MANIFESTO OF SALVATION
FOR ARMENIA
LIFE OR OBLIVION!
By MERUZHAN HARUTYUNYAN
“Consciousness determines being.”
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK (1899–1992)
“The best government is that which governs least.”
THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743–1826)
“The problem of establishing a truly just capitalist order
is not so much a scientific problem as it is a problem of
educating the people and changing their psychology.”
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK
Until we again make the philosophical foundations
of a free society a life-threatening intellectual question,
and engage the ingenuity and creativity of our sharpest conditions
for their implementation, the prospects for freedom are indeed grim.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK
EDIT PRINT
YEREVAN
2026
Summary
The manifesto asserts: The cause of Armenia’s collapse is not the external enemy, but the cult of the state and intellectual short-sightedness. The state is the ruling apparatus itself, which plunders the citizen through taxes and debasement of money.
The salvation formula is: “money → powerful army + true economics.” To have money, the state must be reduced to the minimum. 7 steps are proposed: Dissolve – the National Assembly, 90% of ministries, city halls, the Central Bank, the SRC, and other bureaucratic structures like them; taxes: 0–10%; arms: to the citizen (21+); courts: elected and removable by the people. Also abolished: officials’ large salaries, budget-funded bonuses, bodyguards, cars and motorcades, advisors, all immunities and all privileges. The foundation of public order is 4 norms of morality: inviolability of private property, voluntariness of contract, prohibition of lying, equality before the law. A transition period is stipulated with a guarantee that no pensioner will suffer. Only private individuals have the right to draft a new Constitution, while state officials, state institutions and structures created by the state, as well as members of political parties, do not have the right to draft a constitution.
Either a rich state and poor people, or a minimal state and a free, armed, rich people; there is no other option.
ISBN 978-9939-40-224-6
© Harutyunyan Meruzhan, 2026
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, converted into multimedia, made into a trademark, read on the internet, radio or television, for the purpose of profit, by any technical or electronic means, without the legal written permission of the copyright holder.
“We must once again make building a free society an intellectual adventure, an act of courage. What we lack is a liberal utopia {that is, utopia of the true capitalism}, a program that will not be a protection for the current state of affairs and not a diluted form of socialism, but true liberal radicalism that does not spare the sentiments of those in power (unions in particular), is not too practical and is not limited to only politically achievable goals today. We need intellectual leaders {that is, true proponents of the true capitalism} who are willing to resist the temptation of power and influence, willing to work for the ideal, however the odds of its rapid achievement. They must be willing to stick to their principles and fight for their full embodiment, in vain in the long run. Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals that still excite the imagination of the masses, but mere "free trade" or "softening control" is neither intellectually respectable nor capable of fueling anyone's enthusiasm. The main science a true liberal should take from the success of socialists is that their courage to be utopians has won them the favor of intellectuals and hence the influence of public opinion that makes possible on a daily basis what only yesterday seemed not within reach. Those who confine themselves to the practically reachable issues in the present state of mind constantly find that even these issues quickly become politically impossible as a result of a shift in public opinion, to which they have done nothing.
Until we again make the philosophical foundations of a free society a life-threatening intellectual question, and engage the ingenuity and creativity of our sharpest conditions for their implementation, the prospects for freedom are indeed grim.
But if we regain this belief in the power of ideas that have been the sign of the best moments in the history of liberalism {that is, the true capitalism}, the battle is not lost.”
F.A. Hayek «The Intellectuals and Socialism», Studies in Philosophy, olitics, and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 194.
{bold and italic and curly brackets mine}
Contents
Foreword: Why Armenia’s Case Is Different? 5
The Four Norms of Morality and Justice 7
The Security of the Transition Period 9
Today’s Order of the RA Is Predatory Socialism 9
The Formulae and Steps of Salvation 10
The Conditions for Becoming Powerful. 16
The Biggest and Most Deceitful Lies of the State 18
What Are Plunder and Extortion? 29
We Are on the Brink of Collapse – SOS! 33
FOUR CARDINAL LAWS OF A MORAL AND JUST COUNTRY. 34
What Have We Had for 30+70 Years: Socialism! 34
The 7 Steps: What Must Be Done Starting Tomorrow 35
The Security of the Transition Period 36
You have read libertarian books before. They tell you the state is too big. They tell you to cut taxes by 20%, audit the Fed, abolish three agencies, and wait a generation. This is not that book.
This manifesto was written in a country that might not exist in 10-20 years.
The Stakes.
I am writing from Yerevan, Armenia. Forty kilometers from here, Azerbaijan’s army stands on land it took from us in 2020 and 2023. Turkey, its ally, declares openly that its final goal is a pan-Turkic corridor that erases Armenia from the map. Russia, our “guarantor,” watched. The West sent tweets.
We have a bit less than 30,000 square kilometers left. We have a bit less than 3 million people. We have a state that consumes almost the whole of GDP and still cannot defend a village. In the West, “big government” means slow internet at the DMV. Here, “big government” means you will not have a country.
Every failed state blames foreigners. I don’t. Our collapse is domestic. It is the cult of the state.
For 70 years we were Soviet. For 36 years after, we replaced the hammer-and-sickle with a three-colour flag, but kept the same “religion”: the state is sacred, the state will save us, the state must be obeyed.
The state is not sacred. The state is the ruling gang. We hired them as servants. They became our masters. They tax us without our consent, print money and call it “inflation,” disarm us and call it “security,” and tell us to die for borders they sell at night.
This is not theory. This is Article 60 of our Constitution: the state has a monopoly on taxation; There are many other articles of our constitution: the state is social and so on, which mean nothing certain. This is our Central Bank printing money while our soldiers buy drones with donations. This is our Parliament voting itself immunity while our villages are shelled. This is us who is always trying to make the elections just and elect a Christ-like saviour. And we don’t understand that there cant be any. Neither the first, nor the second.
You cannot reform this. You cannot “vote harder.” You dissolve it.
This manifesto proposes 7 steps. Abolish the National Assembly. Abolish 90% of ministries. Abolish the Central Bank. Abolish the tax service. Cap taxes at 0–10%. Return arms to the citizen. Make courts elected and removable by the people.
It sounds insane. It is not. It is bookkeeping. A state that cannot defend its borders has no right to almost 30% (and even more) of your labor. A state that loses wars must be reduced to two functions: protection and justice. Everything else must be returned to private hands, under the four axioms of morality: property, contract, truth, equality before law.
If you are American, you think “tyranny” is the IRS. I will show you tyranny: when the IRS and the enemy army are the same threat. If you are Argentine, you know inflation. I will show you inflation when the enemy is at the gate and the Central Bank is printing for both. If you are Lebanese, Haitian, or any citizen of a failed state, this is your template. This is not “privatize the railroads.” This is “dissolve the parliament before the country dissolves.”
The West wrote libertarianism for rich, safe countries. I wrote it for a country bleeding out. That is why it is 19 pages, not 600. You don’t read Mises in an ambulance.
If we fail, there will be no Armenia to write about. If we succeed, there will be a model for every nation that is told “you have no choice but to die slowly.”
You have a choice.
Meruzhan Harutyunyan, Yerevan, July 11, 2026
The Diagnosis – Armenia Is on the Brink of Collapse – SOS!
A mortal danger threatens the Republic of Armenia today. The cause is not external enemies, but the domestic constitutional order, which grants the state’s ruling apparatus nearly unlimited rights, and the “short-sightedness” of our intelligentsia, which does not consider or does not know this exposition, so as to explain it to ordinary individuals. The ruling apparatus of the state has proclaimed itself “the state” and even “the fatherland,” and, by the one-man will of its prime minister who is supported by the ruling political party, acts contrary to the four basic norms of morality and justice.
Articles one and two of the “FOUNDATIONS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER” chapter of the RA Constitution state:
“The Republic of Armenia is a sovereign, democratic, social, rule-of-law state.”
The meaning of this declaration is completely unknown: for first, it does not become clear what “social society” is, and second, it is unknown what “the state’s rule-of-law, democracy, and sovereignty” are and how they are expressed. For example, a termite mound or an anthill is also a “social society.” So what?
And if by the word “social” the so-called “social justice” is meant, then – as shown below – that is social injustice itself. Or, as F. Hayek showed in the “The Mirage of Social Justice” volume of his “Law, Legislation and Liberty” trilogy, social justice is a mirage or illusion.
