The Probability Broach, chapter 2
Win is interviewing Jenny Noble, state director of the Colorado Propertarian Party, about her murdered colleague:
She brushed back a stray curl and squared her shoulders. “I’ll try to help. What can I tell you, Officer?”
“Lieutenant. Were you expecting Meiss at your headquarters today?”
She nodded. “Executive Committee Meeting. He’s not on the Execom, but he called to say he had important news ‘for the Party and all of us as individuals.’ That’s precisely the way he put it. He called me again last night to make sure the meeting was still on, and said exactly the same thing: something that would change everything ‘for the Party and for all of us as individuals.’ We’d almost given up on him by now – two hours is late, even by Anarchist Standard Time…” She trailed off, realizing all over again what had happened, visibly determined to hold back the tears.
“Tell me… Jenny, is it? I’m Win, Win Bear. Did he always carry a gun, or was something worrying him – maybe whatever he wanted to tell you?”
Jenny covered the two steps across the tiny room, got a chair, and put it beside the desk. “Would you like to sit down, Win? This might take a little while. Vaughn sounded, well, conspiratorial, but also enormously pleased about something. He did have one pretty constant worry, but that’s an old story, and I’ll get to it. And yes, he carried a gun. It was his philosophy, you see.”
Something libertarians and anarchists both miss is that, like an iceberg, most of society is beneath the surface. They believe that government is a parasite, draining people’s energy and time and giving back nothing in return. But that’s only because they overlook the things government does that make it possible to have a civilization in the first place.
One example I’ve previously discussed is Ayn Rand’s cargo cult economics. When enough of her supercapitalist heroes are gathered in one place, the modern conveniences they want just appear, as if out of nowhere – even though they lack the complex supply chains and trade networks that logically should be needed to produce them.
Here’s another example with an everyday experience to anchor it. When you buy a lamp and a light bulb, why don’t you have to worry about whether they’ll fit together?
The answer is they’re designed according to a common standard. There are thousands of these standards, touching every area of modern life. Some are voluntary, agreed to by consensus; some are written into law; and some started as the first but became the second. ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, manages and coordinates them with national standards bodies from all over the world.
An ordinary consumer almost never has to think about these standards, but they’re the support structure undergirding modern life. Standards are why people with different phone companies can call each other; why your web browser can load websites from any country in the world; why every appliance can plug into any electrical outlet; why cars fit on roads and in parking spots; why airplane pilots can talk to any control tower.
There are standards for safety gear, environmental protection, and quality control. There are standards for almost everything we make, from automobile and aerospace parts, to obscure or quirkier ones, like wine glasses, ski boots, and musical tones.
Standards are bureaucracy in action. They’re mundane, unglamorous, non-sexy. They’re also hugely important for an industrialized, technologically advanced world linked by chains of trade – as opposed to a haphazard world of individual tradespeople and organizations all doing whatever they feel like.
Anarchists and libertarians would have none of this. By definition, they have no overarching organization that can compel businesses to work together.
You can argue that an anarchist society could still create voluntary standards. Maybe, in a few cases, they would. But creating a functioning society takes large-scale coordination of the kind you’d simply never get without lawmaking authority. And this book agrees!
Smith pokes fun at how anarchists are all stubborn individualists who don’t agree about anything, even something as trivial as what time to meet. He treats it as a throwaway joke, but it would be a massive problem for people trying to build a whole society along these lines.
A complex product of modern industry, like a self-driving car or a supersonic airplane, needs thousands of high-precision parts sourced from factories around the world. Now imagine trying to build one when you’d have to engage in separate negotiations with each and every producer, starting from first principles, to reach agreement about the design of even basic parts like nuts and bolts!
What makes this an even harder problem for anarchists to solve is that businesses have every incentive to create their own unique, proprietary standards. That way, you can only buy replacement parts from the manufacturer at inflated prices. There are industries that are notorious for this: think of printer ink, or farm equipment.
In the real world, antitrust laws and other government enforcement helps push businesses to converge on standards that everyone can use freely. This boosts everyone’s productivity by giving industry a common template to build on. Without a government, clashing standards and proprietary lock-ins would be a constant drag on productivity and technological progress. This is in stark contradiction to Smith’s vision that technology would explode in innovation without a government to hold it back.
New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!
“No, we keep a cat at the office to keep them out” would have been a perfect rejoinder to this.
This played out in our own shadow president’s company. Tesla was originally very cagey about releasing a standard for the NACS EV charger. They had to accelerate the building of chargers with NACS and CCS (SAE J1772) after the Inflation Reduction Act because they couldn’t get federal subsidies for chargers with proprietary access. Shortly after, they fully released the NACS standard, SAE J3400. It’s been largely embraced by North American EV manufacturers, and presumably, future chargers will not need to have two different interfaces. (Of course, Trump hates the IRA, so who knows if EV charging station subsidies will last, but it’s still a case where government policy drove a process of standardization. And in this case, it’s generally believed that the NACS interface was superior, so everyone benefits from this change)
Are you actually familiar with how anarchists propose society could be organized in the absence of states, or are you just assuming that state power is necessary so of course standardization couldn’t happen without it and we’d all be at the mercy of corporations. Remember, capitalism, and therefore this sort of corporate unstandardization, would not exist in a non-capitalist society. It’s inaccurate to assume that a stateless society would be just like today but with no government: that is, ironically, exactly the mistake L. Neil Smith made in the first place. Because right now it just looks like you’re fighting a strawman.
