of the poor person.

If I had the power to persuade non-libertarians to read one book right now I’d choose The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer. It's a distillation of the most robust and compelling arguments against the legitimacy of the state I’ve come across in ten years of exploring the topic.

If you don’t self-identify as a libertarian before reading this with an open mind I wouldn't be surprised if you do three months after finishing it. At the very least you’ll have gained an appreciation for the most powerful arguments for libertarianism and you can truthfully say you gave the idea a fair chance.

If you already self-identify as a libertarian the book is valuable too. As well as rebutting a greater breadth of pro-state and anti-anarchy arguments than I’ve seen collected elsewhere, it’s a great illustration of the value of defending anti-statism by relying on the reader’s desire for coherence in their moral judgements. The author begins by finding common ground with the reader: agreement about the conditions under which the interpersonal use of violence is condemnable. He proceeds by carefully examining each of the strongest attempts to show that the state’s use of violence is different in some ethically significant way to the violence that we condemn. All the arguments examined are demonstrated to be insufficient to the task of rescuing the state from our condemnation.

The arguments challenging the state's legitimacy never depend on the reader accepting a controversial premise (such as the existence of natural rights, or of free will, or the truth of a particular ethical theory). This is the same approach I tried to take with my George Ought to Help series of animations.

The chapter on the Psychology of Authority is particularly interesting to me. Huemer examines well-documented cognitive biases to provide an account of why so many people are in thrall to a cognitive illusion (the belief in the right of the state to coerce) that’s at odds with their foundational moral intuitions.

The second part of the book is dedicated to outlining the ways that market anarchy would solve the problems of providing the goods of law and its enforcement, and national defence. The final chapter surveys historical evidence to derive a set of conditions under which anarchic zones could be expected to emerge and thrive in a world initially dominated by states.

Previously I’d recommended The Machinery of Freedom (PDF, Paperback) by David Friedman and Chaos Theory by Robert Murphy as great texts that introduce the ideas of libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism. In my view The Problem of Political Authority is superior to either. It’s more comprehensive, easy to read, scholarly, humble and reasonable in its argumentation. I’ll be recommending this one until something even better comes along.

In an interview Milton Friedman said:

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

This is close to the truth. And the simplification might be appropriate when comparing free trade against coercion as an organising principle. But it's missing an important qualifier, and the more thoughtful critics of markets will notice. Here's how Walter Block qualifies it, emphasis added.

Each and every trade is mutually beneficial in the ex ante, or anticipatory, sense. That is, if I trade you fifty cents for a newspaper, we each value the other’s possession higher than our own.

Each party in a voluntary trade expects to be better off for having made it. That mutual expectation is why the exchange happens without the need for coercion. But expected benefit isn't the same as realised benefit.

Discrepancy between expected benefit and actual benefit can have three kinds of cause:

1. The seller commits fraud, misrepresenting the thing he sells: it turns out that the goose doesn't lay golden eggs.

2. The product was fairly represented, but the buyer makes an error of judgment. A year later it's clear that the product he bought didn't benefit him enough to offset the opportunity cost of having bought it.

3. The buyer knew about all the undisputed features of the product (price, physical characteristics, performance data etc), and wouldn't have made the purchase, had it not been for skillful promotional messaging on the part of the seller.

The three kinds of outcome aren't sharply delineated. Two and three can fully overlap. I'm most interested in the third, because I think it represents the most interesting challenge to proponents of free markets, like me.

Fraud

Libertarians generally believe the use of coercion in response to fraud is legitimate. So we grant that the first item is a valid concern, and advocate institutional enforcement of rules (laws) against fraud and/or the use of soft social disincentives to fraud such as reputation systems.

Mistakes

In a world of imperfect knowledge we accept that people will make mistakes, including making trades that they later regret. In this context we realise that expected benefit is the best motivation available to plan-making humans, there can be no certainty of benefit. So regretted trades aren't a special defect of markets. They're just the kind of mistakes that humans make routinely anyway. In a market economy they'll often be made in the context of trade.

To the extent that property rights are enforced, the costs of trade mistakes are borne by those who make them. This arrangement minimises perverse incentives and systemic risk, which are commensurate with the degree of top-down political control in society.

PSYOP

Most interesting to me is the case where real benefit doesn't match expected benefit because of a particular kind of promotional messaging on the part of the seller. Think of famous contemporary organisations with marketing departments.

In terms of what marketing departments do, we can imagine two non-exclusive dimensions: fact conveyance and PSYOP.

Fact conveyance means broadcasting the existence of a good/service and describing what that thing is in relatively objective terms. This dimension roughly corresponds to transparently appealing to reason - "Our product helps solve problem X thanks to features Y and Z".

PSYOP stands for psychological operations. Here I'm using the term to mean designing messages that interact with the unconscious minds of your audience with the intent of increasing sales. PSYOP roughly corresponds to covert manipulation of emotion and what has been called affective advertising.

Here's one example of successful PSYOP from Robert George Heath.

In 2001 the struggling communications network, Cellnet, was relaunched as O2 using a campaign with the vacuous message ‘O2: see what you can do.’ The advert featured blue water with bubbles bubbling through it, people flirting and floating around, fluttering doves, a dog catching a ball, and some lilting music in the background.

There was absolutely no mention of the network quality or coverage or tariffs or handsets, because O2 was no better than anyone else on these. Yet despite being a failing brand, and having absolutely no performance advantage, O2 went from last to first in the market in just four years.

More importantly, an industry analysis of this launch concluded their success was entirely due to the ads, which had encouraged people to feel that O2 was “calm and serene, the antithesis to clutter and chaos, a contrast to the often frenetic world around mobile phones”.

Fact conveyance can help buyers find solutions to their problems, a clear benefit with no obvious downside. On the other hand brand PSYOP could be harmful to consumer benefit on net (even while we may enjoy a well-crafted affective advert).

Defending the advertiser?

In Defending the Undefendable (1976) Walter Block wrote:

Subliminal advertising, if it exists, would be considered coercive. But it cannot be claimed that ordinary advertising is coercive without completely obliterating the distinction between coercion and persuasion.

Perhaps things were different in 1976. Whether or not subliminal advertising is properly considered coercive, in 2019 (in the internet age) ordinary advertising routinely has a subliminal element - in the sense of content that exerts influence without reaching the subject's conscious awareness. I don't think a hard distinction between subliminal advertising and other kinds is tenable anymore.

the main fallacy of the critics — the assumption that deep down, there is a distinction to be made between motivational advertising and informational advertising, that motivational advertising is "bad" in various ways while informational advertising is "good." The truth is, however, that exposing people to information and motivating them are so inextricably bound up together that it makes little sense to even distinguish between them.

Block's claim that information cannot be separated from the way it's conveyed, packaged, is true and may help the case in defense of the advertiser, but it doesn't speak to the possibility that PSYOP can invalidate the generalisation that voluntary trade is mutually beneficial.

Confabulation

PSYOP techniques might not even have a bearing on expected benefit. That concept belongs to the domain of conscious deliberation and belief. Skilled emotional manipulation can work instead at the subconscious level. A marginal buyer, one who only just decided to buy the product, may have been tipped over the edge by a cannily constructed sentence or image (or the collective influence of thousands of them) that made them feel more favourably towards the product for reasons they can't articulate.

Stronger still, expected benefit is a much less important component of our buying decisions than we believe. Here's Fiery Cushman's article about confabulation.

We are shockingly ignorant of the causes of our own behavior. The explanations that we provide are sometimes wholly fabricated, and certainly never complete. Yet, that is not how it feels. Instead it feels like we know exactly what we're doing and why. This is confabulation: Guessing at plausible explanations for our behavior, and then regarding those guesses as introspective certainties.

When we are outside the laboratory — and when our brains have all the usual connections — most behaviors that we perform are the product of some combination of deliberate thinking and automatic action. [...] The problem is that we get all of our explanations partly right, correctly identifying the conscious and deliberate causes of our behavior. Unfortunately, we mistake "partly right" for "completely right", and thereby fail to recognize the equal influence of the unconscious, or to guard against it.

Red queen

Under competition in a free market firms will be under strong pressure to use PSYOP. To the extent that these marketing practices become widespread in a society, a systemic gap can open between voluntary trade and mutual benefit.

From this perspective, free market advocates might appear naive. We've noticed the capacity for voluntary exchange to deliver mutual benefit (at least in the anticipatory sense, and under conscious deliberation) but overlook that that's not the only dynamic at play.

Left-leaning commentators have made a similar complaint. Their concern is often the perceived incentives of businesses to maltreat workers and the shared environment under a laissez-faire regime. I think this underestimates the capacity of strict property rights, private law, and market forces to remedy both concerns.

Certain kinds of voluntary exchange will tend to deliver mutual benefit. But free market rhetoric tends to overlook a countervailing tendency: the Darwinian pressure of the market in favor of firms that are skilled at exploiting the idiosyncrasies of human brains, not necessarily at aligning with our highest values. Individual firms who want to buck the trend put themselves at a disadvantage and are less likely to survive. Collectively enormous energy is spent without progress, but any individual refusing to participate will be left behind.

How bad could the situation get?

Observing myself, it seems like some of the market exchanges I participate in are much more susceptible to PSYOP influence than others.

Social media platforms are a well-documented example of PSYOP-rich environments: with millions of users, it makes sense for tech giants to endlessly iterate on subliminal conversion-enhancing tweaks to their software. Through the use of A/B tests, developers and designers needn't even understand why their adjustments work to encourage the behaviour they want. I understand that my strong impulse to check my phone for notifications isn't a fluke.

In other domains my prefrontal cortex is much more heavily involved, and the room for successful PSYOP is minimal. This includes any costly purchases that I've felt motivated to research before buying. So at least for now the scope for successful PSYOP is limited.

Counter PSYOP as a market opportunity

The same market that incentivises PSYOP also creates factors that limit its power and scope. There is a growing awareness of the potential harm of this kind of manipulation, and a demand for ways to circumvent it.

Books and commentary

Self help books such as Digital Minimalism Thinking, Fast and Slow and Essentialism help readers to understand their minds and live intentionally, both of which will tend to undermine marketing PSYOP.

Many critical articles have been written about social media's behavioural influence too. A general demand for novelty means there'll always be an audience curious to hear about the potential undesirable effects of systems that are widely used.

Intentionality aids

Beeminder is a website that charges you money when you fail to stick to your stated goals. One of its taglines taglines is 'Be a slave to your second-order desires'. One of Beeminder's example use cases is the goal spend less time on facebook.

Another class of products and services promise to foster internal awareness. A mindful brain, aware too of internal changes, is less easy to manipulate. There's been an explosion of apps for developing mindfulness skills. And there are devices for the deliberate manipulation of your brain state.

Information sentries

Humans brains are jury-rigged. Our neo-cortexes work in concert with neural structures we inherited from our ancient ancestors. This arrangement makes us vulnerable to skillful marketing manipulation. But future AI's needn't suffer from this deficiency - they may not be faithfully neuromorphic. Perhaps there'll be an era in which AI assistants granularly curate information generated by other minds for us. A kind of memetic firewall. The information they present to us will be tailored to be maximally beneficial to us, however we end up defining beneficial. I don't know if general intelligence would be required for this role, if so we still have the alignment problem to contend with.

Conclusion

I hold these beliefs with regard to the claim that voluntary exchange (always) benefits both parties in the ex ante sense. I hope the preceding discussion explains these items to your satisfaction. I'm very happy to hear arguments against any of them that I haven't mentioned above.

1. It is false that voluntary exchange (always) benefits both parties in the ex ante sense. At least some voluntary exchanges are precipitated by factors not under conscious control, and thus not sensitive to expectation of benefit in the usually understood sense. Medium confidence

2. It can't be apodictically shown that voluntary exchange is more often mutually beneficial than it is one-sided (in part because of PSYOP and subconscious influence). High confidence

3. On net, voluntary exchange (with PSYOP) currently results in more good than harm. High confidence

4. At least in our pre-super-AI era, a pervasive PSYOP-driven dystopia is unlikely. (After this era, all bets are off). High confidence

5. In this era, incentives inherent to the market create human behavior that limits the power and scope of PSYOP. High confidence

The statistics

Given the cultural, economic, political differences between countries, international comparisons of violence and gun ownership are of very limited use. Even so, many are again making the claim that international data regarding gun ownership and violence supports the case for more restrictive gun prohibition. Even if trends in the data were capable of supporting such a conclusion, it doesn’t appear to be the case. The plot below compares homicide rate against gun ownership rate.