In the RA Constitution, the number of uncertainties, deficiencies, and also contradictions like this exceeds one hundred, and it is completely impossible that with such a constitution a moral and just social order could be defined and established.
Any moral Constitution must first proclaim that the state it establishes is an independent and sovereign state, and that it establishes its constitutional order and laws independently, by referenda of its own people, and does not submit to the instructions of any foreign state or foreign structure. The RA Constitution does not!
Besides, it is impossible that the collective concept “people” be ascribed the qualities of an individual. Isn’t it obvious that: “The people sneezed, then, by its own will, wiped its nose and laughed” is meaningless speech? For this reason, the true constitution of the RA must define a social order such that is, indeed, moral and just, and where every single thing is done by individuals, and not by this “abstract and undefined state” thing.
Any moral and just social order is based on the following 4 axioms:
I. The Inviolability of Private Property. No one, not even the state, has the right to dispose (seize) of a citizen’s property without the voluntary consent of that citizen. The forcible seizure of private property is plunder.
II. The Inviolability of Contract. Properties are exchanged only by the bilateral voluntary condition of the individual owners, and not by force or threat.
III. The Prohibition of Lying and Breaking Promises. The lie of a state official or the breaking of a promise is state treason and must be punished by criminal laws.
IV. Protected Free Competition. All are equal before the law.
No monopoly, no privilege, no bonus, no immunity for any official, no bodyguards and motorcades kept at the expense of the state budget must exist. Violating these norms and their consequences eliminates both morality and justice, and humanity itself.
This manifesto is only an exposition of the general direction and general spirit of actions. This is neither a program nor a constitution. Nor is this a technical collection of laws.
It is obvious that without a transition period no reform is possible. And there must be defined, for example, a three-year (or five-year) transition period, during which:
1. All state pensions, benefits, disability and loss compensations must be preserved – without reduction.
2. Current state payments for healthcare and social insurance must be preserved.
3. These expenses will be financed from the property and budgets of the dissolved ministries, city halls, the Central Bank, the SRC (the State Revenue Committee), and other large state structures, as well as by funds obtained from the privatization of state real estate, and during the Transition period no new tax or duty must be established.
4. Citizenship of the Republic of Armenia shall also not be granted to migrants coming from states whose religious or traditional views are contrary to the religious or traditional views of the citizens of the Republic of Armenia, since, as the experience of Europe demonstrates, such migrants do not integrate into the religious and traditional reality of the Republic of Armenia. Migrants shall be prohibited from receiving any state social assistance.
5. Private property rights of disposition shall be restricted by prohibiting the sale or transfer in any form of privately owned land to citizens of other states, as long as there remains a theoretical danger of usurping the territory of the Republic of Armenia, such as plans for the creation of a Turanian imperial state by Turkey.
6. The transfer to another state of privately owned lands purchased from citizens with the consent of those citizens and at the price set by those citizens is possible only and solely by the decision of a nationwide referendum. All state officials who violate this rule shall be immediately dismissed from their positions without any delays or bureaucratic red tape and shall be brought to trial.
After the transition period, the system of accumulating pensions, gradually and by a procedure approved by referenda, must pass to private voluntary cumulative insurance.
However, those large state pensions that the ruling apparatus has established for state officials by the force of its “laws” (for example, the enormous pensions of generals, colonels, ministers, judges and prosecutors, etc.) must be abolished and become equal to the pensions of ordinary citizens.
a. Citizenship. RA citizenship is not granted to citizens of those states with which the RA is in a state of war or unsettled conflict, or whose official doctrine contains claims directed against the territorial integrity of the RA, and whose ideological doctrines are opposed to the customary norms of the RA, and this opposition is irremovable.
The list of these states is approved by local referenda.
b. Social payments. Only citizens of the RA have the right to receive a pension, benefit, or other social assistance from the budget of the RA Government.
c. Real estate. The procedure for foreign citizens and companies to acquire land and real estate in the RA is established only by local referendum. Without the consent of the community, a transaction to acquire land and real estate is null and void.
a. Tax and customs are plunder, if they are established without the consent of the private property owner. Today’s Constitution, by Article 60, gives the state a monopoly on plunder.
b. The state is elected to be our servant, but today it has become our master. We gave the state the right to disarm us, but itself remain armed, to secretly dispose of our very property, to listen to our phones, to seize our land and houses – under the predatory pretext of “the overriding interest of the state.”
c. It is the Central Bank (the CB) that counterfeits money and causes inflation. The CB is among the very first enemies of our people. The monopoly on currency manipulation, on taking external and especially internal debt and placing it on the shoulders of our generations, as well as on printing paper money and increasing the money supply (that is, counterfeiting money), and therefore also the monopoly on inflation, belongs to the CB. The inevitable consequence of inflation is the unceasing price rise that plunders the people, which at any moment threatens hyperinflation. The dollar and the other currencies, as well as gold, are economic goods, and when the CB supposedly regulates their prices, it contradicts science, it plunders, and it obstructs export-import. The CB, by this supposed regulation, further impoverishes the already poor and further enriches the already rich. Therefore, such regulations of CB must be prohibited.
d. For the same reasons, the powers of the Constitutional Court (the CC) and the Supreme Judicial Council (the SJC) must be given to ordinary courts. Isn’t it obvious that if a judge is incapable of interpreting any article of the constitution, then either that article of the constitution is of no use, or the judge is? The existence of the SJC is completely meaningless, for if the court and the Constitution exist, is there, besides their justice, also some “supreme justice”?
e. There must be no SRC, because when we hire the state-ruling apparatus – by electing it for some salary – we hire it to serve us, to collect tax and customs. This servant of ours, besides tax and customs, must have no other income, the income which, actually, belongs to us only, not the state.
We need money to have a powerful army to protect us from any intervention. For this, the following steps must be taken.
Step I. The minimal state must be established, on the following foundations: The ruling apparatus is an evil. If this evil is unavoidable in the present world, it must be the minimum. To bring this evil to the minimum, the state must be decentralized as much as it is possible and reasonable in the state of the present global situation.
a. The following must be dissolved: The National Assembly (NA), about 90% of the about 40 ministries and other very large state institutions of ministerial weight, and the city halls.
Dissolving city halls eliminates their possibility of engaging in any economic (and inevitably corrupt) activity today. Community halls and village halls must also be deprived of this possibility, because almost all of their functions must be given to private hands. The remaining administrative functions of these must be transferred to local (with a strictly limited low number of employees) community halls, to local referenda, as well as to sheriffs and courts elected by those referenda. This will forever eliminate the monopoly corruption of distributing licenses (for bribe) of: “parking lots, garbage collection, advertising billboards, and other such building permits.”
(The NA is a legislative organ, and the member of a legislative organ is, in fact, a “judge examining and stating the fairness of a law,” and this member must be free from party bias. It follows that the existence of party factions in the NA is contrary to the constitutional norm of equality before the law. As the parties are inevitable and the courts have the right of producing law, the NA must be dissolved).
b. Perhaps only the ministries of foreign affairs, defense, and the courts elected and dissolved by local referenda must remain.
c. All state institutions and officials must be subject to an audit appointed by the court and give an annual report to that court, as it was in Ancient Athens.
d. The powers and rights of all state institutions must be drastically reduced and almost all of their functions must be given to private hands. Except for a referendum, the government or any other state organ must not have the right to declare war or to surrender. This function must be given only to a referendum.
e. Citizens have the right to sue any state official and legal entity (especially the prime minister and members of the government or a minister and the ministries, etc.) if they collect, for instance, 10000 signatures. Upon the first case of LIE or corruption proven by a court, they must be immediately dismissed from office, without any impeachment or other formality. A judicial claim must be filed against them, especially if during their office they disposed of citizens’ lives or large state resources. That court which does not accept a claim of this lie or of damaging another’s private property, or delays the proceedings, must be immediately dissolved, and its judges must also be put on trial. But if the citizen’s accusation in the claim is not proven, the plaintiff citizen himself (as in Ancient Athens) is put on trial.
Step II. The sanctity of private property must be established.
a. The “law of the overriding interest of the state” must be abolished. Not even one square centimeter of land may be taken from the owner without the owner’s voluntary consent. The issue of disposing of and alienating land considered public is decided only by local referendum.
b. By referenda, the property tax, movable property tax must be abolished. The tax on small business must become zero. The tax on medium business must not exceed 5%, for the rest a flat tax of no more than 10% must be established.