I’m happy to entertain your proposal for this. Does it assume that people in an anarchist society will be inherently more cooperative and less argumentative than they are now?
My wife does lots of volunteer work: on community boards, political organizing, and church committees (non-theistic Unitarian Universalist). My experience from watching her is that people are very good at coming up with reasons to fight with each other, even when they should theoretically agree on the basics.
…or are you just assuming that state power is necessary so of course standardization couldn’t happen without it[?]
That’s not an assumption, that’s a conclusion based on observation. LOTS of observation.
And if we seem to be fighting strawmen when we criticize anarchist ideas, that’s because straw is all the anarchists have.
Well, to be fair, the history of the creation of standards are quite complex and state power has not been the primary driver of many standards. A whole series of blog posts could be written just on the history of various standards.
A lot of modern standards came from insurance companies. The NFPA is still a non-government organization which creates and publishes the National Fire Code for buildings. This standard specifies materials, wiring guidelines, escape routes, etc. It is often adopted by various municipalities as a required standard to follow in that municipality, but it is not developed/updated by the state. The intent by the insurance industry was to create building standards which would reduce building fires they would have to pay for. Originally buildings which met this standard were cheaper to insure, eventually society decided that bringing all buildings up to this standard would help everyone, so municipalities adopted these standards as building codes and enforced compliance with them. But the standard was not created, and is not updated, by the government. The government leaves it to experts, the people with experience in determining the cause of fires, to keep the standard up to date. Some of these are government employees, but not all of them.
Other standards were created by industry without government involvement. A lot of time these started as competition, if the barriers to entry was low. An M2, 6mm, Hex-Head bolt meets a standard defined by the industry. These standards developed because the different companies wanted to make their parts interchangeable with their competitors. These standards are enforced by the market. If a company supplies parts which do not meet the standard they will lose business. I’ve personally, on occasion, purchased hardware which are just slightly outside of a standard and I’ve never purchased (knowingly) from that source again. There is no government enforcing these standards, but they still exist.
There are definitely standards created by governments as well. The US Military Industrial complex is filled with standards created and enforced by state power. The intent for a lot of these standards is to ensure interchangeability during times of conflict. Because of the US Military requirements/contracts, a 4001 Op Amp would have the same characteristics whether it was from TI, Raytheon, Panasonic, Honeywell, etc. As a young engineer everyone had copies of the yellow, hard-bound, TI bible because it gave the characteristics for semiconductors regardless of who made them. Since the 1990’s those standards have been allowed to decline and I can no longer know that an Infineon BSP613P can be used interchangeably (in most applications) with the On Semi NTF2955 just by looking at the part numbers.
My point is that standards develop for a multitude of reasons, and are enforced by a variety of mechanisms. Some standards absolutely require government oversight. The standards which deal with medicine or food safety would have been unlikely to have developed or enforced by the market or created by secondary players in the market like insurance companies. The libertarian/anarchist argument that people would learn to avoid con artists and tainted food may work in a small community where knowledge can be disseminated to the entire community relatively quickly. But when a town/city/nation grows to the point where there is no shortage of marks, even if the conman/quack kills a few, industry standards and market forces are ineffective at enforcing standards and the society has to create and enforce them through their government.
As an example, the average citizen doesn’t know how to test their milk for borax. Borax was added to milk sold openly on the market in the late 1800’s because it removed the odor of spoiled milk. A dairy didn’t adulterate all their milk, but the milk which was not sold before it spoiled had borax added to it to eliminate the odor and then offered for sale. If the entire industry was engaged in this practice (and it probably was because it generated greater profit), the market will not stop it. People, a large percentage of which were children, were drinking spoiled milk with a poisonous substance added to it. The market couldn’t discriminate between wholesome and spoiled milk, it took government intervention, and inspections/fines/closure before the practice stopped.
Standards cannot be left entirely to the market to develop, because the market will always prioritize profit over other considerations, including, but not limited to; environmental degradation (pollution) and health affects on humans/animals/plants. The market will develop standards which allow businesses to make a greater profit even if it means hurting other businesses.
Here’s another problem I notice here: If the state doesn’t exist (or at least doesn’t use its power) to enforce any sort of standards, then who would enforce standards? The most obvious answer is: the largest corporations in collaboration with each other. But if you’re postulating anarchy and no capitalism, then what sort of corporations would be enforcing standards? If there’s no state power, AND no privately-owned businesses, AND no state-owned businesses, then what sort of economic order is there at all? Churches?
Most people who claim to be anarchists make a big deal out of cooperation, at least on the personal level. Whether they’d be any good at it, as a general thing, I have no idea. Most people who claim to be Libertarians don’t seem to be very big on cooperation at all. I’m not familiar enough with Anarcho-Libertarians to say what typically happens when you mix the two.