When all countries are plotted, there’s a negative correlation between gun ownership and homicide rate. Only when the plot is limited to OECD countries (with the outliers of US and Mexico included), does a very small positive correlation appear.

And if those outliers are removed, the trend is strongly negative again.

The total homicide rate is more relevant than the gun homicide rate

Why do the plots use overall homicide rate? Because we should be interested in the total effect that gun ownership might have. For example: Easy access to a firearm may be the dispositive factor that leads the marginal killer (the person who very nearly didn’t kill, and if things had been slightly different, wouldn’t have) to commit a crime — increasing the homicide rate. But firearms are also used defensively, and the suspicion that a victim may be armed is a powerful deterrent for attackers — in these ways guns decrease the homicide rate.

Hypotheticals

To put it another way: Imagine that one legally owned gun is added to a population and that this coincides with a small increase in gun related deaths but a huge reduction in overall killings. The gun would be improving conditions in that population, while a narrow focus on gun death statistics would misleadingly paint the opposite picture.

Or imagine that a country banned all private gun ownership. Gun ownership dropped to zero. But emboldened criminals began carrying out deadly knife attacks at a far greater rate than before. Gun homicides were now at zero, but total homicides had risen by 400%. Things have gotten much worse, and if we only look at gun deaths, we’re overlooking that entirely.

So we want the metric we use to be able to capture the potential ways that gun ownership makes things better as well as worse. Total homicides is the more relevant figure to use.

Opposing tendencies

We’ll ignore international statistics now, and just reflect on what we know about how people behave. Would more restrictive government prohibition of guns in the US make things better or worse with regard to the killing of innocent people? We don’t know.

There are some outcomes of gun prohibition that we can predict with a fair degree of confidence. But some of these outcomes will increase overall killings, and others will decrease them. We don’t know which tendency would prevail.

In favour of more restrictive prohibition of guns we can point to likely outcomes that would give a reduction in the rate and severity of harm to innocents. These outcomes include:

1. Fewer gun accidents.
2. Fewer deadly crimes of passion.
3. The marginal killer may find it harder to obtain a gun, which could save lives.

Against the prohibition of guns, there are outcomes that would give an increase in the rate and severity of harm to innocents. The outcomes include:

1. At any time, there will be a higher proportion of law-breaking aggressors with guns, relative to law-abiding people with guns, than if guns were more widely available legally.
2. Because of 1, anyone considering carrying out an armed attack would be less worried about being injured or killed while doing so. They would be emboldened, and so more likely to carry out such an attack.
3. Because of 1, any mass shooting which does occur is likely to last longer and harm or kill more people, since there’s less likely to be a person on the scene with a firearm who could stop the shooter.
4. In an area in which many people demand guns (such as the US), prohibition will result in a boom in black market guns, and an associated increase in violent gang activity both domestically and abroad. If the government declares a ‘War on guns’ in response, we should expect it to be a similar failure as the ‘War on drugs’ is. Just like the ‘War on drugs’, a ‘War on guns’ will result in the loss of many innocent lives.
5. Gun prohibition creates a greater likelihood of democide. Which, in the 20th century claimed many times more lives than were ended by ‘private’ murders. Most democides are carried out against members of populations that have been legally disarmed beforehand.

The meds

The perpetrators of school shootings, the kind of murder that most reliably makes the headlines, are very often taking medications known to lead to murderous psychotic episodes in a minority of people. At the scale at which these drugs are prescribed in the US, it’s not surprising that school shootings happen as often as they do.

Perhaps the activists hoping to change the world for the better might spend their energies more effectively by directing their attention to medication practices, and the incentives of pharmaceutical companies in the US.

There’s an underlying assumption that if there is a right to healthcare, everyone (including the poorest) can get medical help. But that’s not true. A right to healthcare, as we know it, actually means something like: Everyone is enrolled in a system that controls the dispensation of healthcare. The system rations out healthcare services on a basis other than the patient’s ability to pay money for them.

That’s an important difference. It means that a person can die while waiting for healthcare, under a system in which they have a hypothetical right to healthcare. And it can mean that a person may die because a certain treatment is not available under the local system, despite there being a local right to healthcare.

Thought experiment

Imagine two societies. Society A is very prosperous. There is a competitive healthcare sector. There is an abundance of healthcare practitioners. Medical technology is sophisticated and ubiquitous. Procedures are cheap. The rate of charitable giving is high, and mutual aid fraternities mitigate health expenditure risks for workers in most professions. There is also no right to healthcare.

Society B is very poor compared to A. In the healthcare sector, a government-supported medical cartel artificially restricts the supply of healthcare workers. New treatments are very slow to become available because of an approval system that penalises decision makers for being too lax but not for being overly cautious. In society B though there is a right to healthcare.

In society A again: If a poor person gets ill they usually pay a small amount (perhaps appealing to a charitable organisation for aid or their mutual aid society if necessary) and receive prompt, high quality care.

In society B if a poor person gets ill they interact with the local healthcare system which rations medical care. Usually this means being put on a waiting list. It's a regular occurrence that patients die while on such a list. Eventually, patients who survive will be treated by overworked, distracted doctors who often make mistakes – sometimes with lethal consequences. Others will die because the treatment they need isn’t available under this system. Private care is a much more expensive alternative than in society A, well out of reach for a poor person.

Focus on the right target

If this isn't enough already, feel free to imaginatively make conditions in society B even worse. The point is that we can imagine a society in which there's no right to healthcare, but in which the poor are nevertheless better off than under another society in which there is such a right. So it’s not a right to healthcare itself that's important.

What we should be interested in is maximising the degree to which high quality healthcare is actually available to everyone in society. And a right to healthcare has no necessary connection to that outcome, despite sounding like a guarantee of it.

A cascade of heuristics

In the world as it is, I believe:

• Any move towards anarcho-capitalism will tend to
• Minimise monopolies. Which will tend to
• Improve general wellbeing. Which will tend to
• Satisfy my personal preferences.

Each of the heuristics above earns its keep commensurate with how well I believe it facilitates the step beneath. These are heuristics that won't deliver an optimal result in every case, but I believe they'll give a superior result to alternative systems, and that moving through the cascade as a whole will tend to give better results than attempting to skip any of the steps it contains.

Virtual?

I'll summarise quickly why I'm not a believer (at least not in the fullest sense) in libertarian natural law. Natural law ancaps like Rothbard advocate an order in which private property is universally respected/enforced, along neo-Lockean lines.

I believe natural law theorists fall short in their attempts to establish that rights are anything but agreements between people about how they must treat one another. I think that rationalist attempts to deduce an objective ethical code from the nature of man, or from the facts of argumentation fail too. To me, social constructivist and moral nihilist accounts of rights and ethics are much more compelling, because of their parsimony and explanatory power.

Natural-law indeterminism

Before it can be of any use in the world, natural-law needs a set of inherently subjective line-drawing decisions, to make identifying rights violations possible. These are known as continuum problems. The dependence of natural-law on the content of these rulings for its implementation means it has an inherent indeterminism — we don’t know what a real world implementation of natural rights would look like, because that would depend to a very large extent on how private judges draw lines.

I wrote more about this in the post NAPI. Non-aggression principle insufficiency.

That all said, if I assume the kinds of rulings that writers on natural law also seem to assume (as I will do from now on in this post), I agree with the ancap rationalists that a neo-Lockean private property order would be desirable in relation to the status quo. I disagree with their view that it's possible to reach that conclusion through deductive reason.

A Schelling point

Natural rights are a fiction in my view, but strike me as a relatively good Schelling point for a governing norm; We have strong and agreeing intuitions about examples of legitimate property, and about unacceptable violence and theft, in many contexts. These intuitions accord with the prescriptions of neo-Lockean property rights. People prefer consistency in their moral judgements, and a natural law approach can satisfy that need well; Better, I claim, than either statist legal positivism, or 'we the people' mysticism can.

Why do I advocate for a set of rules that are dependent on fictions, rather than for the 'raw' moral nihilism that I believe is true, instead?

1. Compared to advocating for ancap, energetically advocating moral nihilism seems likely to move the world by a lesser distance towards an outcome I strongly prefer (general wellbeing).
2. People want to know how to act. And moral nihilism isn't any use for answering that question. I believe moral fictionalism is the appropriate fix. Here's roughly how it works out in my own life: I 'pretend' that moral facts exist – this is easy because this make-believe accords with my moral feelings, and usually with those of the people around me. This allows me to better realise my preferences.

So from one angle, my ethical/political stack looks roughly like this:
My subjective preferences -> running moral fictionalism -> running rule consequentialism -> running ancap.

Prospects of change

Even if ancap is a possible Schelling point, we do currently have representative democracy (generalising), and not anarcho-capitalism. What grounds are there for supposing that a shift in governance in that direction is possible?

'Underthrow' technologies (synergistically social and digital) are emerging that undermine the state's ability to wield coercive power, in all kinds of subtle ways. They're bringing exit from its systems ever more conveniently within reach. As this trend progresses there's less and less reason for the state's subjects to rationalize their victimisation. These forces may move us to an inflection point from which we'll leave behind the forms of governance we're habituated to.

Anti-monopolism

The sanctity of rights, while very important shouldn't be our paramount concern. Consider Robinson Crusoe: Close to starvation, alone on an island, with his natural rights uninfringed on. Crusoe is arguably worse off than he would be if he was a typical citizen under a (natural-rights violating) representative democracy today.

William Nava has a podcast episode where he talks about his belief that free market advocates should be more interested in minimising monopolies than in ensuring the sanctity of property rights. I agree, sort of.

In the episode he sets out a thought experiment in which landlords in an ancap order have gotten ownership of large contiguous areas of land, and form a conglomerate. Because the territory is so large, the renters of property within it face high costs if they want to leave. The way I'd frame the scenario is that the relative difficulty and high cost of leaving means that the owners of the land can get away with imposing more restrictions on the freedoms of the persons living there than we're used to under existing representative democratic regimes. I agree that this situation might be much worse than what we have now, even though no one's rights have been violated according to natural-law.

To a very large extent, it's competition between providers of goods and services that makes our lives better. Monopolies are the antithesis of this competition, but they are compatible with ancap.

I don’t want a private property society for its own sake, I want one because I think it’s the order that would best satisfy my preferences for wellbeing, because it will tend to minimise monopoly power (the opposite of what newly minted critics of ancap reflexively assume). If I came to believe that another system would do a better job of minimising monopoly, all else somehow equal, I would advocate for that approach instead.

A benevolent superhuman AI monopolist

Anti-monopolism is also a heuristic. It may not always be the case that minimising monopoly is best for human well-being. Imagine a superhuman AI without typical human failings, with no competitors, managing the production of goods and services for humans. This AI incorporates preference-satisfaction and opportunity cost feedback into its calculations by a mechanism we can’t currently imagine. It’s not obvious that this situation would be improved with the addition of a competing food provider – it might even be made worse because of inefficient resource use.

I don't want to minimise monopolies because of badness that's intrinsic to them, but because monopolies (especially in the context of the world as we know it) tend to hurt wellbeing; They result in higher prices and poorer quality of service than tend to obtain under conditions of competition.

Uncertainty

In this sketch I hope to have shown how my ethical and socio-political beliefs hang together at the moment. They might change. Compared to other things I've written, I'm a good deal less certain about the ideas I've expressed here. If I change my mind sufficiently in the future on any of this I'll write a new post and link to it below.

Further reading

Emergence of Individual Property Rights Among Humans
The Property Strategy
Property is Not Just a Social Construct

The problem is not that the NAP gets the important basics right and supplemental detail can be derived in other ways. NAPI means recognising that the NAP is completely dependent on integration with subjective, contingent legal opinion. Without this arbitrary line drawing, the NAP has nothing to say about the permissibility of any action in the world. For instance, the NAP alone is insufficient to conclude that taxation is theft.