Step III. The citizen must be armed.
a. Every sane citizen has the right to possess arms and to carry a pistol.
b. The puppet institution of the president must be abolished.
c. The Prime Minister/President should not be the Supreme Commander-in-Chief (CIC), or any other type of military commander, by virtue of the constitution (or otherwise), unless he has been elected by referendum; nor should he have the right to appoint anyone to a military office unless he is the CIC. Candidates for military offices should be elected democratically. The voters should be all military personnel. The elections should be conducted by open ballot and should be direct and based on a majoritarian system.
d. Private military units are permitted, up to and including regiments (“Yerkrapah”-like, but independ¬ent of the state), as well as private police divisions. See the commentaries. Private military and police units are also subject to the law.
Step IV. The court becomes single-tier.
a. Justice is completely separated from the state and becomes the function of courts elected and dismissed by local referenda. The judge is elected and dismissed by the referendum of the local community, when a need arises (for example, by an initiative of 1,000 or 1,500 signatures). A judge dismissed from office must immediately and automatically be put on trial.
b. For grave crimes, the institution of jurors is established.
c. Military courts are dissolved – no specific justice, for all are equal before the law.
The courts must receive a certain sum by a certain mechanism from every trial – somewhat lake lawyers – ¬which will create an incentive for a given court to have many plaintiffs and will, of course, also force courts to compete to establish and strengthen their honest reputation.
Step V. Legislation must be separated from the state.
a. The NA functions of legislation must be handed to the courts. They must judge by the basic theses of Roman common law, and the jurors must decide by the logic of the norms of morality and justice.
b. Newly produced legislation must become fully precedential.
c. The state must be deprived of the right to propose or establish a draft law or normative act. The ~40,000 laws adopted in the last 25–30 years by “state drafts,” almost entirely, must be dissolved, so that the market becomes free.
Step VI. The police must be subordinate only to the local community.
a. The institution of sheriffs must be established, whom only the community referendum elects and dismisses.
b. The institution of sheriffs must be established on the model of the sheriffs of the USA. The sheriff must be elected and dismissed like a judge.
The sheriff and the community police must be subordinate only to the local community (for example, to the local referendum), and not subordinate to any other institution, not even the prime minister. Anyhow, a sheriff must be subject to a court trial.
c. The police huge army of about more than half the state army must be reduced to a reasonably low number.
Step VII. The state secret does only hide the state crimes committed by the ruling apparatus-the state, especially the most horrifying and filthy of them, from the people (for example, those secrets which show the grave crimes of high state officials, the Central Bank, the National Security Service (NSS), and the remaining most important institutions of the state).
a. The state secret must be abolished (except for military secrets during days of war).
b. Arms trade must not be a state secret, because in today’s technological world it is absolutely impossible for large trade to remain secret.
c. Any type of secret discussions and trials and hearings must be prohibited.
The psychology of the people must change. We must abandon the illusion of “the state is sacred” and “the leader will save us.” There cannot be a just state, there cannot be a Christ-like saviour who could have saved us without changing the social order of the society according to the above stated moral norms. There is only the free person, the free market, free people according to moral norms.
CONCLUSION: Either the state is powerful and rich, or the people are. There is no third option.
If the ideas of this Manifesto and its explanations become the imperative of the day, the RA will not vanish from the map and we will have money, an army, freedom, and there will be a future.
If they do not, there is no future and there will not be, and the main culprit will be us.
*****************
Armenia’s situation is critical. It is not excluded that the Republic of Armenia (RA) may vanish from the map. For five years I have been trying to tell our educated class what the RA needs to survive, drawing on Austrian economics – praxeology. This manifesto is only a synopsis of the theories of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich August von Hayek. For detail see my The State versus the People or Moral Order – the Saviour and the bibliography in there – more than 60 English titles – 2021, 480 pp; and The Country Rescue Formulae, 2024, 168 pp, Edit Print, Yerevan.
First, a constitution must contain several mandatory laws, and several laws it must not contain.
For example, “the law of the overriding interest of the state” lets the ruling apparatus seize any citizen’s private land – at a price the apparatus itself sets. That is immoral and unjust, because seizure is plunder. This law serves only the overriding interests of the rulers, not the citizen’s. It is by this law that homes in Yerevan’s Kond district are being taken today. It is by this law that private lands of RA citizens are handed to Azerbaijanis.
State secret. Isn’t it absurd that our hired “servants” keep secrets about how they dispose of our property? We hire a servant by election, not a ruler who then calls himself “authority” and “minister.”
All immunities of our servant-rulers must be abolished: all bonuses, all privileges, all bodyguards funded by the state, all motorcades, all official cars, all state apartments and free meals. No official’s salary may exceed a professor’s salary.
Rulers must go from home to work and back on public transport, at their own expense. Let the official know his post is dangerous – that ordinary citizens may shoot him for immoral and unjust conduct.
A free market (or free-market relations) rests on the basic norms of morality and creates a moral order. Again, the foundation of a moral order is the free market, or a truly capitalist order. A moral order is also a just order. To this day, true capitalism has never been fully implemented in any country; capitalism has always been mixed with socialism.
Here are the four norms of morality and justice. Violating them must be treated as state treason.
When the Constitution or anyone else asserts that “the Republic of Armenia is a state of independent, free, and sovereign citizens,” the assertion is, in fact, devoid of any real or substantive meaning. Why? Because the concept of the “Republic of Armenia” is a collective concept. It is a mistake to attribute the properties of an individual to a collective entity. Only an individual can be independent and sovereign, not a collective abstraction.
The independence and freedom of a member of society consist, first and foremost, in the inviolability of that individual's private property and the freedom to dispose of that property as they see fit.
Yet the current Constitution of Armenia states that the Republic of Armenia is an independent, free, and sovereign state, which contradicts reality. Is it not the case that, following the defeat of 2020, the Republic of Armenia has been subject to the will of Aliyev and other well-known and unknown individuals?
A realistic, just, and moral constitution must first declare that the Republic of Armenia is a state of independent, free, and sovereign citizens, that its social order and the fundamental laws governing that order are established through referendums held among its own citizens, and that it is not subject to the directives of any (foreign, as well) institution or individual.
In the sense explained above, any just social order rests on the following four axioms:
I. The inviolability of private property. No one, including the state, has the right to dispose of a citizen's property—let alone seize it—without that citizen's voluntary consent. Forcibly taking control of a citizen's property or seizing it outright is plunder.
II. The inviolability of contracts. Citizens' property may be exchanged only by mutual voluntary agreement between its owners, never through force or threats.
III. The prohibition of lying and breaking promises. A public official's lie or breach of promise constitutes treason against the state and must be punished under criminal law. The minimum penalty is the immediate dismissal of the lying public official.
IV. Protected free competition. Everyone is equal before the law. There must be no monopoly whatsoever over property or rights, no privileges, no bonuses, no preferential salaries or immunity for public officials, and no bodyguards or motorcades. Violations of these and similar principles destroy morality, justice, and humanity alike.
In fact, these four norms are fused into one another. Only a social order that satisfies these norms – and only these norms – is moral and just, because all morality and justice we know, all that is human and just, derives, more or less, from these four basic norms.
When these norms are not followed, both morality and justice vanish; what is bad and vile is called good and excellent; and humanity itself is annihilated. When these norms are not followed, human society turns into something far worse than a pack ruled by laws more unjust than a bandit’s, and it disintegrates. Civilization itself disappears. John Locke said four centuries ago:
Theorem 1. Abolish private property and you will abolish justice.
The source of human justice is the inviolability of private property alone. The only alternative to justice is injustice, and the only source of injustice is violence and deceit – sword and cannon, or the fraudulent and treacherous propaganda of lies.
AXIOM 1. From the VERY BEGINNING of a moral constitution these four moral norms must have been laid down, because only the constitutional, criminal, and civil-administrative laws that implement these – and derive from them – will allow a truly moral and just capitalism to take root in a country governed by them.
AXIOM 2. The aim of a moral constitution must be to implement these four moral norms in the country as completely as possible. Only by these norms must a moral and just order – i.e. public justice, or true capitalism – be established.
The truly moral and just capitalism has been mankind’s long-standing dream. The more fully the basic norms of morality are implemented, the more political and economic freedom and welfare every individual in that society will have; and the production and quality of spiritual and material goods will be the greatest possible, while prices and misery will be the least possible.
Truly moral and just capitalism is an extremely fragile order. Because for about a century and a half, socialists have slandered and discredited capitalism, painting it as unjust and bloodthirsty. Whereas, IT IS SOCIALISM THAT IS UNJUST AND BLOODTHIRSTY.
From these four norms flow all the moral-legal and ethical rules we follow at every step, almost by instinct – for example, the reflex of apologizing when we step on someone’s foot.
The third norm asserts that no unprincipled person, no liar, no bad faith or promise-breaker can be moral and just. A high official’s false promise or false statement, or his breaking a promise, must be treated as a grave criminal violation of the constitution.
The fourth norm, together with the second, says bluntly: deputies and state officials must have no immunity beyond the length of one session. Those same deputies or any official must have no other privilege.
A few derivative rules follow from the basic moral norms: trusting strangers in society – that is, not expecting danger and unpredictability from them; voluntary exchange; honesty; truthfulness; keeping one’s word; principledness; trade; honest earnings; and so on.
The state is the ruling apparatus. Those who say, “The state is not the ruling apparatus” or “The ruling apparatus is not the state,” let them show what the state is, if not the ruling apparatus. Let them say who signs, for example, the state’s treaties, who enforces state laws, if the state is not the ruling apparatus.
THE FIRST CONDITION: for making the country powerful is to free ourselves from statism – from treating the state as sacred and useful. Every type of uncontrolled and unpunishable state is ruinous, whether called socialist or capitalist or another name.
THE SECOND CONDITION: the people must understand that the sole aim of the state-ruling apparatus is to live safely and carefree on taxes and customs extorted from the people, and to exploit and enserf the people so they meekly submit while the allegedly servant-state plunders and exploits their masters the people. The people must understand that the state-ruling apparatus – especially one that is uncontrollable, unpunishable, irremovable and keeping to expand – is both a scourge and the people’s first enemy.
THE THIRD CONDITION: We must shed two illusions: the just and paternal state, and the Christ-like savior leader. There is no just and paternal state-ruling apparatus, and there is no Christ-like savior. After election, every party becomes a plundering ruling apparatus. Every one of them. The only escape from their plunder and serfdom is to shrink their numbers and rights to the minimum.
THE FOURTH CONDITION: the people must understand that almost everything the state now monopolizes – from education and healthcare to road-building and pensions – the private sector can do, and will do far more efficiently, if free-market competition had been protected by law.
There will be an objection: the proposed 10% flat tax will slash budget revenues. Economically, that objection is baseless. A tax that low and predictable is exceptionally attractive to foreign and domestic capital, as Monaco’s 0%, Andorra’s 10%, Liechtenstein’s 12.5%, and the Swiss cantons prove. Low taxes create a powerful inflow of capital investment, multiplying the country’s total wealth very quickly. And to fund the state’s minimal needs – defense and justice – a 10% tax is entirely sufficient.
And by the final and MAIN CONDITION, the people must understand this: If a state is mandatory – if a country cannot exist without a ruling apparatus – then let this scourge at least be the smallest. Let the state-ruling apparatus be the minimum not only by its number, but also by its written rights, as told in this Manifesto. But to achieve this we must understand some simple things. Now let us see what simple things we do not understand.
Theorem 1. The state is nothing other than the ruling administration, and the state-as-ruling-administration IS EVIL.
Corollary 1. The state is neither the homeland, nor the country, nor the people.
The main concern of the state, through all its propaganda and by all means, is to zombify the people in such a way, with the sole purpose that all citizens become obedient and submissive taxpayers, policemen, and soldiers of the state. Why? So that the state may plunder and oppress the people with impunity and without being noticed, and also keep them obedient and submissive. This is why the state constantly and incessantly “feeds” and educates its people with countless lies. Here are several of the main ones.
LIE 1. The belief that the state is an elected organization that provides beneficial services to the people is a COLOSSAL LIE. The state is an organized criminal group whose sole purpose is to live in comfort and luxury at the people's expense by plundering and oppressing them through its monopoly over taxation and customs duties.
Corollary 2. Since, under the conditions of civilization as they exist today, the state-as-ruling-administration-as-evil is bound to exist, it is necessary to keep both its scope and its rights and powers to a minimum.
LIE 2. “If there is no state, or if its size is very small, external enemies will attack us and immediately eliminate us.”
This enormous lie, which has been instilled in the people for centuries, is refuted by the glorious victories of our private detachments at the very beginning of the 1990s when our state was rather weak. It is also refuted, for example, by the Solonian period and by the example of Ancient Athens during several centuries that followed it.
a. The state of Ancient Athens was minimal – both in the number of its public officials and in the paucity (almost complete absence) of their rights and powers. The social order of Ancient Athens was non-centralized or decentralized. In today’s sense, Ancient Athens was a “stateless state.” Here, all major issues were decided by a great many courts and by a permanent court-referendum, the popular assembly of approximately 6,000 people. Ancient Athens had neither a tax system nor a standing army (almost like Ancient Rome before the military reforms of Marius). But when the Persian King of Kings Xerxes attacked Athens with an army of at least a quarter of a million men, the Athenians formed an army of 50,000 within a few minutes and, together with the 10,000-strong Spartan army, crushed Xerxes’ army and navy and drove Xerxes out of Greece.
b. Not only the examples already given, but the example of modern Armenia itself shows that it is precisely the army of a minimal state that is more effective than the powerful state armies of the Xerxeses. Indeed, was it not precisely the private, non-state military detachments of the early 1990s that, in fact, defeated Azerbaijan and, through their heroic actions, instilled such terror in the enemy army that even one powerful blow was enough to make them flee in panic all the way to the Caspian Sea?
Unfortunately for us, when the state of the Republic of Armenia became powerful (and not the people themselves became powerful – with their popular private military detachments), the highly talented heroic commanders who had organized and led these private detachments were killed one after another (as if from some strange “commanders’ epidemic”).
Then all these private detachments were incorporated into the state army, which two years later signed a mad ceasefire with the enemy. The consequence of this, together with the subsequent nearly two decades of complete (and, in fact, treacherous) inaction by the state, was the complete and disgraceful defeat of Armenia’s state-administrative army and the loss of Artsakh. Therefore, the alleged superiority of a supposedly organized permanent state army over a rapidly self-organizing union of private armies is A LIE.
c. This is also demonstrated by the example of Switzerland. Switzerland’s standing army numbers fewer than 10,000 military personnel, but when necessary, the country can assemble an excellent, superbly trained and equipped army of approximately half a million within a very short time.
LIE 3. “There supposedly has never been, and there is not now, a country without a state or without a minimal apparatus in the sense described above”.
Both of these are LIES, as demonstrated by the example of Ancient Athens already given (and perhaps also by many other ancient Greek poleis). But there is also the example of Ancient Ireland, which for more than 1,000 years was governed solely by the Brehon laws of the private Brehon jurists, and the example of Ancient Iceland, which for more than three centuries was governed by the laws of the Þjóðveldið (“People’s Commonwealth” or “Alliance of Communities”).
Countries with minimal administrative apparatuses have existed for a long time, and their number tends to increase. These include Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Andorra, perhaps also Switzerland, Singapore, and others.
LIE 4. When we are constantly told that the reason goods and services become more expensive is not the state, but solely the greed and insatiability of individual producers and sellers, as well as external causes (for example, the EAEU, or Europe, or some other “Boogeyman” from outside), THEY ARE LYING. The only cause of the rising cost of living is state intervention in the affairs of individual economic actors. The state carries out this intervention in several highly deceitful and unnoticed ways.
a. The state monopolizes the production of money, a right that, in a free market, would belong to any commercial bank, for example. But (especially in the case of paper money) the monopoly on money production automatically grants the state a monopoly on counterfeiting money with any impunity. And the state, completely uncontrolled, unaccountable, and unpunished, constantly prints banknotes and, as an economist might say, “inflates the quantity of banknotes,” that is, it causes monetary inflation, and prices rise. Producers and sellers, seeing that all kinds of raw materials and services have become more expensive, are then forced to raise the prices of their own goods as well. And the state, feigning innocence, declares: “Those greedy and insatiable producers and sellers raised the prices of everything.”
b. The same inflation occurs when the state gives part of the money taken from taxpayers to weak enterprises in order to save them from bankruptcy (mainly not as a gift). The lying and deceitful state also causes inflation through this insidious trick, and then all prices continually rise.
c. In the same way, inflation is created or intensified when the state incurs foreign and domestic debt, because these too increase the quantity of money needed by the country’s economy.
d. According to Mises’s Regression Theorem, the quantity of gold money required by any country is, in fact, arbitrary, but when the state switches to paper money and continually increases its quantity, it necessarily contributes to inflation. Why? Because the state does not distribute the additional paper money simultaneously, equally, and proportionately among all economic actors. The state’s favorites immediately learn that additional paper money has been injected into the country’s economy and immediately accumulate capital goods before those goods become more expensive. Meanwhile, the poor and the “middle classes,” unaware of all this, experience the result of this inflation – that is, the ensuing rise in prices – much later, when the new and higher prices have already become established.