What the NAP means

Here Murray Rothbard explains the NAP (emphasis added).

No one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.

So the NAP forbids aggression, which resolves to 'violence against another man’s person or property', which in turn resolves to 'anything that violates property rights'.

The indeterminate NAP

Natural-law libertarians like Rothbard uphold a neo-Lockean view of property rights. But in order to derive a judgement about permissibility of any real-world action from this theory, a set of questions about line drawing need to be answered. And it isn’t clear how the answers to this set can be derived from theory. For instance:

• Exactly how visible must a property boundary be? How should its visibility be tested?
• How long must a property be vacant, and under what circumstances, in order to be considered abandoned?
• How much 'labour’, and of what kind, must be 'mixed with the land' in order for it to be considered homesteaded?

David Friedman has some excellent illustrations of NAPI towards the end of his book The Machinery of Freedom, in the chapter with the opaque title ‘Problems’.

If I fire a thousand megawatt laser beam at your front door I am surely violating your property rights, just as much as if I used a machine gun. But what if I reduce the intensity of the beam—say to the brightness of a flashlight?

We likely agree that it’d be unreasonable and undesirable to prohibit photon trespass in the case of very low light levels. That means that there must be some threshold of intensity below which emitting light that reaches your neighbour should be permissible. What is that threshold? Neither natural law, nor the NAP tells us.

Carbon dioxide is a pollutant. It is also an end product of human metabolism. If I have no right to impose a single molecule of pollution on anyone else's property, then I must get the permission of all my neighbors to breathe.

Again, nobody is an advocate of a regime in which a person must get permission to breathe. So implicitly we have an idea of an acceptable level of pollution and an unacceptable level. The NAP doesn’t help us find the proper place to draw that line.

A similar problem arises if we consider effects that are small not in size but in probability. Suppose I decide to play Russian roulette, with one small innovation; after putting one cartridge in my revolver and spinning the cylinder, I point it at your head instead of at mine before pulling the trigger. [...]
what if the revolver has not six chambers but a thousand or a million?
[...]
I take off from an airport in a private plane with a cruising radius of a thousand miles. […] There is some probability that the plane, […] will crash. There are things I can do which will reduce these probabilities, but not to zero. It follows that by taking off I impose some (small) probability of death and destruction on everyone through whose roof I might crash.

We would like to forbid the involuntary game of Russian roulette, but perhaps not the plane flight. So we’d like to draw the line of permissibility somewhere between the two. Notice again that the NAP has nothing to say about the extent to which we should allow exposing other people to the risk of harm without their consent.

From the NAP to taxation is theft?

Does the NAP forbid taxation at least?

On its own, no. If the state was the rightful owner of the land on which its subjects live, it's plausible that taxation is legitimate (meaning permitted, by the lights of libertarian natural-law). The NAP offers no way of testing the claim that the state is the rightful owner of the land.

• This is because it doesn’t specify homesteading criteria in any testable way
• it doesn’t specify the conditions under which property should be considered abandoned by its previous owner
• It doesn’t specify how restitution should be handled (if at all) in the case of rights violations.
• It doesn’t say anything about how historic misdeeds committed by long-dead agents of a trans-generational institution must be remedied.

All of these questions will involve arbitrary line drawing, and subjective opinion.

The significance of NAPI for libertarian rhetoric

The incompleteness of the NAP is significant for libertarian rhetoric. Most claims relating to whether a behaviour violates the NAP are underdetermined.

That's because the NAP provides no guidance on the permissibility of any given behaviour, until it's allied with  subjective and contingent rulings about where to draw lines on gradients. By that I mean rulings on questions of this sort: "what degree of caused physical change constitutes legally significant 'transformation' or 'trespass'".

So contrary to what Rothbard believed, deriving rules about permissible action isn’t a project that can be carried out through the unadulterated application of “reason and rational inquiry”.

The libertarian NAP invoker unwittingly shirks the messy duty of defending the locations of all the implicit lines that his conclusion, like ‘taxation is theft’, has to assume.

Further reading

• The Non-Aggression Principle Can’t Be Salvaged—and Isn’t Even a Principle by Julian Sanchez.
• NAPs Are for Babies by Michael Huemer
• Continuums by Walter Block.

P2. For all other people, there must be a very strong case for using violence, or the threat of violence, against them before we sanction doing so.

P3. Credible threats of violence against citizens are inherent to taxation.

P4. We don’t have a very strong case for having the state threaten violence against its peaceful subjects.

C. Until such a case is presented, we should treat taxation as unjustified because of the threats of violence inherent to it.

Common Objections to P3

Objections here tend to follow this form:

“I don’t understand how desirable outcome X would obtain without taxation, therefore taxation is necessary to secure this outcome.”

Even if we ignore that this is an appeal to ignorance fallacy (or a special case of denying the precedent), it would still need to be compellingly shown that desirable outcomes X, Y and Z should be given more collective weight than the prima facie undesirability of the mass threats of violence that taxation is predicated on.

Objections in this category are inadequate twice-over. They don’t constitute the very strong case we need.

The Abolition of Slavery Illustrates the Principle

At one time, activists advocated that massive numbers of slaves be freed. This had never happened before on a comparable scale. No one knew for certain what the effect on society would be. Some feared chaos and ruin, and pointed to the apparent economic advantages of using slave labour.

Ultimately, slavery was condemned nonetheless. The moral motivation for abolishing slavery can be framed in terms of the weak argument above: We treat slavery as illegitimate because it entails threatening peaceful people with violence, without a strong justification for that violence.

In mid November, a person dressed-up as Saint Nicholas ‘arrives’ in the Netherlands, on a steam boat, having ostensibly sailed from Spain. For many Dutch children it’s a celebration filled with wonder and excitement. De Sint is accompanied by helpers. They are called Zwarte Pieten, in English, Black Petes. The people dressed as Zwarte Pieten are usually pale-skinned, they wear boot polish to blacken their faces.

In the Netherlands there are strong conflicts of opinion about the appropriateness of the Zwarte Piet element of the celebration. Opponents of the tradition say that it’s racist. Here’s how one explains it:

A friendly white boss who has only jolly black slaves is no accident, but a consequence of historical events that were horrible and often deadly for people of African descent.

Supporters of the Zwarte Piet tradition say that it does no harm. That it should be maintained as part of Dutch cultural heritage. That their personal attitude towards people with dark skin has not been affected by the tradition. That as children they never even read the blackfaces as representing black people. One of the more naive sounding defences is that the black is actually chimney soot.

Bad Arguments From Both Camps

Some who want to see the tradition continue charge that their activist opponents are trying to 'destroy a children's celebration'. This is the appeal to emotion fallacy; I believe nostalgic adults are far more attached to the character of Zwarte Piet than children are. And the children's celebration would live on if the only alteration was the removal of the blackface.

In support of the pro-Pete camp on the other hand, I agree that the Zwarte Piet tradition isn’t inherently racist. At least if racism is taken to mean a belief that within humanity certain biological groups are inferior to others – the most defensible definition in my view. No image or performance can be inherently racist in this sense. Images or rituals don’t hold beliefs, only people do.

An alternative sense of racist could be something like ‘antagonistic towards members of a particular race’. But this definition doesn’t fit the reality of the Zwarte Piet ritual as currently practised either. While many feel as though it’s offensive, even they do not claim (as far as I’ve seen) that participants in the ritual necessarily aim to cause upset.

Perhaps what the anti-Piet activists mean is that the Zwarte Piet tradition causes racism. I think that would be a very tough case to make, in my opinion implausible on its face. I don’t see anyone even starting to do the work to establish such a claim.

Here's my attempt to steel man the case for anti-Piet activism:

The Black Pete tradition is a painful reminder of the suffering of black people in the past. We find it distasteful that this symbol is now part of a celebratory ritual in the Netherlands.

In my opinion, the anti-Piet activists would serve their cause much more effectively if they would limit their propaganda efforts to emphasising how the ritual makes them feel, rather than making the highly contestable claim that Zwarte Piet is racist.

Neither Side Appreciates Value Subjectivity

Anti-Piet activists claim that the ritual is hurtful, and offensive – as though these were mind-independent qualities of the Zwarte Piet celebration. Of course some people are hurt and claim offence. But the same is true about the anti-Piet demonstrations. These also hurt and offend some people, including those who feel shamed by the demonstrations, and those who feel as though a beloved tradition is at risk of being banned. So if Zwarte Piet is hurtful and offensive (which I think is a misleading way of talking about it), so are the activities of the activists opposing it. This doesn't get us anywhere.

Similarly, members of the pro-Piet crowd have dismissed or diminished the hurt and anger felt by those opposed to the ritual. "You're getting worked up about this of all things?" As though there was a standard by which unwelcome emotions can be judged against to determine their validity – and these emotions have failed the test.

Worse Than It Needs To Be

We have two groups with opposing views about the appropriateness of this tradition. The stakes of the conflict are raised by the poisonous involvement of the state.

At least the main Saint Nicholas celebration – an event that's televised – is a state-subsidised event. If a private group expresses an opinion one finds distasteful it’s disturbing, but we at least know that we don’t have to associate with that group or person anymore. But when an entity that claims to represent you in some meaningful way compels you, under threat of force, to subsidise speech that you find distasteful in the extreme, hurtful and offensive it’s intolerable.

In 2011, a guy wearing a tee-shirt with words ‘Zwarte Piet is Racism’ was part of the crowd at the ceremonial arrival of Sint Nicholas in Dordrecht. A peaceful expression of opinion. He was subjected to police brutality and arrested.

So the state:

1. Artificially amplifies and promotes a ritual by subsidising it, to an extent unrelated to the aggregate value the public places on having the ritual continue.
2. Violently suppresses peaceful speech that opposes a hated ritual.

Prices and trading activity under freed market conditions embody, and are highly reactive to, information about what people value, and how much they value it. As far as matching resource use to people’s values, state subsidies are shots in the dark because of their isolation from market forces. In other words, we don’t know whether the state subsidy of the whole celebration represents a net gain or loss of subjective value to society.

A Partial Solution

What’s the solution? The logic of statism results in two equally unsatisfactory options:

1. Use threats of force to fund the Zwarte Piet tradition, and suppress speech that opposes it.
2. Use threats of force to prevent the practising of the Zwarte Piet ritual itself.

I believe there's a third option which is simpler, saner, and – while not the definitive resolution some might hope for – a step towards deescalating this culture war:

Remove state funding of the Zwarte Piet ritual. Don’t force anyone to pay for speech they oppose. Let go of the harmful idea that 'we', as a nation, must at all costs come to agreement on matters like the acceptability of cultural expressions like this one.

Those groups who strongly want to see the Zwarte Piet ritual continue will fund local events on their own. Those who don’t much care either way will likely not see the ritual – and won’t miss it. And one less injustice will be foisted on those who would never voluntarily support the ritual and would be glad to see it die out.

The thief and the farm

Here’s a thought experiment described by Chase Rachels. This is not presented as a good analogy for border control in general, but it helps establish a couple of principles that are useful for thinking about state-imposed border policy. More on that later.

Imagine that a thief steals a large amount of money from persons A, B, and C. Imagine that he uses the money to have a farm built, and imagine that the farm is the only valuable thing that the thief has to his name. For whatever reason, the theft isn’t corrected, the thief isn’t brought to justice, his victims don’t get their money back.

Which policy sees more justice done?

Consider two different approaches that the thief could take to the management of the farm and notice which approach you think delivers a greater degree of justice.

1. Against the unanimous wishes of the victims, the thief allows all-comers to use the farm as they wish, turning it into an effective commons.
2. In accordance with the unanimous wishes of the victims, the thief allows only the three victims to freely use the farm. He excludes anyone else from using it, using force if necessary to do so.

I believe the policy of exclusion is clearly better, no matter how many people the thief ends up forcefully excluding. I hope you agree.