Through all these processes, the state makes the poor poorer and the rich richer.
LIE 5. The state says: “Only the state is capable of carrying out projects on such a large scale as enormous railways, bridges, tunnels, space exploration, and so on.” This is the state’s greatest technological LIE. Let us say a few words about this deceitful lie.
a. Railways. The enormous railway network of the United States was built by private companies. Where private enterprise built with its own funds (for example, James Hill’s Great Northern Railway), the railway was profitable and of high quality. Where the state intervened with subsidies, there was plunder and bankruptcy.
b. Bridges and tunnels. The greatest structures in history have often been built through private concessions. The state merely takes the “laurels” for these enormous private constructions, cutting the red ribbon at the inauguration of what was actually built by private enterprise with money taken from that very private enterprise through taxation.
c. Space. For decades, the state-run NASA was regarded as “proof” that reaching space was impossible without the state. Today Elon Musk (with his SpaceX) and other private companies have proved the opposite. They fly into space dozens of times more cheaply, more quickly, and more efficiently than any comparable flight by a state bureaucratic institution. Private enterprise is interested in results; the state is interested in spending the budget. This destroys the stereotype that “private enterprise can only run small shops.” If private enterprise can send a rocket to Mars, then private enterprise can certainly build Armenia’s roads, railways, or bridges much better.
d. The question of efficiency. When the state builds a bridge or railway, it always costs the taxpayer three or four times more than the actual value of the structure, because a government official “spends someone else’s money on someone else” (this is Milton Friedman’s formula). And the state always bankrupts everything it touches.
e. The technological lever. This should suggest to the Armenian intellectual that if we want modern technologies rather than Soviet ruins, we must make room for the genius of private enterprise. Why don’t we think: “If Elon Musk accomplished things that NASA could not accomplish for decades, perhaps our country’s ‘unsolvable’ problems can also be solved without this administrative apparatus?”
f. Public transportation. The latest example of the same lie is right before our eyes. The state, through municipal authorities, monopolizes public transportation. The great state LIE says: “The private minibuses and buses are bad; we will use the taxes taken from you (this is what it means) to bring new buses.” And here is what happens.
A private entrepreneur works with his own money and at his own risk, and if he performs badly, he goes bankrupt. A state bus operates precisely with money taken from us – that is, with taxes. And if the municipality (the state) performs badly, it does not go bankrupt. Instead, it demands a new tax. The result: the ticket becomes more expensive, the debt remains on our shoulders, and the municipality becomes one of the biggest businessmen, even though it understands nothing about business. And the state needs this LIE to convince the people that supposedly only the state is capable of doing big things, so that later it can take even small things away from private enterprise – even your bus and minibus.
LIE 6. In ancient times (Greece, Rome, Ancient Armenia), there were no “police forces” in the modern sense. First, both in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, free citizens were armed; and, as the saying goes, an armed citizen is respectful (because whenever one person is rude to another or, literally, uses physical force, there is always a possibility that he will encounter “His Majesty the Pistol, who makes the weak equal to the strong”). This circumstance restrains the unrestrained.
LIE 7. Sometimes advocates of a large state police force say that the police have always been this extensive. But there are several lies here. First, state police have not always existed. In the Ancient World, the victim or the victim’s family themselves pursued the criminal. Second, we are told that “without a state police force, the criminal will remain unpunished.”
This is A LIE. Human history knows the system of Frankpledge, in which the community itself had an interest in and responsibility for the conduct of its members. Under this system, a criminal had almost no opportunity to hide, because it was not an indifferent police bureaucrat who pursued him, but the armed victim himself or the victim’s friend and neighbor. This was the libertarian model of community guarantee or community responsibility. For example, because all free citizens of Old England were armed, whenever the English saw a criminal act, the “Hue and cry” was immediately raised, and the entire neighborhood was obliged to come out armed and apprehend the criminal.
LIE 8. The very concept of a criminal’s rights is entirely false. The state very often protects the “supposed rights of the criminal” and punishes the homeowner himself for resisting – and especially for killing – a criminal who has invaded his home or private property.
a. From a libertarian perspective, the territory of private property is inviolable. Aggressively invading any private property gives the owner of that property the full right to use any type of forceful defense by which that owner is capable of protecting his life and property.
b. The concept of “limits of self-defense” is itself a deceitful fraud. It is purely a state device intended to leave the citizen defenseless and dependent on the state police.
c. Privatizing justice (Restitution), strictly speaking, means that the state administers justice in its own name. This exposes the state’s deceit. Indeed, if someone has robbed you and the state sends him to prison, you, the victim, receive nothing. Moreover, you pay through your taxes for that criminal’s food and accommodation.
It would not be unjust if historical practice were applied, that is, if punishment itself became restitution. The criminal owes a debt not to the state, but to the victim. This would make justice – expensive for the criminal and fair to the victim.
It would not be unjust if the deterrence factor were applied. When a criminal knows that the homeowner is armed and has the right to kill an intruder when the intruder invades the homeowner’s private property, and that the criminal’s family will have to pay enormous compensation, the motivation to commit a crime will sharply decrease. This is a much stronger deterrent than fear of punishment by a state bureaucratic court.
LIE 9. There is no doubt that it is A LIE that the state, through its Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport, supposedly provides all those who wish with high-quality and “free” school education. (This lie applies to every state “ministerial service”; that is why we will examine it in considerable detail below, using the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport (ESCS) as an example, since almost everyone is well acquainted with the activities of the ESCS Ministry.)
a. First of all, this education is not free, because its cost is paid by the taxpayer.
b. This supposedly high-quality education, “in accordance with state standards,” is, for the most part, not at all in accordance with the standards established by the ministry itself. This is known to every citizen of Armenia, because every citizen of Armenia has necessarily received this compulsory state education, has seen and experienced it for years, and is completely aware of its quality. Everyone who has attended school knows that after the 6th or 7th grade, for example, out of the students in a class of 40, only about four continue to study mathematics conscientiously, as well as physics, chemistry, and biology beginning in the 7th grade. (I will not even mention the fact that, strictly speaking, school teaches almost no one anything, because only those students who teach themselves actually learn, for one reason or another. But that is another question.) Thus, from at least the 8th grade (if not the 5th), at least 90% of students must sit silently, for five (or seven) long and tedious years, in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology classes, hear nothing, learn nothing, ask nothing, because they know nothing about these subjects and understand nothing. If this is not the most brutal form of mental torture, then it is hard to say what torture is.
c. If we think about this a little, we will understand that this kind of compulsory state education and upbringing is also the state’s greatest, most deceitful, vilest, and most criminal fraud, of which both the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport – the state – and the entire Armenian people are perfectly aware. And everyone, both the perpetrators of this crime and its victims, considers this situation normal, to the point that they do not even notice it. This is a national tragedy.
d. The Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport does not teach genuine economics in schools and universities. Under the signboard of genuine economics, it teaches Keynesianism and disguised socialism. It will be shown shortly that socialism inevitably destroys a country’s economy. For now, let me say what Keynesianism is.
Keynesianism is the greatest economic lie, which claims that government spending, government debt, and printing money (that is, counterfeiting money) make a country richer. This lie is needed by the state to justify its plunder and oppression of the people. If students were suddenly taught the genuine economics of Mises and Hayek (the so-called “Austrian” economics), the student would ask the very next day: “Why are you taxing me if you yourselves are the cause of poverty?”
That is why the Ministry, as part of the state, prohibits genuine economics and teaches (unscientific and false and, incidentally, so throughout the entire world) state economics. A state school will never teach a child that the state is unnecessary, just as a church will never teach that God does not exist.
LIE 10. This lie is refuted by the following theorem:
Theorem 2: The Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport, as an agent of the state, has not ever had the purpose of educating the people, at least during the last 36 years.
Although the explanation and example of this “theorem” is quite lengthy, it is so fundamental that it must be given.