Implications

Assuming you agree, this view has implications that are relevant to thinking about border policy controlled by a state:

1. A resource created or improved using stolen funds, at least under some circumstances, should be considered the property of the victims of the theft. To see this is true consider the following: If a resource created this way should always be considered unowned there could be no justification for preferring the thief to violently exclude an arbitrarily large number of people from its use; These exclusions would be new rights violations, and at some point these new violations, taken together, must be more severe than the injustice suffered by the original victims of theft.
2. Partial restitution doesn’t need to be made in the form of money to be effective. It can also be made by implementing use rules for the resource that the victims like more, instead of rules they like less.

The borders controlled by the state

Libertarians agree that the state violates the rights of many people on an ongoing basis through taxation, war, prosecution of victimless crimes and other predations.

These violations entitle the victims of the state to restitution from that state.

What about restitution in the form of fiat currency?

Critics of the first article often proposed that restitution could be made in the form of a transfer of fiat currency.

But since the desirability of fiat currency is contingent on the state violating the rights of taxpayers in the future by demanding taxes denominated in the local units – it’s unlikely that people would choose to hold and accept it otherwise – awards in the form of fiat currency are not suitable as restitution.

Developed public property is owned by victims

The most appropriate asset the state controls that can be used for restitution is developed public land.

The state can provide some restitution to a victim by permitting them to use public property. But in many cases this compensation doesn’t seem likely to cover the whole of the debt. Here’s another hypothetical that I hope helps to support that intuition:

If I used the threat of violence to get you to work for me every Thursday, and used your forced labour to build a tree house, I don’t believe my debt to you would be absolved by permitting you to merely use the tree house afterwards. At minimum, Justice demands that you become the owner of the tree house – so that I have no further say in how it gets used – at least if we assume my other assets combined don’t represent equivalent market value.

So to me it seems plausible that those with the best ownership claim to developed private property are the people who make up the state’s victim population.

Exclusion via border control doesn’t necessarily violate rights

This ownership claim is significant in this context because if the victim population own public property, it cannot be assumed a priori that any non-victim’s rights are being violated if the local state denies them entry to it; there’s no automatic right to access another person’s property.

Simultaneous gains and losses in justice

By admitting immigrants from group X (in other words, by allowing them to use developed public property) the state diminishes the restitution it is providing to every member of its victim population who prefers that members of group X be excluded from developed public property.

But by excluding members of group X the state diminishes the restitution it is providing to every member of its victim population who would like members of group X to have access to developed public property.

By adopting an active border policy the state may require a greater degree of tax funding – which inherently entails rights violations. This is a consideration that counts in favor of open borders, but is not dispositive.

Border agnosticism

Bearing the above considerations in mind, while the state controls borders, it isn’t feasible to determine which policy – open vs restrictive – constitutes a greater degree of justice delivered, or a lesser degree of rights violated, in any particular case.

The best we can do at the moment is guess. So the proper libertarian position is to admit as much, and reject open borders as an a priori conclusion.

Further reading

Tomasz Kaye : Against the presumption of open borders. The libertarian argument from imperfect restitution.

Stephan Kinsella : A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders

Chase Rachels : The libertarian case AGAINST open borders.

Rights Enforcement Agencies

The economist and legal scholar David Friedman has imagined a future where, instead of having police and courts provided by the state, people access the legal system through private organisations he calls Rights Enforcement Agencies. These REAs settle disputes between their clients by bringing them before a private judge.

For a present-day precursor of the eventual REAs, think less of the infamous Blackwater mercenaries (nominally a private firm, but primarily a government contractor) and more of Dale Brown’s Threat Management; an organisation selling its protection and prevention services directly to private residents of Detroit.

The incentives that move REAs are different from those that a traditional police force faces. An REA depends on pleasing its subscribers directly, while a police force is beholden to political masters. This means we can expect an REA to conduct itself quite differently to a police force. Brown gives one example:

Police departments are tasked with arresting people after broken the law. So if you think about it, law enforcement’s way of thinking is based upon prosecution and ours is based on prevention.

Balanced incentives

Rights enforcement agencies try to attract and to keep subscribers to their services. Some of those potential customers will want to have access to firearms. REAs have several related reasons to have a permissive stance towards gun ownership among their clients.

1. REAs know that they can’t be there in time to protect their clients in case they’re attacked. If a client is killed by an attacker, the REA has one less paying customer.
2. Unlike governmental police forces, who have only very weak incentives to look out for the interests of the citizens they are imagined to protect, REAs who do a bad job of satisfying the preferences of customers (including a preference to own a gun) are more likely to lose out to competitors who do better.
3. In cases of violence against customers the REA would have to use scarce resources to apprehend and prosecute offenders. Because if they fail to apprehend an offender, their customers (and future prospective customers) are more likely to choose an alternative REA to represent them in the future. REAs have a reason to look favorably on anything that can act as an effective deterrent against violence, including firearm ownership.

So REAs have an incentive to help customers who want to have the means to defend themselves, or ward off would-be attackers, and owning a gun is an effective way to do that.

On the other hand REAs also have an incentive to try to minimize the likelihood that their own clients harm anyone who is not threatening to violate their rights — either deliberately or accidentally. Think of fatal crimes of passion, and unintentional discharges. Access to a gun makes these unwanted outcomes more likely. Why would an REA want to avoid these things happening?

1. In a case where a customer kills a customer of another REA, the REA needs to expend resources on participating in the legal process initiated by the rival REA.
2. In a case where a customer kills another customer of the same REA, the procedural costs might be lower since an external judge may not be required. But the REA is disadvantaged anyway because it has lost a paying customer.

So REAs also have reasons to restrict gun ownership among their clients.

Neither a totally permissive policy nor prohibitionist policy is likely to be optimal with respect to revenue; both mean offering a service that is a poor fit with the preferences of one sub-population of possible customers. Instead I believe that REAs are likely to seek a middle way.

The REA has protocols in place that help the client to return to the low-risk bracket again. Call it risk mitigation therapy.

Contracts

Because the REA’s relationship with a client is subject to an explicit contract, the REA can use that agreement to secure prospective clients’ consent to various measures that would allow gun ownership while minimising the likelihood of the client harming an innocent.

An REA contract could specify that clients agree not to handle or own any firearm except under the conditions listed. A client would be incentivized to adhere to this stipulation, not only because they want to remain a client of the REA they have chosen, but also because adherence would increase the likelihood of them being exonerated in any case of legitimately defensive firearm use.

Smart Guns

One condition may be that clients are permitted only to use a firearm issued by the REA itself. These would be ‘smart guns’ designed to facilitate the intermediate goal of the REA to minimize costly rights violations. The details of these weapons aren’t crucial to the broader picture here but I’m imagining features like fingerprint-activation, with on-board video camera(s), microphones, torch, and motion sensors. The sensors begin recording data to circular buffers as soon as the weapon is picked up. The recordings can be used by the REA to verify that any given discharge of the weapon was contractually permitted.

Perhaps the gun is recalled and replaced with a new one on a repeating schedule, so that the REA can inspect it for signs of tampering (contractually forbidden of course), or discharges unaccounted for, and analyse any recordings to help streamline their operations.

On the other hand such a clause may be a deal-breaker for some; a gun which can be disabled remotely is a serious security concern.

Profiling

It costs an REA money if a client gets into legal trouble; the legal process puts a demand on the firm’s resources. Pretending I’m the CEO of an REA, then especially if my client has a gun, I’d like them to be in a mental and physiological state that minimizes the likelihood of them doing any harm to others. There are some constraints on how I can solve that problem. For instance, it wouldn’t do to drug my gun-owner clients into a permanent sleep-like state. I want to attract and retain customers. The solution I settle on needs to be one that wouldn’t horrify people who are shopping around for a REA.

But if I aim to promote a mind-body state in my subscribers that fits adjectives like calm, rested, content without sacrificing alertness — a state that many people would like to be in anyway — that’s a proposition that gun owners might not find abhorrent.

• Concretely, perhaps gun-owning clients must consent to wearing a bio-feedback gathering device, or submit to regular lab tests. The REA might use a neuroprediction approach in trying to forecast the client’s future behavior.
• Perhaps the subscription fee of the client would be variable based on the outcomes of these tests or feedback. If the statistical analysis places the client in a group more likely to commit acts of aggression, they are notified. In a smart-guns scenario their access to any REA-issued firearm is locked. Perhaps if a second test in a month’s time doesn’t show improvement, their subscription fee is increased according to a pre-established schedule.

Especially once their datasets reach a certain size, it seems likely that REAs would use machine-learning models to predict instances of violence. It’s important to notice the REA would have a financial incentive to make sure its risk model and profiles track reality closely at all times. If the REA makes it difficult or expensive for peaceful, low-risk people to keep a firearm those people are more likely to go to a competitor with better calibration.

On the other hand, if the REA's firearm-owning customers harm innocents they also pay a financial cost — costs of the legal process, a possible requirement to compensate the victims or heirs, and the possible loss of a paying customer (who isn’t in a position to continue being a client after the legal process is complete).

Collaborating for wellness

The client prefers to have access to a firearm and to pay less, and the REA wants to keep them as a client. So the REA has protocols in place that help the client to return to the low-risk bracket again. Call it risk mitigation therapy. This therapy could take any approach shown to have an effect on a person’s proclivity to violence. It might incorporate interventions related to nutrition, sleep, mental exercise, counselling, or a drug regime.

Financial incentives on both sides are aligned so that the REA and client effectively collaborate to minimize the risk the client poses to the rest of society.

Objection: Futurecrime

In the Philip K. Dick short story, “The Minority Report”, a division of ‘Precogs’ aids the police by accurately foreseeing crimes. Would-be criminals are apprehended before they have harmed anyone. In the situation I’ve described above, an REA’s AI resembles the Precog division to a limited degree. A concern might be that the situation in the Minority Report universe is an unjust dystopia, and we don’t want a situation that resembles that.

There are important differences between the Minority Report world and any situation that could obtain in real life in a condition of competitive REAs. The Precogs, and the police they collaborate with, were agents of the state, which is an ultimate decision-making authority with a monopoly on the right to initiate violence. The state has no local competitors, so ‘exiting’ the relationship with the local state is usually extremely costly for a citizen. Consequently the state, and by extension its agents, feels very little pressure to treat citizens well.

By contrast, an REA which has acquired the ability to accurately predict a client’s behavior, is operating within a network of sovereign institutions and actors. Unlike the state (nominally constrained by a constitution, but in practice free to disregard or ‘reinterpret’ it), it could not unilaterally decide to preemptively imprison people even if it placed a very high likelihood on their committing crime in the future; the rest of society would be unlikely to permit it without a fight. We might expect impediments to such belligerence from:

• Pressure from competing REAs — eager to accept new paying customers.
• Insurance firms — who underwrite REAs for legal fallout and provide them with ‘insurance-approved’ certification on the basis of which communities would accept or bar them.
• Private judges — who have heavily invested in their reputation for being dependable issuers of verdicts that accord with our most deeply shared intuitions about justice.

Objection: Imbalance of power in favour of REAs

Here’s a concern that carries more weight for me; under this arrangement, the REA has access to lots of data on their customers. That data is used to predict likelihood of violence but it could be used for other purposes, and by other parties, too.

The data could be sold, for instance, without the client’s consent. Or analysed for some purpose not communicated by the REA to the client. For instance, perhaps the REA routes fewer units to neighbourhoods with clients whose physiology makes them less likely to get angry and complain about slow response times.

One response could be that customers have to suck it up; the REA is able to charge you less for the service they provide because they are able to use this information about you to limit their uncertainty. Customers have to factor in the likelihood of leaks and stolen/sold/abused data in that cost/benefit calculation.

But this doesn’t feel satisfactory to me, especially if we consider the possibility that people may be subject to cognitive biases causing them to reliably undervalue their privacy; others might not appreciate the long-term costs of giving away data which look harmless in the present but might put them, or their friends and family, at a serious disadvantage when that data is aggregated — particularly when many others are similarly surrendering their data.

Perhaps this is a problem that’s only really resolved in the ultimate equilibrium of Brinnian Omniveillance (reasonable people might disagree with me that this route offers any equilibrium habitable by humans). In this situation, any information about any party is available to those who choose to look it up. So while a REA can access all information about their clients, the clients can do the same with respect to all agents of the REA. And because the act of ‘abusing’ information about a person is itself surveilled and indelibly recorded, there emerges a norm where accessing ‘private’ information about others is something only done in very special circumstances.

Granular governance delivers a better fit to our values

I see the scheme above as part of the move towards a society that operates on incentives instead of directives, to use Justin Goro’s phrase.

The control of guns needn’t take the form of rules imposed unilaterally by a commanding power determining who may own a firearm. Instead we’re all better off if private companies and their clients end up cooperating — thanks to price signals and market competition — to arrive at a balance between the risk of harm to innocents on the one hand, and the capacity of innocents to protect themselves on the other.

Unlike the blunt instrument of state-imposed regulation, this approach is distributed, its costs are internalized, and it has the capacity to be highly granular. The result, I believe, would be a much better net value fit — many more people’s preferences satisfied to a far greater degree than under the status quo.

Thanks to Justin Goro and Max Borders for critical questions and editing.

I talked with Max Borders about his new book, The Social Singularity. We also touch on social technologies, incentive systems and scarcity, the importance of culture, and Distributed Income Support Cooperatives (DISCs).

Download episode.
Social Evolution on Medium: https://medium.com/social-evolution
Voice and Exit conference: https://www.voiceandexit.com/

Justin Goro is a developer building tools on the Ethereum network. We talk about programmable scarcity, the oracle problem, and Pythia, Justin’s project to provide a decentralised marketplace for passive oracles.

Download episode

Justin on Github: https://github.com/gititGoro

Justin on Medium: https://medium.com/@justingoro/latest

Intrinsic value cannot exist because value is subjective. Value exists only in minds. A mind imputes value to a particular instance of a thing in accordance with how useful it believes that thing will be in the service of satisfying its wants. Human wants are subjective. Wants, and their relative intensities, vary from person to person, and from day to day.

Carl Menger put it best.

When I discussed the nature of value, I observed that value is nothing inherent in goods and that it is not a property of goods. But neither is value an independent thing. There is no reason why a good may not have value to one economizing individual but no value to another individual under different circumstances. The measure of value is entirely subjective in nature, and for this reason a good can have great value to one economizing individual, little value to another, and no value at all to a third, depending upon the differences in their requirements and available amounts. What one person disdains or values lightly is appreciated by another, and what one person abandons is often picked up by another.

If you feel tempted to talk about a precious metal like gold as having inherent value, or about a crypto asset as lacking it, please consider instead talking about expected demand for non-trade uses. The existence of non-trade uses for an asset — uses that humans care about at least — is economically significant in that each such use makes it less likely that the market price for the asset will drop beyond some minimum.

Shorthand?

So what’s the harm in using inherent value as shorthand for expected demand in non-trade uses? The problem is that it makes it harder to get at the truth.

Misleading language makes careful thought that much more difficult. When we can change our language to speak more accurately about a topic without a significant loss of convenience, we should. In this context I claim we can.

Here’s one illustration of a mistake the wrong language can lead to. Talking in terms of gold’s inherent value can obscure the possibility that the demand for gold could drop to zero at some time in our long and uncertain future. Think in terms of radical new industrial processes (affecting gold’s usefulness in industry), changing fashions (affecting gold’s desirability as a decoration or status symbol), or entirely new industries such as asteroid mining (affecting gold’s apparent scarcity). If some proportion of gold’s value were truly inherent, no hypothetical change of our circumstances would bring its price to zero. Yet we can easily imagine such scenarios.

Hidden use value of digital tokens

The idea of inherent value can lead people astray because it suggests a false dichotomy. The illusion that some classes of asset are fundamentally different from the others because of this special quality. But no such hard distinction exists. If you look closely enough, you can find examples of non-trade usefulness of things as ephemeral as quantities of a crypto currency.

In explaining his regression theorem, Mises wrote.

no good can be employed for the function of a medium of exchange which at the very beginning of its use for this purpose did not have exchange value on account of other employments.

In other words, in order for any proto-money to get its start, it must initially be useful to people - must be in demand - for reasons not deriving from its potential function as money.

Here’s Konrad Graf talking about how the history of Bitcoin easily squares with Mises’ regression theorem.

In other words, mere possession, knowledge, and use can carry social membership signalling functions in various sub-cultures, much as wearing certain styles of clothing does. These are also direct-consumption values to those concerned with such signalling. Direct-use values, whether psychological or sociological, do not have to be recognized by anyone other than those in a given sub-culture actually doing the valuing (according to methodological individualism and subjective value).

In summary, the complaint that crypto assets have no intrinsic value is off the mark because nothing has intrinsic value. Meanwhile, even something as unlikely as a quantity of crypto asset turns out to have use value unrelated to trade. Once this commonality is appreciated, it’s possible to talk more sensibly about the similarities and differences between crypto currencies and more traditional forms of money.

In this case I think the problem has to do with overselling libertarianism with attractive anti-violence/anti-aggression catchphrases. There is some truth to these, but at the same time I don’t think they hold up well to scrutiny.

Here’s Scott Alexander’s explanation of what a motte-and-bailey doctrine is:

the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement, so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.

On an internet forum somewhere

Libertarian: Libertarianism means not using threats of violence against peaceful people. [Bailey]

Challenger: But someone in breach of contract might still be peaceful, yet you believe that threats of violence against them might be legitimate. And you believe threats of violence against a trespasser might be okay too, even though they are non-violent.

Libertarian: I mean peaceful in the sense of not violating anyone else’s property rights. By property rights I mean neo-Lockean property rights. I think a determination of whether rights have been violated or not is best arrived at through the operation of a polycentric legal system. Rulings in individual cases are best made in reference to the case law that emerges in this system. If you have the time I could explain why I believe this system would be better than the status quo in all the ways that matter. [Motte]

[Challenger makes talk-to-the-hand sign and leaves.]

Libertarian (softly): Libertarianism means not using threats of violence against peaceful people. [Bailey]

Elsewhere

A sophisticated libertarian:
The justness of any human behaviour can be tested by referring to the Non Aggression Principle, or NAP.

A statist rube:
Does that mean it’s unjust to commit acts of aggression against others?

Libertarian: Yes! Who could disagree with that, right? Oh, and by aggression I mean anything that violates property rights.

Statist: Hold on, property rights according to what theory?

Libertarian: I’m thinking of Rothbardian or neo-Lockean property rights specifically.

Statist: Just a minute. On that view isn’t it a rights violation for a starving person to steal an apple from the orchard of a wealthy owner?

Libertarian: Yes, it’s definitely a violation of property rights, and therefore aggression. The apple theft is unjust, but might still be a morally permissible action. You see, the non-aggression …

Statist: Wait. You think that a starving person stealing an apple is aggression. But you think that the angry owner, yelling at the thief and threatening to shoot him, isn’t aggression?

Libertarian: Right, the owner isn’t necessarily violating property rights when he makes that threat.

Statist: The principle you want to sell is called non-aggression. That sounds great to begin with. But it turns out that you have a really weird way of defining aggression. The way you use the word has nothing to do with what it means to me. If this is libertarianism you can keep it.

Libertarian: Enjoy your chains! [scoff]

I'd better add the disclaimer that vaccines are harmful is also a claim I believe is underdetermined by the evidence right now. And I'm satisfied that the claim vaccines are generally effective is true (i.e. Vaccines are useful for preventing the spread of the diseases they target).

There are lots of websites of doubtful credibility that make sensational claims about the dangers of vaccines. My skepticism isn't motivated by those. I'll explain as succinctly as I can where my reservations come from.

I'm sure that important parts of the dynamics of vaccination are well understood. But based on studies that I've read about, the precise effects of some adjuvants on the human body - particularly in the long run - do not seem to be well understood.

Aluminum adjuvants

Though not all vaccines contain aluminum, compelling evidence of risk associated with this ingredient would be enough to undermine the general claim that vaccines are safe.

Here are a few excerpts from studies related to aluminum adjuvants. I've added emphasis for if you're in a hurry. I could link to more if I had the time. I think the sample below is enough to illustrate that there is space here for reasonable doubts about the long-term safety of vaccines containing aluminum as an adjuvant. See what you think.

Is exposure to aluminium adjuvants associated with social impairments in mice? A pilot study

Aluminum, although neurotoxic, is used in many pediatric vaccines as an adjuvant.This study investigated the effect of aluminum adjuvants on social behaviour in mice. Neonatal pups injected with aluminum hydroxide demonstrated anomalous social behaviour in some instances.

Are there negative CNS impacts of aluminum adjuvants used in vaccines and immunotherapy?

In spite of a common view that aluminum (Al) salts are inert and therefore harmless as vaccine adjuvants or in immunotherapy, the reality is quite different. In the following article we briefly review the literature on Al neurotoxicity and the use of Al salts as vaccine adjuvants and consider not only direct toxic actions on the nervous system, but also the potential impact for triggering autoimmunity. Autoimmune and inflammatory responses affecting the CNS appear to underlie some forms of neurological disease, including developmental disorders. Al has been demonstrated to impact the CNS at every level, including by changing gene expression. These outcomes should raise concerns about the increasing use of Al salts as vaccine adjuvants and for the application as more general immune stimulants.

Aluminum in the central nervous system (CNS): toxicity in humans and animals, vaccine adjuvants, and autoimmunity.

injection of aluminum adjuvants in an attempt to model Gulf War syndrome and associated neurological deficits leads to an ALS phenotype in young male mice. In young children, a highly significant correlation exists between the number of pediatric aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines administered and the rate of autism spectrum disorders. Many of the features of aluminum-induced neurotoxicity may arise, in part, from autoimmune reactions, as part of the ASIA syndrome.

Aluminum adjuvant linked to Gulf War illness induces motor neuron death in mice.

Aluminum-treated groups also showed significant motor neuron loss (35%) and increased numbers of astrocytes (350%) in the lumbar spinal cord. The findings suggest a possible role for the aluminum adjuvant in some neurological features associated with GWI and possibly an additional role for the combination of adjuvants.

Biopersistence and brain translocation of aluminum adjuvants of vaccines.

We previously showed that poorly biodegradable aluminum-coated particles injected into muscle are promptly phagocytosed in muscle and the draining lymph nodes, and can disseminate within phagocytic cells throughout the body and slowly accumulate in brain. This strongly suggests that long-term adjuvant biopersistence within phagocytic cells is a prerequisite for slow brain translocation and delayed neurotoxicity. The understanding of basic mechanisms of particle biopersistence and brain translocation represents a major health challenge, since it could help to define susceptibility factors to develop chronic neurotoxic damage.

Non-linear dose-response of aluminium hydroxide adjuvant particles: Selective low dose neurotoxicity.

An unusual neuro-toxicological pattern limited to a low dose of Alhydrogel® was observed. Neurobehavioural changes, including decreased activity levels and altered anxiety-like behaviour, were observed compared to controls in animals exposed to 200μg Al/kg but not at 400 and 800μg Al/kg. Consistently, microglial number appeared increased in the ventral forebrain of the 200μg Al/kg group. Cerebral Al levels were selectively increased in animals exposed to the lowest dose, while muscle granulomas had almost completely disappeared at 6 months in these animals. We conclude that Alhydrogel® injected at low dose in mouse muscle may selectively induce long-term Al cerebral accumulation and neurotoxic effects. To explain this unexpected result, an avenue that could be explored in the future relates to the adjuvant size since the injected suspensions corresponding to the lowest dose, but not to the highest doses, exclusively contained small agglomerates in the bacteria-size range known to favour capture and, presumably, transportation by monocyte-lineage cells. In any event, the view that Alhydrogel® neurotoxicity obeys "the dose makes the poison" rule of classical chemical toxicity appears overly simplistic.

Aluminum hydroxide injections lead to motor deficits and motor neuron degeneration.

A second series of experiments was conducted on mice injected with six doses of aluminum hydroxide. Behavioural analyses in these mice revealed significant impairments in a number of motor functions as well as diminished spatial memory capacity. The demonstrated neurotoxicity of aluminum hydroxide and its relative ubiquity as an adjuvant suggest that greater scrutiny by the scientific community is warranted.