First, let us note that in 1985, the late Academician Manuk Abeghyan’s brilliant 144-page work On Several Grammatical Problems was published. It was the written version of M. Abeghyan’s three-day speech delivered in the hall of the People’s Commissariat of Education in 1936. In this speech, Abeghyan incontrovertibly proved that post-Abeghyan Armenian grammar, beginning in 1934, was unscientific. Incontrovertibly, because there was no scientific objection to this devastating speech either at the time of the speech or afterward. This speech was kept hidden from the Armenian people until our days.
But isn’t the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport precisely supposed to be responsible for being aware of such matters and preventing them? Could it really be that even after 1985 the Ministry did not know that the “wise” Armenian people had already been “educated” in unscientific grammar for more than half a century? Does the Ministry still not know this today, when the age of this course of grammatical ignorance is approaching a century?
The explanation is precisely the theorem above. The Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport is one link in the state, while the state’s only concern is to breed obedient and submissive taxpayers, soldiers, and policemen (so that it can plunder and oppress the people with impunity), and not citizens armed with knowledge and endowed with independent and critical thought. Such a citizen would immediately rise up against the state that plunders and oppresses him.
Our present-day Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport is the most powerful and most terrible obstacle to education in Armenia. It is absolutely obvious that if the Ministry disappeared and schools became autonomous, the educational problems of Armenia would immediately and sharply improve. But why only this ministry? Armenia’s economic and military situation would improve greatly if almost all ministries disappeared and only a few remained, and even those with a drastically reduced number of personnel.
LIE 11. They say: “Nevertheless, the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport educates our entire people.” This is A LIE. What is the result of the Ministry’s present-day activity?
The result is a servile-minded, obedient, submissive, and serf-like people. The school really does educate the people, but the result of this education today is so cruel and so terrible for the people. For the state, which plunders and oppresses its own people in every possible way, this is infinitely advantageous. Why? Because, I repeat, for the last 100 years the sole and principal concern of a state of this kind has been to breed obedient, servile-minded and serf-like taxpayers, soldiers, and policemen.
LIE 12. There is no doubt that it is A LIE that the state, through its Ministry of Health, provides all its citizens with high-quality and “free” or “affordable” healthcare.
a. First of all, this healthcare is never free. Its cost, just as in the case of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport, is paid by the taxpayer. And the taxpayer pays three times. The first time – through taxation, when the state takes approximately 30% of the taxpayer’s salary. The second time – through money printing and inflation, whereby the state takes the taxpayer’s money again through rising prices. The third time – at the state hospital, when the same taxpayer is often forced to pay out of his own pocket for medicine, surgery, and “gratitude,” because the supposedly “free” state hospital often has neither the necessary medicine nor the necessary equipment.
b. This supposedly high-quality healthcare is, for the most part, not high-quality – even according to the standards established by the ministry itself. This is known to every citizen of Armenia who has been forced to enter a state polyclinic. Here the citizen is greeted by an indifferent doctor-official who has no incentive to care about his patient’s health. Here, under the dictates of the Ministry of Health, the doctor must first (and for the most part) deal with a nightmarish amount of paperwork, leaving no time for the doctor to examine the patient.
c. One of the state’s agencies, the Ministry of Health, constantly and continually increases this nightmare by increasing queues and various obstacles to reaching a doctor. Perhaps there is no new instruction or order from the Ministry of Health that does not increase this nightmare. But the Ministry of Health is the state’s representative in this sphere. Therefore, the author of this nightmare is the state itself.
And this phenomenon is widespread throughout the world. For example, taxpayers provide half of the funding for the governmental part of U.S. Medicare. The quality of healthcare provided by this part is continuously and steadily deteriorating, becoming more expensive and less accessible. In England, more than one million Britons wait MORE THAN ONE YEAR to reach the state healthcare system that is supposed to establish “social justice.” According to Johan Norberg, during its twenty-year social-democratic “paradise” (1971–1991), the Swedish government so corrupted the extraordinarily hardworking and highly disciplined work ethic of its own population that Sweden became a “sick-note country.”
d. Why is this so? Because for a state-employed doctor, the patient is not a customer but a headache. The patient of a private doctor is a customer on whom the doctor’s reputation and livelihood depend. Yet the state has monopolized the doctor’s diploma, the licensing of medicines, and hospital authorization. The result is that, for example, in Armenia (and elsewhere), becoming a doctor is ten times more expensive and bureaucratic than it should be, while medicine is three times more expensive than it would be on a free market.
The state effectively prevents people from receiving treatment cheaply and quickly so that it can later “take care” of the same person’s health problems itself, but more expensively and worse. Why? To convince people that the state is extremely paternal and supposedly cares day and night about the suffering and troubles of its citizens.
At the same time, the state obtains the votes of all doctors and all auxiliary personnel of healthcare institutions, because it immediately dismisses those who do not vote for it.
LIE 13. Who has ever proved that it is NOT A LIE that the state has the right to possess so-called state secrets from its people, on the pretext that the rulers’ administration possesses these secrets and keeps them from its people solely for the sake of the people’s welfare? Does a hired servant elected by the people have the right to possess from its master – the people – a secret concerning the private property of that same master? (This does not refer to military secrets during wartime.)
So-called state secrets exist solely to conceal the state’s small and large crimes from its master – the people.
Conclusion-1
We do not notice or realize all these lies, this entire deception, and we constantly demand that our state become more and more powerful. But the demand that it become powerful in this way is exactly the same as demanding that the biggest and most deceitful lies of our state become bigger and more deceitful.
We do not notice or understand this. But not only these things. That is why let us see what other obvious things there are that we do not notice and do not understand.
We do not understand that we maintain the state, not the opposite. We do not understand that the state’s ruling apparatus creates no good; it lives on the goods we create, which the state, under false and unrealizable pretexts, simply takes from us – as much as it wants. We do not understand that we create everything ascribed to the state; we do it, only and only we.
We are like a householder who hires a crew to be his temporary servants, to renovate his house. But with his own hand he signs a contract – that is, by voting he “adopts” a constitution and various codes – with this crew, agreeing that he, the householder, has no right to demand an accounting from this servant-crew; no right to oversee its work; or, when it breaks its promise, no right to fire it or punish it.
We give our servant the right to raise the wage – taxes and customs – set in the initial contract, at any moment and by any amount; and we give our servant the right even to imprison the householder if he refuses to pay the increase.
We give our servant the right to plunder his master’s house, to take his household members to other countries’ wars and get them killed.
We give our servant the right to take on gigantic debts abroad in our name – the external debt – and from our banks – the internal debt. Can you imagine: the servant borrows in his master’s name and does not say why, or how he spent it? And gives himself a huge salary and bonus and puts our future generations in debt. And we have no right to demand an accounting from these servants, and we and our generations, like serfs, meekly pay off these debts.
We give this servant the right not to disclose what secret fraudulent dealings he runs in our house, because we ourselves gave him the right to hide any crime he wants, declaring it a STATE secret.
We give this servant the right not to say where he has taken members of our household, and we do not even have the right to ask whether those taken are dead or alive, what he did with the corpses, whether he autopsied them or is rotting them in sacks.
We give this servant the right to disarm us but remain armed himself, so we have no means to restrain him by force.
This servant disarms even border-village residents, who now suffer at the hands of Azerbaijanis, because they are completely unarmed, while our servant does not protect them either. The Azerbaijanis, seeing that this servant of ours is cowardly, unprofessional and, in essence, treacherous, grow ever more brazen and bite off our lands piece by piece, and we stand by as unarmed, powerless, will-less spectators.
We do not understand that fair elections will never save us if we do not know whom and for what we are electing, or what this servant-crew of ours is and what qualities it must have had. We do not understand that elections cannot be fair if they are only party lists. From a list-member only loyalty is demanded, even if his professional or moral quality is absolute zero or below zero. That is, we have no idea what an election is or what it is for.
We do not understand that an impossible thing is for an unpunished, uncontrollable and irremovable – and therefore unrestrained and constantly growing – crew-ruling apparatus to hold fair elections.
We do not understand that the elections of an uncontrollable, unpunishable and irremovable crew will necessarily be UNFAIR.
And we never notice that this servant not only never keeps the promises it gave us, but by the laws he creates himself, by taxes and customs and tariffs and all its bureaucratic red tape, he only obstructs us and stops us from doing anything important and essential.
We do not understand that this servant of ours is always a scourge.
We do not understand that the house is ours, so why must the laws of our movement inside our house, of our every action, be proposed and approved by our hired servants? We do not understand that by ELECTING we have hired only a small SERVANT-crew, but we let it constantly swell its ranks and force us to pay them high salaries.