Systematic review of potential health risks posed by pharmaceutical, occupational and consumer exposures to metallic and nanoscale aluminum, aluminum oxides, aluminum hydroxide and its soluble salts.

Conclusions from the current review point to the need for refinement of the PTWI, reduction of Al contamination in PN solutions, justification for routine addition of Al to vaccines, and harmonization of OELs for Al substances.

A role for the body burden of aluminium in vaccine-associated macrophagic myofasciitis and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Herein, we have described a case of vaccine-associated chronic fatigue syndrome and macrophagic myofasciitis in an individual demonstrating aluminium overload. This is the first report linking the latter with either of these two conditions and the possibility is considered that the coincident aluminium overload contributed significantly to the severity of these conditions in this individual. This case has highlighted potential dangers associated with aluminium-containing adjuvants and we have elucidated a possible mechanism whereby vaccination involving aluminium-containing adjuvants could trigger the cascade of immunological events which are associated with autoimmune conditions including chronic fatigue syndrome and macrophagic myofasciitis.

Aluminum adjuvants of vaccines injected into the muscle: Normal fate, pathology and associated disease.

Aluminum oxyhydroxide (Alhydrogel(®)) is a nano-crystalline compound forming aggregates that has been introduced in vaccine for its immunologic adjuvant effect in 1926. It is the most commonly used adjuvant in human and veterinary vaccines but mechanisms by which it stimulates immune responses remain ill-defined. Although generally well tolerated on the short term, it has been suspected to occasionally cause delayed neurologic problems in susceptible individuals. In particular, the long-term persistence of aluminic granuloma also termed macrophagic myofasciitis is associated with chronic arthromyalgias and fatigue and cognitive dysfunction.

Objections

It might be objected that the risks associated with vaccines are outweighed by the risks of not vaccinating. There are two difficulties with that reply right now:

1. Given the apparently poor state of our understanding of the long-term effects of vaccine ingredients on general health, it's not clear how such a case could be made without new research being conducted.
2. Let's assume that it turns out to be true - Even well-nourished, healthy kids in western countries, living in areas with high vaccination rates, are better off getting vaccinated. This still doesn't earn vaccination the description of safe. Jumping from a window high up in a burning building might be the least risky course of action. It would be misleading at best to declare that jumping was safe.

If I’m making some blunder here and the studies and reasoning above don't warrant hesitation, I'd like to know why. I'm interested in the truth for its own sake, but it’d also make my life a good deal easier to believe that vaccines are safe.

Though most pubmed-listed studies are peer reviewed/refereed, some caution is required here since pubmed's own pages don't indicate whether a study is peer reviewed. Any help with checking the status of the studies in this article would be appreciated.

I identify as a free market anarchist. Perhaps some will suspect that ideological convictions are leading me astray when I say that human needs don’t exist. I can imagine a defender of the state questioning my motives, for example. He or she might reason that because the modern state is the provider of people’s basic needs when other options fall through, the anarchist practises need denial – either deliberately or subconsciously – in order to diminish the importance of the state.

This hypothetical statist is right at least about one thing: the way we think about human needs has political consequences. With my biases out in the open, I hope to explain why it’s correct to say that human needs don’t exist.

If human life is infinitely valuable, you really can't be too careful

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs attaches the greatest importance to physiological needs. This category corresponds to the sense of human needs or basic needs that I’m interested in. Take the claim ‘Man needs food’. We can be confident that a person making this claim doesn’t have poisoned food in mind. Food is regarded as a needed good thanks to its ability to extend life. How can we justify granting a unique status to goods, like food, that extend life? One way would be to maintain that life is of infinite value. Indeed, many claim that ‘You can’t put a price on human life.’ But do we really believe that? Does extending our life trump all other valued ends?

All of us, including those who avow that human life is of infinite value, knowingly do certain things that reduce the portion of the future we’re likely to survive long enough to experience.

Everyone exposes themselves to an increased risk of death in order to satisfy other preferences they hold: risky sports, smoking, drinking alcohol, travelling by car, crossing the street, biking, going swimming, giving birth, eating food that hasn’t been pre-liquified to minimise the chance of choking; the list goes on. Clearly most people do not place infinite value on extending their own lives. If they did, their lives would look very different.

In the brilliant little book The Machinery of Freedom, in a chapter entitled I Don’t Need Nothing, David Friedman explains the troubles we get into by entertaining the idea that life is infinitely valuable:

additional medical care continues to bring improved health up to a very high level of medical expenditure, probably up to the point where medicine would absorb the entire national income. Does that mean that we should satisfy our ‘need’ for medical care by having everyone in the country become a doctor, save those absolutely needed for the production of food and shelter? Obviously not. Such a society would be no more attractive than the ‘life’ of the man who really regarded his life as infinitely valuable.

This all gets us to the realisation that there’s no justification for treating life-extending goods and services as though they are qualitatively different to non-life-extending goods and services. Extending life is just one consideration among many that we (subconsciously) weigh against one another when choosing a course of action.

We all value extending human life to different degrees, and none of us assigns infinite value to this goal.

The most expensive life-support machine ever built

Imagine an old man, tired of life. He wants to die. Imagine also that at a cost of many thousands of dollars, a machine could be assembled and operated that would prolong his life. To me it feels grotesque, or at best misleading, to say that he needs this life support machine. I hope that your intuition agrees with mine on this: when considering conflicting goals related to the continuation of this person’s life, the goals of the old man himself must have priority.

It's possible that the phrase ‘the old man needs the machine’ could be intended to communicate 'without the machine the man will die'. The title of this article could be objected to on the grounds that human needs is harmless shorthand. ‘Bob needs food’ is just a quicker way of saying ‘Bob needs food if his goal is to extend his life’.

So human needs is just shorthand, what's the harm?

Thinking clearly about such matters is already hard work. Do we really want to make contemplating important subjects even more difficult by using phrases that suggest dichotomies where none exist? By using this human needs shorthand we make the mistake of reification more likely, we risk fostering the belief that an unqualified need is something that can exist in reality.

Friedman explains the political danger here:

The idea of ‘need’ is dangerous because it strikes at the heart of the practical argument for freedom. That argument depends on recognizing that each person is best qualified to choose for himself which among a multitude of possible lives is best for him. If many of those choices involve ‘needs’, things of infinite value to one person which can be best determined by someone else, what is the use of freedom? If I disagree with the expert about my ‘needs’, I make, not a value judgement, but a mistake.

An alleged need, something that must be provided to the needer whether they want it or not, can be employed as a justification for state intervention, and for the expansion of state power. The existence of a bunch of mere human wants doesn't open that same door to power.

But wants sounds so unimportant

There might be a concern that when we’re talking about desires for goods that would prevent imminent death, wants sounds too trivial. I think that in philosophically rigorous contexts that's just a bullet we need to bite. If necessary we can qualify wants as primary wants, intensely felt wants, longings or yearnings. The important thing is to stop implying the existence of a separate category of unconditional needs.

If we agree that human needs are more properly considered wants, can there be any justification for maintaining that a starving person’s desperate desire for food is somehow qualitatively different from a wealthy person’s casual desire to visit the new bar in town? I don’t think so. To insist that it is doesn’t tap any additional explanatory power and violates the principle of parsimony. All matters of human desire - including the desire to extend life - can be accurately expressed in terms of subjective wants of differing strengths.

Keeping this homology in mind we can appreciate the potentially huge difference between the intensity of any two wants in the world. Perhaps seeing things in this light can refresh our sensitivity to the suffering of the critically poor.

I believe the concept of human needs is dehumanising. It erases individuality by projecting the goal to extend life on all persons, and falsely assumes that infinite value is attached to this goal. Imagining categorical needs – divorced from individual values and goals – dismisses human difference, subjectivity, intentionality and reason; all of which exist even under the most desperate circumstances.

Is an open border policy inherently more libertarian than a restrictive or exclusionary policy? I believe the answer is no, there are important libertarian considerations that count against open borders.

I believe the correct position for libertarians is one I'm calling libertarian border agnosticism. The view that a priori knowledge about what the best border policy for a state would be, with respect to libertarian ideals, is not obtainable. I’ll do my best to explain how I've gotten to this conclusion, and then mention a few relevant considerations and objections.

By open border policy, I mean a policy by which a state is permissive about who it allows to enter the territory it controls.

In my view, private property anarchism is the most thoroughgoing expression of libertarianism, so I’ll be talking about why an adherent of this view may coherently prefer a restrictive border policy over a permissive one, under statism. The rest of this article is written from the perspective of private property anarchism and assumes the reader shares this view.

A simple case

When the state bars a foreigner from entering the territory whose borders it polices, and is prepared to use violence to enforce that exclusion, is the state initiating aggression against (violating the property rights of) that person? Not necessarily.

The developed public property within the state’s borders is more properly considered the property of the people the state owes restitution to. The people with the best ownership claim to this land and infrastructure are those who have been victims of the state in the past. This group includes taxpayers, foreign civilians killed in bombings (and their heirs), and those the state has punished for victimless crimes.

An inherent quality of being a legal immigrant (as opposed to a person who has just travelled somewhere, or a person with some other legal status) is the legal right to the routine use of developed public property in the host country. Under current conditions, immigrants to a country necessarily use the host country’s developed public property — e.g. roads, airports and public buildings.

Bearing all of the above in mind, imagine a state with only local victims. Imagine too that the victim population is unanimous in preferring that members of foreign population B not use their property —  the developed public property of that territory. In preventing members of population B from crossing the border, the state would plausibly be acting with the permission of those property owners to exclude members of population B from using the local developed public property. In this aspect at least it would be acting as a steward, albeit one prone to predation and abuse.

In this hypothetical even those subjects who would prefer that the state did not exist, would prefer the state to deploy its ill-gotten gains to restrict access rather than allow unrestricted access. In my view, libertarians should advocate a restrictive border policy here.

Does a more realistic polity justify open borders?

A more lifelike scenario is that some members of the victim population are in favour of people from population B using their property, while others don’t want that to happen.

The wishes of the two groups cannot both be satisfied by the state as we know it. By denying entry to population B, the state is committing a rights violation against the part of its victim population who would like to invite members of B onto their property. And by allowing entry to population B (while simultaneously preventing anyone else from physically excluding that population) the state is committing a rights violation against the members of the victim population who would prefer to exclude population B.

In this case the least harmful policy for the local state to impose, with respect to the sanctity of property, might be a restrictive one or a permissive one, depending on the summed preferences of the victim population - and on the respective weights of their claims to restitution.

The libertarian argument from imperfect restitution

For the next part of the discussion here are the premises I’m assuming:

• The local state commits criminal acts of aggression against many people.
• Both restrictive and open border policy, when imposed by a state, involve rights violations of different groups.
• The local state owes restitution to its existing victims (including net tax payers).
• The local state, qua state, does not necessarily owe any restitution to would-be immigrants.
• While it exists, the local state, through its policies, is capable of providing partial restitution to its victims.
• Insofar as the state deploys expropriated resources in accordance with the preferences of its victims, it provides partial restitution to them.
• It is preferable to maximise the degree of fulfilled restitution while minimising the number and severity of new rights violations.

Accepting the above premises, principled libertarians may judge it preferable that a given state adopt a restrictive border policy with respect to a given population.

The libertarian should be estimating which policy would cohere best with the summed preferences of the victim population with regard to how their property is used, while minimising new rights violations.

The point is that given a government theft, taking, or trespass, it is better, other things being equal, for the victims to receive restitution; and more restitution is better than a smaller, insufficient amount. But restitution need not be made only in dollars. It can be made by providing other value or benefits to the victims. One such benefit to me is the ability to use a nice, uncrowded, local pool for a cheap price.

Stephan Kinsella

It’s possible that the policy that best balances providing restitutive justice while minimising new acts of aggression, would be a policy that excluded members of population B from crossing the local state’s borders.

I believe that by this point we’ve established that libertarianism doesn’t require an advocacy of open borders in all cases.

Other considerations

In this article I’m using the phrase open borders as if it were synonymous with open access to developed public property. I feel justified in doing this because in almost all the conversations I’ve experienced on the subject, this is what people seem to have in mind.

This argument is relevant only to the phrase open borders insofar as this phrase refers to open access to developed public property. For instance if new settlers arrive without setting foot on developed public property, and homestead some remote piece of land within the state’s borders that no one else had homesteaded previously, then this argument offers no reason to oppose them.

Open borders advocates like Bryan Caplan point out that the state is violating human rights when they prevent an immigrant from entering a country to stay on private property with the consent of the property's owner. This view is compatible with the argument presented above.

A restrictive border policy may require a more powerful government to enforce it than would a more permissive policy. At least from a libertarian perspective, that additional power is likely to lead to future abuse and injustices that would otherwise not have obtained. On the other hand, allowing entry to populations who prefer a more powerful state introduces a trend in the opposite direction if the newcomers, or their descendants with similar views, are eligible to vote.

The imposition of border controls by the state will carry costs that are ultimately borne by the taxed population. Some proportion of this population will prefer for those controls not to be in place. So this additional taxation constitutes an additional degree of rights violations that counts against the option of restrictive border controls.

The sentiments of local victims can be roughly gauged by existing political processes and polls, but trying to take account of the preferences of foreign victims in particular seems, at best, like a very difficult challenge. Estimates of which policy is most in accordance with the wishes of victims are certain to include a large measure of doubt.

All the above difficulties and considerations notwithstanding, we cannot know, a priori, that the best border policy in any locality is open borders, from a libertarian perspective.

Biting the eugenics bullet

In objecting to this line of thinking writers have pointed out that being born is similar to immigrating to a country in many respects. In both cases a newcomer shows up, potentially without the blessing of the majority of the victim population, and starts using developed public property.

If the argument set out above is sound it seems that there is nothing inherent to private property anarchism that says a state-imposed eugenics policy (e.g. People matching a given profile are forbidden from having children) is necessarily less just than the ubiquitous ‘open-procreation’ policy we’re all used to today. As with border policy, the relative desirability of such a policy — at least by the lights of those who take private property rights and restitution seriously — can’t be known a priori and should be weighed by attempting to assess the summed preferences of the victim population.

Criticism

The website OpenBorders.info has a page talking about ‘Collective Property Rights’ arguments against open borders, like this one, and summarises some responses. In my view none of the responses refutes this argument.

Credit

This post owes a good deal to Stephan Kinsella’s 2005 article A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders.

Further reading

Chase Rachels: The Libertarian Case AGAINST Open Borders.

Updated 2017-06-17 to swap references to the 'taxed population' to the broader, and more relevant 'victim population'. Added the qualifying prefix 'developed' to all mentions of public property.

Updated 2017-06-24 to introduce the phrase libertarian border agnosticism.

Arts funding is derived from taxation. Taxation depends on the state maintaining credible threats of violence against peaceful people who would otherwise not comply. If no such threats existed most would choose to safely withhold their funds. So taxation is extortion.

I appreciate that Patreon allows me to connect with people who value my work enough to voluntarily support it. On the other hand, more ‘support for The Arts’ means more funds extorted from the unwilling. The idea of anyone being coerced to support the creation of art works is repugnant to me. It’s a poor fit with the mindset I associate with your service.

Thanks for listening, and for your service that allows consenting supporters of my work to help me create things.

Patreon.com/tomaszkaye

Most of the discussion here relates to the incentives faced by Rights Enforcement Agencies, which I’ll abbreviate to REAs.

1. People who don’t purchase protection are pretty much fair game for anyone to rob or murder or torture or whatever. This seems harsh, especially since this society is likely to have a sizeable underclass. I don’t know if “$20 for a year of police protection” was a reasonable estimate for the 70s, but I expect this would be much costlier now. Compare the percent of people who, pre-Obamacare, still didn’t have health insurance, and how much higher it would have been if there weren’t government programs that kind of got health insurance bundled in with employment

In a Friedmanian ancap situation, public property doesn’t exist. So any instance of murder, torture or other abuse would be taking place on private property. I would prefer to do my shopping in an area free from murder and torture. I’m sure most people have the same preference.

If it came to light that this kind of abuse had happened, and the owner of the place had attempted to cover it up, they would suffer reputation loss. So there’d be a general incentive for private property owners to take steps to ensure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen on their land — whether the victims were subscribers to a rights enforcement agency or not.

It’s possible that some owners choose to bar the unsubscribed from access entirely (this might depend on the general rate of REA coverage in the population). But it seems likely either way that owners would have measures in place to quash any violence initiated in their zone, and to see the perpetrators prosecuted, for the sake of keeping it an attractive destination for visitors.

To the extent that abuse of the unprotected was a problem, I’d prefer to contract with a REA that dedicated some proportion of its resources to pursuing justice on behalf of these unsubscribed. For instance, by tracking down their killers. For the safety of myself and my family I would also strongly prefer that any killers in my neighbourhood were pursued. Not merely those whose prior victims were subscribed to a REA.

An REA would prefer not to have any killers at large in any area where their customers live   to prevent expensive future claims. And there would likely be some brand-enhancing prestige attached to being the firm to apprehend a killer on the loose.

There’s a possibility of free-riding by agencies here, but bearing in mind all of the above, it seems unlikely that the equilibrium settled on would allow killers to roam free.

I see no reason that competitive REA provision would be expensive relative to the price of monopolistic police protection. I’d expect it to be much cheaper and of much higher quality thanks to the discipline of the market.

As I understand it, health insurance in the US is an industry subject to very heavy distortion through state intervention. It is very far from a freely competitive market, and has become something that is arguably no longer insurance at all (see preexisting conditions). All this results in unnaturally high costs. So pointing to a historically low rate of health ‘insurance’ in the context of heavy state intervention doesn’t say much about the likely rate of REA coverage in a competitive market.

One effect of employer-provided health insurance is that it obscures the cost of that insurance from the consumer, which allows insurance firms to price their products more highly than they otherwise could. So it’s not clear that employer-provided insurance has a net positive effect on the rate of health insurance.

2. Protection agencies are going to be engaged in constant brinksmanship for the same reason nation-states are engaged in constant brinksmanship. If Agency 1 wanted concessions from Agency 2, it has an incentive to seem kind of crazy and like it might actually declare real war, however unprofitable, in order to bluff Agency 2 into complying. Remember, countries have the same economic incentives to avoid war that companies do, but they still occasionally get involved in them. Even when they don’t, the threat of such leads many resources to be wasted in military buildup.

Heads of state and heads of firms are in very different situations with respect to the considerations that might lead them to war. In my view the balance lies strongly in favour of heads of state entering war more quickly than heads of firms would.

1. Generalising: Heads of state are self-selected for charisma, power hunger and machiavellianism. Heads of successful firms are self-selected for ability to deploy resources to provide goods/services at a price lower than the public’s valuation of the offering. The personality types drawn most strongly to statesmanship are more predisposed to entering military conflict.
2. Heads of state do not stand to lose personally from the costs of war — they are generally democratic ‘caretakers’ who can hand off the economic mess they’ve made (or worsened) to their successor. The economic fallout generally manifests after they’ve left office.
3. Heads of state can fund war through national debt and taxation, treating these sources as an inexhaustible war chest.
4. For whatever reason, public support for heads of state often increases in times of war. Even in the absence (from my perspective) of a very compelling narrative about the justness of the war. So heads of state can be expected to be belligerent for the sake of public opinion. It’s not clear that any analogous dynamic applies to heads of firms. Perhaps part of this difference has to do with a head of state inheriting a measure of loyalty and respectability from being the figurehead of an institution to which many people are ideologically loyal, the state. No private firm commands this kind of loyalty, and I don’t believe this would change if ancap conditions obtained.
5. If a private firm wants to go to war, it ultimately needs to fund the necessary expansion (hardware, staff, training) by increasing subscription fees to its customers. In Friedman’s ancap situation, REAs are geographically overlapping, so the cost of switching to a cheaper competitor is much lower than the very large costs of relocating to a different country in our current situation (assuming choosing a new political ruler is even possible). It’s not at all clear that a REA could successfully fund a war under these conditions.

3. Security companies and their clients are very unlikely to want to pay for the cost of incarcerations. There’s no incentive to pay extra for criminal rights, so convicted criminals are likely to end up facing something like corporal punishment. Never mind, this went an unexpected direction and is probably a good thing.

I think a likely outcome in many places is that criminals would be ordered to pay restitution to victims. If they could not afford that, they would be enslaved. The victim or heir would likely have the option of selling the slave to a labour firm. Alternatively, if the idea of enslavement is rejected by the local population, the result may be that the criminal is blacklisted in such a way that they are no longer welcome in the majority of the stateless zone. In this case, labour firms would compete with one another to attract the future labourer to ‘sign up’ with them–providing protection, board, and lodging in exchange for labour.

5. There are some things which might decrease crime in an area in general instead of just involving crime against a specific person. For example, adding streetlights, fighting drug abuse, putting troubled youth in after-school programs, fighting the broken window effect. If these are public goods, nobody will be incentivized to pay extra for them.

I believe that private ownership of land would make some of these non-issues (adding street lamps, avoiding the broken window effect). The examples concerning youth problems could plausibly be handled by charitable organisations.

I expect that net donations to charities would be considerably higher than in our current situation. Both because real income would be higher absent state interference, and because people would not have the feeling that they were already ‘doing their part’ for the vulnerable through taxation (much of that transfer ending up wasted on bureaucratic overhead).

It also seems likely to me that a donator would tend to prioritise local charities, since they’re the ones likely to ameliorate the problems she sees daily, and the ones that are most likely to have some effect on her quality of life. This would have the side-effect that, relative to government welfare programs, philanthropy work would be subject to a higher degree of social control.

6. In fact, protection agencies have a strong incentive to make everybody as scared of crime as possible, and in fact to raise the actual crime rate if they can, in order to get people to buy their Premium plan. Given that this is anarcho-capitalism and there are no laws against crime, this can’t possibly end well.

REAs are incentivised to take steps to prevent crime, since dealing with crime increases their operational costs. To this end they might install security systems for their clients connected to their fast response network. Perhaps they’d even issue specially prepared firearms to their qualifying clients too — barrel-cams, palm-activation. These things become part of the package enticing prospective customers (who’d also prefer to minimise the chance of being a victim) to sign up.

On the other hand, deliberately raising the crime rate somehow would also raise their operating costs. Even if the trickery went undetected it’s not clear it would be a net win for the trickster firm.

Probably most important: Deliberately increasing the crime rate risks irreversible harm to the firm’s brand.

As far as we know, most of the time, existing private protection firms aren’t covertly encouraging criminal violence. Home security firms aren’t funding break-ins etc. There are counterexamples. For instance firefighter arson. But I don’t see a clear case for assuming this would happen more often under stateless conditions.

A Rights Enforcement Agency might like to have people scared of crime, but this would be checked against an incentive to be seen as a credible and trustworthy firm. If they were perceived as liars or fear-mongers they would lose out to competitors with a better reputation for honesty.

Relevant here too: For state police departments, when local crime increases, or the rate of solved crimes drops, the department is likely to receive extra funding. Having no competitors, I think we can expect that this perverse incentive is giving us a very bad outcome relative to what would be possible in a competitive law regime.

7. It would be hard to have large-scale public laws. Right now Saudi Arabia can have laws about how no woman can go outside unveiled, America can have laws that nobody can go outside unclothed, and some European beaches can have laws saying go ahead and be naked. Likewise, some small villages can have zoning laws saying not to build non-scenic skyscrapers, but Dubai can say to build as high as you want and then some. This seems harder under anarcho-capitalism until people start coordinating the formation of intentional communities, at which point it becomes less anarcho-capitalism and more Patchwork.

I don’t understand this objection.

8. Gang leaders and barbarian warlords had the chance to become protection agencies like this, but never did. This suggests that this system is unstable or unnatural. It’s possible that once the equilibrium of protection and arbitration agencies is established it will be stable, but of all of the various lawless societies to exist throughout history, none of them coalesced upon this system. Suspicious.

It’s possible that for ancap to obtain, certain beliefs have to be widespread that historically haven’t yet been. Here are my candidates for necessary conditions:

1. There is a widespread appreciation of the importance of property and trade.
2. And there is a widespread belief that the state is an immoral and/or unnecessary institution.