We do not understand that our army and police are also our servants. We maintain them to protect us. We have no right to oversee these servants or demand an accounting from them. We let this servant-police and servant-army protect ONLY this servant-state that is our enemy when this enemy and we are against each other. We never notice that the KGB (or other intelligence services), which supposedly protects our security, ALWAYS AND ONLY protects this servant-state of ours when this enemy and we are against each other.
We do not know what state paper money is or how it comes into being and functions. We do not know that this servant of ours has monopolized the production of paper money, so only they have the unpunished right to counterfeit money.
We do not know that THERE IS NOTHING MORE INGENIOUS THAN THE FREE MARKET, and we think the Christ-like savior we dream of is more ingenious than the free market. We do not even imagine what is needed for this free market to function. We do not know what social justice is and do not understand: this is always INJUSTICE, because this is “Robin Hood” justice, established by plunder. We do not know that the only real justice is established only by competition protected by the law in the free market.
And since we do not know what true capitalism is, we think Western capitalism is the true one, not sensing in the least that Western capitalism is itself unjust and ruinous semi-socialism.
We do not know what a constitution that establishes a moral order is, yet we demand that this – essentially plundering – crew of ours, or parties infected with an insatiable thirst to become the state, draft a new constitution for us. And we do not understand that these “servants” of ours, organized in advance to plunder us, will never draft a constitution bereft of plunder, for they live on this very plunder.
We have always looked for the causes of our misfortunes outside. We always complain that the cause of our misfortune has been: the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Turks, the Germans, the English, the USA, the Russians, etc., etc. But we never think that quite possibly the cause is our own –unfortunately national – ignorance and inability, our arrogance and megalomania, our childishness and our vainglory.
Private property is property you created or found, or that was given to you, or bequeathed to you. Private property is yours alone. That is, if you do not want it or do not permit it, no one has the right to touch your private property – NO ONE: not an individual, not any group of people, not even the ruling apparatus, the state. That is, private property is inviolable; private property is sacred; it is a sanctity.
And this sanctity is so inalienable and sacred that when any foreign state attacks and seizes – for example – the yard or field or irrigation ditch of just one of your citizens, your country’s state army must immediately, without any order, attack the enemy – without even declaring war – and return that citizen’s private property.
This means also that when they try to convince you to sell your land and house to the state – even on terms advantageous to you – and you are not convinced and do not agree, then no one, not even this servant, the state-ruling apparatus of ours, has any right to “alienate” – seize – your house in any way. And if it seizes it, it commits an immoral and unjust act.
Theorem 1. The more they socialize an individual’s private property in any country, the more that country’s morality and the justice that derives from it, as well as humanity, decrease and diminish.
The entire history of socialism testifies to the veracity of this theorem.
Plunder is the forcible taking of someone’s private property—that is, without the owner’s permission. Plunder is the forcible appropriation of private property. Theft is the secret appropriation of the same. Extortion is the appropriation of private property by fraud.
What are tax and customs? Tax and customs are plunder or extortion, whether direct or indirect – that is, under other names, for example, excise, value-added tax, etc. – if they are established WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE OWNER OF PRIVATE PROPERTY.
Unauthorized tax and customs must necessarily be called tax and customs plunder. Only the state implements tax and customs plunder, because the state, by Article 60 of the constitution, has declared that it has the monopoly right to tax and take customs. “Our servants” themselves have established that they have the uncontrollable and unpunishable right to plunder their masters. Cumulative tax is an example of extorting money from citizens, which the state-ruling apparatus implements. From the basic norms of morality it follows that tax and customs plunder and money-extortion are immoral and unjust.
The state is precisely the ruling apparatus, which is supposedly our hired servant.
An uncontrollable and unpunishable state-ruling apparatus is an organized band of bandits, whose aim is to plunder the workers with tax and customs and to extort money, as well as to exploit and enserf the people, so they meekly submit while the servants plunder and exploit their masters. Our servant-state does all this by convincing the people that by all its steps it acts for the welfare and happiness of the people. For this, this servant of ours acts with the greatest propaganda lies and fraud. This servant of ours first convinces the people that there are things the people itself cannot do, and it is precisely on this pretext that it must take tax and customs – plunder – from the people, to do those things. This is the main lie and fraud of this servant of ours. The private sector can do everything “done” by the state. In the end, everything done in the country is done by the private sector – under the “supervision” of some state official or group of officials.
The Pretexts for Plunder
a. Establishing internal order and rule. This is supposedly done by this servant-police of ours. So far not a single case has been recorded where, during conflicts between this servant of ours and the people, this servant-police defended the people –defended us – instead of this servant of ours.
b. Defending against external enemies. This is supposedly done by this army-servant of ours. But this army-servant of ours, in conflicts between the ruling apparatus and the people, always defends only the state.
c. This servant-state of ours has already, almost everywhere, concentrated in its hands education, healthcare, and the greatest part of mass media—radio and television – fully or partially. Now the servant-state of ours is moving to concentrate in its hands service business too – for example, public transport.
The volume of this servant-state of ours is constantly and steadily growing. This servant-state of ours is the largest employer in the country. And the electoral resource of the state-ruling apparatus is extremely large, which makes this servant-state our permanent immoral and unjust master.
This servant-state of ours is the sworn enemy of the people, always, if it is unpunished, uncontrollable and irremovable from office.
The intelligentsia must explain and convince our entire people that the so-called servant-state must be, as far as possible, few and weak. This servant-state of ours is an evil. This evil must be the minimum. But our intelligentsia itself does not realize that this uncontrolled, unpunishable, extensive and omnipotent servant-state of ours is an evil and will always be an evil. And it does not realize that if the evil is unavoidable, then, as far as possible – let it be few and toothless, that is, let it be the minimum.
Is it not strange that the master has no right to know the expenditures of the money taken from him by his SERVANT-STATE? Is it not strange that this SERVANT-STATE has every right to know all the bank secrets of its master – the people? And now these servant-states must switch to digital money, so they supervise all the steps of their masters and completely enserf their masters, huh?
The government that is supposedly our servant must be elected by transparent democracy, by direct election, without any mediation or intermediary – a prime minister, deputy prime minister and a few ministers, no more than 6-7 people, as, for example, in Switzerland. The observers and the vote-counters must be, for example, the likes of sheriffs elected by local referendum and the people appointed by them.
The unacceptable method of electing by party lists must vanish, because this is completely contrary to the principle of equality before the law and gives the possibility that – by the will of the party-leader – even a criminal be included in those lists. That is, elections must be majoritarian, non-list and unmediated, direct.
A law must be formulated and confirmed by referendum: insurance companies have the right to create private police detachments – parallel to the communal ones, so there is competition – with their weapons and ammunition. For the unsuccessful activity of these, those companies must be obliged to compensate the suffering citizen. The amount of the fine must be determined by the audit of some court.
In the same way, insurance companies must have the right to create private army detachments, up to and including divisions – like “Yerkrapah”-type units – with their weapons and ammunition, for whose military failure – defeat – these companies are obliged to compensate the suffering citizens. The amount of the fine is determined by the audit of some court. These insurance companies will be directly interested that the army units work justly and conscientiously, otherwise they themselves will have to pay an enormous fine.
Based on the works of Mises and Hayek, we assert that a social order is some kind of socialism if the following conditions are implemented – the first two. And if also the next condition is implemented, the order is already strong or wild or rabid socialism:
a) the freedom of exchange and contract of market goods and services is replaced – by significant or complete regulation of the market – by the central state-ruling apparatus;
b) the just way of distributing economic goods – and also money – by market competition is replaced by the state’s “social justice,” that is, by distributive “justice,” which is plundering injustice;
c) the disposer – in fact: the owner – of the country’s land area, as well as the dictator of the political ideology mandatory for all, in one way or another, is the central authority, the king, the religious elite with its leader, the General Secretary with his politburo and central committee, etc., that is, the state-ruling apparatus.
1. So-called social justice is plunder, if it is implemented by tax and customs plunder – unilaterally established by the servant-state of ours – without the consent of the taxpayer. This social “justice” is INJUSTICE.
2. All countries considered capitalist today are only partly capitalist, because although their means of production are private, nevertheless, only a part of their product is private, and the remaining part is taken by our servants, the state, under the pretext of establishing this social “justice.” From the basic norms of morality, it follows:
3. I. Plunder is always immoral and unjust, by whatever Robin-Hood pretext it is presented. Therefore, the so-called social JUSTICE is INJUSTICE.