9. An extension of this: it’s unclear that we’re not already living in this society. It’s just that one protection and arbitration agency has completely taken over from all of the others and instituted a policy of using force against those who don’t pay for its services. That’s allowed under anarcho-capitalism because everything is allowed under anarcho-capitalism. So expecting anarcho-capitalism to be stable is expecting the thing that has already happened to not happen again a second time.

We might agree that there’s a limit to how analytically useful this distinction is but definitionally we’re not living in an ancap society because we currently have political rulers.

10. There seems to be a lot of opportunities for rich people to purchase greater privileges not available to the masses. After all, negotiation results are often determined by a party’s BATNA. Rich people may have access to very strong security companies (or premium plans from regular companies) that could win most fights; they can use this to insist on better arbitration terms. A rich person’s company might only accept basic arbitration (eg punish the rich person for murder) if other companies agree to lopsided deals (like don’t go after the rich person for less dramatic things like sexual harassment. On the other hand, a poorer person’s company might have to accept the worse side of the deal, where the poor person can be prosecuted for a very wide range of crimes against the rich person, including giving offense and not being respectful enough. Yes, it’s easy to see how a company could arise that charges extra in exchange for not accepting these compromises, but this still suggests you’re going to have more rights if you’re able to pay more money.

1. It’s not clear that rich people would choose to do this. They would need to be willing to pay more to remove the poor person's rights than the poor person was willing and able to pay to secure them.
2. If rich people did do this it would mean they were indirectly subsidising the disadvantaged poor on an ongoing basis. Perhaps this outcome is desirable.
3. A manufacturer of cheap cars doesn’t necessarily do worse than a manufacturer of luxury cars. Depending on how you slice it, relatively poor people are collectively a much bigger market than relatively rich people. It’s possible that this revenue source would be plenty to secure equal legal rights with the rich (with the rich enjoying premium service that was enhanced in other ways — e.g. better response time, personalised patrols). It could even go the other way — the rich compelled to accept the law preferred by the poor because no firm can find a profitable way to offer exemption.

Here, David Friedman talks more about these considerations:

And here’s Roderick Long talking about the relative power of the wealthy under different regimes.

Certainly, you’ve always got some sort of advantage if you’re rich. It’s good to be rich. You’re always in a better position to bribe people if you’re rich than if you’re not; that’s true. But, under the current system, the power of the rich is magnified.

Suppose that I’m an evil rich person, and I want to get the government to do something-or-other that costs a million dollars. Do I have to bribe some bureaucrat a million dollars to get it done? No, because I’m not asking him to do it with his own money.

Obviously, if I were asking him to do it with his own money, I couldn’t get him to spend a million dollars by bribing him any less than a million. It would have to be at least a million dollars and one cent. But people who control tax money that they don’t themselves personally own, and therefore can’t do whatever they want with, the bureaucrat can’t just pocket the million and go home (although it can get surprisingly close to that).

All I have to do is bribe him a few thousand, and he can direct this million dollars in tax money to my favourite project or whatever, and thus the power of my bribe money is multiplied.

Whereas, if you were the head of some private protection agency and I’m trying to get you to do something that costs a million dollars, I’d have to bribe you more than a million. So, the power of the rich is actually less under this system. And, of course, any court that got the reputation of discriminating in favor of millionaires against poor people would also presumably have the reputation of discriminating for billionaires against millionaires. So, the millionaires would not want to deal with it all of the time. They’d only want to deal with it when they’re dealing with people poorer, not people richer. The reputation effects — I don’t think this would be too popular an outfit.

And Properal adds:

In AnCap society, I would expect tort claims to be transferable. Poor people could get justice if they were wronged by selling their tort claims to capable prosecutors. The poor person might get compensated fairly quickly for an injustice done to them and the prosecutor would have an incentive to get as much restitution as he could, thus punishing the perpetrator. So there might be more of a deterrent to preying on the poor, and the poor would be more likely to collect restitution, in an AnCap society than in today’s society.

Back to Slate Star Codex.

But the main reason I want this tried far away from me is none of these. It’s just a general expectation that something will go wrong when we try a social system we’ve never tried before. I was very impressed to learn that very few people predicted, before the fact, that Communist countries would have terrible economies. Even the American 1950s opponents of Communism argued that okay, fine, Communist countries will probably outperform capitalist countries economically, but freedom is more important than mere wealth.

If people can’t figure out that Communism might sink the economy, I don’t trust them to figure out all of the things that might go wrong with anarcho-capitalism. Even if David Friedman replies with utterly convincing rebuttals to all of my ten points above, it’s going to be the eleventh point I didn’t think of that makes the system explode.

Fair enough.

The apparent theft of surplus value

Marx believed that a product created by a worker had an objective value, derived from the socially necessary labour time that was spent to create it, and that this value tended to determine its market price. This meant that when capitalists kept profit for themselves from the sale of the goods created by the workers, they were effectively stealing value. Marx believed that the portion of sale price claimed by the capitalist as profit rightfully belonged to the workers. This is known as exploitation theory.

Marx’s exploitation theory depended on the idea that a product has intrinsic value. That is, value that doesn’t change depending on whoever is considering the product.

Marx believed in a version of what’s called the labour theory of value. His idea was that the value intrinsic to a thing was determined by the amount of ‘socially necessary labour’ time that was spent to create it.

'Socially necessary' labour time

Marx appreciated that products that cost a given amount of actual labour time (referred to by Marx as concrete labor) to create weren’t necessarily valued equally. If I take twenty minutes to create a mud pie, and twenty minutes to make an apple pie, people will usually value the apple pie more highly.

Marx defined socially necessary labour time as:

the labor required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time

Marx believed that the socially necessary labour time needed to create a given product varied according to:

the average amount of skill of the workman, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the means of production and by physical considerations

Socially necessary labour time is an abstract concept. It won’t be equal to actual labour time for any product. So how do we know how much socially necessary labour a particular product embodies?

The only answer Marx gave was to observe the behaviour of the market. If a product sells well, some of the labour it embodies was clearly ‘socially necessary’. Or if no one buys the thing, then it didn’t contain socially necessary labour after all.

But it’s clear that the prices people are willing to pay for goods depend on their subjective valuation of those goods. Even though people often pay a lot of money for items that cost a lot of labour, there’s no necessary connection between the amount of labour spent on manufacture, and the price people are willing to pay for the resulting good. At this point we have to ask whether the concept of socially necessary labour is helpful at all.

Subjective theory of value

The subjective theory of value, formalised by Carl Menger, says that the value of a thing is not inherent. Instead it’s potentially different for each person considering it. A thing’s value to me ultimately derives from its expected usefulness in helping to achieve goals I consider important. Menger wrote:

Value is therefore nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs, that is, to our lives and well-being, and in consequence carry over to economic goods as the exclusive causes of the satisfaction of our needs.

On this view, when two people trade it’s possible for both of them to benefit. In fact, the expectation of benefit on both sides is the reason trade happens in the first place. Each party to the trade swaps something he values less, for something he values more.

In other words trade is mutually exploitative–both traders use the other to their advantage. Wage labour is a particular kind of recurring trade: the worker trades his time and energy for money.

Why prefer Marx’s labour theory of value over the more simple and elegant subjective theory of value? One reason may be to clear the way for exploitation theory, which depicts successful owners of capital as villains, legitimising hostility towards them.

Further reading

http://mises.org/daily/1349
http://mises.org/daily/2610
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Menger.html

* A version of this post was originally published as a PDF hand-out during the Occupy protests.

Some people worry that if they become persuaded of moral nihilism it will undercut their ability to make moral arguments. Perhaps they even fear turning into people they don’t want to be. I hope to show that these fears are misplaced.

Moral nihilism: More plausible - Less comfortable?

I was happy to come across David D. Friedman’s Amazon.com review of Michael Huemer’s book, Ethical Intuitionism. Friedman and Huemer are authors of the two best books I’ve read on the topic of libertarianism. Here’s the part of the review most relevant to me.

[Huemer] does not provide an adequate response to the one challenge I am concerned with, the view that combines ethical nihilism with evolutionary psychology. The claim of that view is that there are no normative facts, that nothing is good or bad and there is no moral reason to do or not do anything. It explains our moral beliefs […] by evolution — they were beliefs that increased the reproductive success of those who held them in the environment in which we evolved, and so got hard wired into their descendants. That approach challenges intuitionism in two ways. First, it explains the evidence, my ethical intuitions, on the basis of facts of reality I already believe to be true. Once we have one explanation there is no need for another. Second, it raises the question of how, if there are moral facts, we could have acquired the ability to know them, since at least some of them would presumably have led us to modify our behavior in ways that reduced our reproductive success — make us less willing, for instance, to slaughter the men of a neighboring tribe and take their women.

Friedman closes the review by explaining that, despite its parsimony and explanatory power, he cannot accept moral nihilism.

Despite these problems, I have not yet abandoned my current moral position, in part because the alternative position fails to answer the questions I want answered, indeed implies that they are unanswerable, that there are no actual oughts. In part also, I fail to adopt the nihilist position because I am unable to believe it. That inability is psychological, not logical. I cannot actually believe that there is nothing wrong with torturing small children for the fun of it or murdering large numbers of innocent people, both conclusions that follow from the view that nothing at all is wrong or right.

I think I understand Friedman’s concerns. Here I’ll try to put them in their proper place.

Is there nothing wrong with torturing children for fun?

Speaking as a moral nihilist — I say that torturing children for fun is wrong. Not wrong in a cosmic, mind-independent way. To me wrong is shorthand for “it’s an idea that is offensive to my moral intuitions”. The name for this attitude to moral statements is Expressivism. I believe I experience the wrongness of the idea of child torture as intensely as they do. I used to be a moral realist so I have some basis for comparison.

Ditching moral realism doesn’t turn you into a bad person

If you’ve done away with moral realism doesn’t that mean you feel free to do things that are abhorrent?

Thankfully the answer is no. Even though moral facts don’t exist, in a healthy human, strong moral feelings and empathetic response do. If I could be sure I would ‘get away with it’ I still wouldn’t do the Bad Things that a psychopath would calmly contemplate. I would feel repulsed by the idea of doing them, and I am sure I would feel overwhelming guilt if I did carry them out. These strong disincentives have nothing to do with ideas of permission or forbiddance.

Moral realism doesn’t give an advantage in persuasion

Doesn’t denying moral facts undercut your ability or motivation to make moral arguments? I don’t believe it has to. While being a moral nihilist and a libertarian, I made the video George Ought to Help, which implicitly makes a moral argument against the state, specifically against the welfare state.

I’m motivated to make moral arguments because I believe they can bring about changes in the world that harmonise with my preferences. My preferences (which reflect my moral feelings) include increasing prosperity and reducing suffering. I’m convinced that propertarian anarchism is by far the most suitable path yet conceived of towards that end.

My moral arguments don’t rely on the assumption that moral facts exist. Instead, they appeal to a preference for coherence and consistency in moral judgments on the part of the people I’m making the argument to.

For instance, you and I feel that X is wrong (meaning that it offends our moral feelings). Y closely resembles X in ways A B and C. If you condemn X doesn’t it make sense to condemn Y too?

I encourage people to examine whether their judgments cohere with one another. In my view it’s fair to say that the moral judgments of most supporters of the state are incoherent, for instance.

Cut your losses

I believe that in efforts of persuasion, moral realism doesn’t help you. If a person doesn’t already feel that threatening violence against peaceful people is wrong (e.g. threatening to assault a friend to compel them to donate to a cause you consider worthy), then no amount of outraged browbeating about moral facts is going to change their mind. You should consider cutting your losses and ending the conversation.

A stronger foundation

If two moral realists disagree with one another, they get to a stalemate because (I claim) they rely on assumptions that are implausible for the same reasons. A moral nihilist can query these directly without threatening their own position. She might ask: How have you gained knowledge about moral facts? By what mechanism? Why treat this conviction as something other than merely a very strong feeling?

I encourage you not to be afraid of moral nihilism. It doesn’t make you a wicked person. It coheres better than moral realism with what we know about the world, and you sacrifice no persuasive power by accepting it.