4. II. Most of today’s so-called capitalist countries are semi-socialist. The “social” plunder of these constantly increases; the quality of all state services of these constantly falls and prices also increase.
The price of services of all educational institutions of the USA – in the last few decades – has increased about three times and half the expenses are paid by the taxpayer. The teachers are almost completely socialist, and the abilities of those receiving humanitarian education are far from satisfactory. More than a million Britons are standing in line for a year or more, waiting for their turn for the “just” – free – medical service of the United Kingdom.
5. III. Socialism and socialist plunder, like every other kind of plunder, must be condemned and considered outside the law. Any application of tax and customs plunder of the so-called “social justice” must be considered criminally condemnable.
The most beloved and most powerful bait-cover of socialist and other plundering state-servants is the so-called democracy. By “democracy,” they understand that order when the whole life of society is supposedly “run” by the people itself, through electing a just paternal state. It is silently considered that if democracy is “genuine,” this leadership is “paradisiacal and ideal,” because “the people –supposedly – is wise.”
These theses are wrong, because it is impossible that the abstract concept called “people” run anything. The saying “The people is wise” is as absurd as: “The people sneezed, then wiped its nose” or “The herd wagged its tail.” The people never runs or governs anything and is never wise. Democracy is a fraudulent trick, by which a small ruling apparatus imposes its plundering will on individuals. If the ruling apparatus is unsupervised and unpunishable, democracy necessarily becomes violence.
When democracy is the unlimited – unsupervised and unpunishable and irremovable – power of the executive, legislative and judicial organs elected by the majority or of one-two – or all – of other structures, this is already vile tyranny.
Armenia is weakening not because of the Turk or the Azerbaijani. It is weakening from the enemy within and from our own minds.
Our main enemy is our conviction that: “the state is sacred or the state will save us.” In reality the state is the ruling apparatus, this group of people, whom we hired, hired by electing, hired to become our hired servants. But this group of our hired servants has today become our master, and has made us its serfs.
How? Very simple. This, without our consent, has appropriated for itself the right to take money from our pocket. The name of what it took it has set as: tax, customs, duty, excise, property tax, wealth tax, cumulative, etc., etc. Yet, the name of any money taken from you without your consent is plunder. There is no other name.
All rich and free countries of the world were, more or less, built on these 4 laws. We have violated all four.
Here they are.
1. Your property is yours! It’s dead final! No one—not your neighbor, not the state, no one, NO ONE has the right to touch your house, land, money, business, if you do not want it. Seizing even one square centimeter of land under the pretext of “the overriding interest of the state” is plunder. And whether you give that seized thing to a neighboring citizen or to a neighboring country, there is no difference—what you did is plunder, by whatever pretext you seized that one square centimeter.
2. Only voluntary contract. I and you exchange something if we both agree. And we both are happy and we both gain. By force, threat, fraud – exchange is not permitted. No one, not even the state, has the right to interfere in our exchange.
3. Lying is prohibited. Breaking a promise is prohibited. The lie of an ordinary person is bad. The lie of an official is state treason. If an official, be it even the prime minister or president, said and did not do, he must be dismissed from office and put on trial, at that same moment, without any impeachment. If the constitution prohibits this and things like it, then that constitution is the enemy of the people.
4. All are equal before the law. No state monopoly. No state privileges. No large state salary. No state bonus for state bureaucrats. No bodyguard and motorcade for them (at the expense of the taxpayer). Immunity exists only in the session hall. He left the hall – he is an ordinary citizen.
If these 4 rules do not exist, there is neither morality, nor justice, nor economy, nor humanity.
It seems to us that we are a capitalist country. Wrong. Our social order is: state capitalism + socialism. As in the USA or Western Europe. The conviction there is capitalism in Armenia is confusion. The proofs: Today’s tax, customs, excise, property tax, etc., are plunder and this plunder is the monopoly plunder of the state. The CB has a monopoly on printing money, that is, counterfeiting money. The main forms of counterfeiting money are state debts (particularly, the budget deficits) and money inflation (printing), the consequence of which is price rise, which is also unnoticeable and fraudulent plunder. Plunder is also giving credit from the budget to non-competitive businesses. The result of all these is making the poor poorer.
What the SRC does is centralized state racketeering. The CB, the CC, the SJC are structures serving the ruling apparatus, which create an imitation of justice. About 90% of ministries and other state structures are for hindering, surveilling and taking bribes from the people.
This is the reason that the active and foresighted citizen leaves his fatherland and departs the country looking for a better one. Because in this system the winner is not the intelligent and diligent, but the “clever” loyal to the ruling apparatus.
The Formula and Steps of Salvation in 3 Sentences. We need money to have a powerful army to not be swallowed by our enemies. For this, it must be permitted that people work freely and become rich. For this, the state must be reduced to the minimum. There is no other way. Either the state is rich, free, and powerful, or the people are. The two together do not happen.
This is not a program, not a constitution. This is a direction, a target, and an intention.
Step 1. The minimal state. The following must be dissolved: the NA, and about 90% of the 30–40 factual ‘ministries’ and other state large structures, for example, the CB, the CC, the SJC, the SRC, and, for example, from the prime minister’s enormous staff only a few-person team must remain. Perhaps only (for example) the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defense, and the courts elected and dissolved by local referenda must be left but with very low number personnel. Dissolving city halls eliminates their possibility of engaging in any economic (and corrupt) activity today. Community halls and village halls must also be deprived of this possibility, because almost all of their functions must be given to private hands. The remaining administrative functions of these must be transferred to local (with a strictly limited number of employees) community halls, to local referenda, as well as to sheriffs and courts elected by those referenda. This will forever eliminate the corrupted monopoly of distributing of license of “parking lots, garbage collection, advertising billboards, and other such building permits.”
Step 2. Taxes: 0–10%. Small business: 0% tax. Medium: up to 5%. Large: 10% flat. Property tax, cumulative and very low, almost symbolic, car tax—abolish. Tax is established only by referendum. Almost all of the roughly 40,000 “state” laws enacted over the past 25–30 years must be repealed in order to set the market free.
Step 3. The CB is closed. The dram (Armenian money unit) remains, but the dollar, euro, gold, crypto circulate freely. People themselves decide what and how much to pay with. Taking external debt, declaring a budget deficit, and internal debt are prohibited by the constitution.
Step 4. Arms to the people. The age of majority of a citizen is set at 21. Every adult and sane citizen has the right to bear arms. Private police companies and the Armenian “Yerkrapah”-like private regiments are permitted. The prime minister is not “supreme commander-in-chief.” The military elect their own commander.
Step 5. The court from the people. There is no NA. Laws are created by the precedents of courts. The judge and the local sheriff are elected and dismissed by local referendum. Grave crimes – by jurors.
Step 6. The state secret is abolished. Except for military operations during days of war, the state has no right to have any state secret. State arms trade, the budget, state negotiations, and all state acts are open.
Step 7. Our mentality must change. We must abandon 2 illusions:
1. “Is the state sacred?” – No, the state is a hired servant. And an uncontrolled and unpunished servant is an evil and an enemy.
2. “Shall one day a good leader come and save us?” – He will not come. There is no Christ-like saviour.
There is only the free person and the free market, or there is nothing but collapse.
a. Citizenship. RA citizenship is not granted to citizens of those states with which the RA is in a state of war or unsettled conflict, or whose official doctrine contains claims directed against the territorial integrity of the RA.
The list of these states is approved by local referenda.
b. Social payments. Only citizens of the RA have the right to receive a pension, benefit, or other social assistance from the budget of the RA Government.
c. Real estate. The procedure for foreign citizens and companies to acquire land and real estate in the RA is established only by local referendum. Without the consent of the community, a transaction to acquire land and real estate is null and void.
And Then? If we do this, in 5 years Armenia will become the Switzerland of this region, or Singapore, or Andorra, or Liechtenstein, or else Luxembourg. Money will come to Armenia, not flee Armenia. The army will become professional, because there will be money. If we do not, in 10–15 years (perhaps sooner) a state named Armenia will not be on the map. And the culprit will not be the Turk. The culprit will be us, who were afraid to rein in the monster (the state) we ourselves created and force it to remain our hired and obedient servant, and not become a Turk enemy to us.
The choice is yours. Either a powerful state and poor people, or a minimal state and rich, armed, free citizens. There is no third option!
There are no citizens either. There are only rightless serfs.