The Probability Broach: Minarchists vs. anarchocapitalists

Two white stone statues in a sentry position

The Probability Broach, chapter 2

Jenny Noble explains to Win Bear that her murdered colleague, Vaughn Meiss, carried a gun because he got it from the government:

“I didn’t know Propertarians were into violent revolution.”

She smiled slightly and shook her head. “Not yet. Anyway, the government gave him that gun in the first place… He’d worked on something, some government secret. After he stopped, I guess they forgot to collect it, or maybe he still had information to protect. But he resented getting a gun from them, because—”

“You folks don’t like getting anything from the government?”

“Or giving them anything, either.” She smiled. “But it wasn’t that. Not this time. Look, can you stand a very brief lecture? It’ll clear things up a little.”

TPB doesn’t have the doorstopper monologues that Ayn Rand is notorious for, where the action comes to a screeching halt so one character can talk for what would take hours of real-world time. But it does have a few infodumps, like this one. As with Atlas, these lectures show how the author is stacking the deck in his own favor, forcing characters to act unrealistically for the sake of delivering his message.

Remember, Win Bear is a police officer. Even though he’s written as an easygoing guy who doesn’t agree with many of the laws he’s supposed to enforce, there’s no indication he thinks his own job shouldn’t exist. The Propertarians’ ideology ought to make him wary. In fact, he asks if they’re planning revolution, and she says, “Not yet.” He should be writing them off as either crackpots or dangerous subversives to keep an eye on.

Meanwhile, the Propertarians by definition believe he’s a thug working for a tyrannical and illegitimate state. Jenny Noble just said she doesn’t believe in giving anything to the government – so why is she answering his questions? For all she knows, he thinks she killed Meiss, and he’s fishing for a reason to arrest her. (Remember, kids: don’t talk to the police!)

There ought to be a chasm of suspicion and distrust between the two of them. Instead, they’re friendly and collegial to each other. She expresses the desire to help his investigation, and Win listens sympathetically to her lecture:

“You see, we Propertarians really try to live by our philosophy – philosophies, I should say. Oh, we all agree on fundamentals, but there are actually two main schools: the minarchists and the anarchocapitalists.”

“Minarchists and…?”

“Anarchocapitalists. I’ll get to them. Anyway, Propertarians believe that all human rights are property rights, beginning with absolute ownership of your own life.”

“The IRS might give you an argument.” Actually, I’d heard this before. Surprising how much more interesting it was, coming from a pretty girl. “But it sounds reasonable for starters.”

Just to emphasize it, in case it slipped past you: Win Bear admits he’s readily swayed to agree with any opinion expressed by a woman he’s sexually attracted to. Your protagonist, folks!

“Even our limited governmentalists would reduce the state by ninety-nine percent: no more taxes, no more conservation laws, no limits on the market. They call themselves ‘minarchists’ because that’s what they want: a much smaller government, restricted to preventing interference with individual rights instead of being the chief interferer. This depression, the so-called energy crisis – they’re caused by governmental interference!”

Jenny Noble never expounds on this part. Caused how? To serve what purpose? Does Smith think that depressions and economic crises never happened before there was a regulatory state?

This goes back to what I said earlier about how Smith finds it so obvious that government causes every problem, he forgets to make a case for it.

“Anarchocapitalists”—she reached across to the literature rack, pulling out a paperback, Toward A New Liberty, by Mary Ross-Byrd—”don’t want any government. ‘That government is best which governs least; the government which governs least is no government at all.

… A free, unregulated laissez-faire market should, and can, take care of everything government claims to do, only better, cheaper, and without wrecking individual lives in the process: national defense, adjudication, pollution control, fire protection, and police – no offense.”

This reminds me of the famous quote: “Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Even if you agree that less government is better than more, it doesn’t follow that no government is best of all. There are some vital functions that only a state can perform.

Most of these fall under the category of commons problems, which can’t be solved for one person unless they’re solved for everyone. If there’s no state to require everyone to contribute, private enterprises will collapse because of the free-rider problem.

Fire protection is a good example. If I pay for a private firefighter service but no one else on my block does, and a wildfire sweeps into my neighborhood, what happens? They’ll dig a firebreak that protects only my house, while every surrounding structure is a raging inferno? That’s not how fire works!

Not surprisingly, this is a case of “tell, don’t show” on Smith’s part. In his anarcho-libertarian utopia, we never see how most of these problems are handled. He takes a stab at showing how adjudication would work (it has some obvious problems, which we’ll get to), but most of these other governance issues go unmentioned.

In fact (spoiler!), we see conclusively that there’s no such thing as national defense in his utopia. That factors into the climax in a big way.

The idea of handing law enforcement over to unregulated private parties should be especially horrifying. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to say it, but Ayn Rand is right about why it’s a terrible idea:

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.

To the extent that the police and the legal system uphold justice, it’s because they’re (supposed to be) objective and disinterested. A for-profit adjudication system wouldn’t serve the interests of justice, but the interests of its funders. Are private police going to arrest the person who pays their salary? Are private courts going to rule against them?

It takes either extreme naivete or willful blindness not to foresee how this would play out. The rich would be above the law and immune to accountability – feudal lords commanding private armies to do their bidding – and the poor would have no rights at all. They’d be scapegoated, abused, punished without due process and targeted for shakedowns. It would be serfdom reborn under a new name.

One real-world example of what this would look like is the “kids for cash” scandal, where two former state judges took kickbacks from a private-prison company to lock up children in juvenile detention centers. In an anarcho-libertarian world, not only would this sort of thing happen all the time – it would be completely normal and above-board!

Death of personality

This past weekend, I went to one of the Tesla Takedown protests. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and the protest drew a diverse crowd. There were people of all ages and races in attendance, including families with young kids. I’d estimate about 70 people showed up.

It wasn’t just a diverse crowd of people, but a diversity of ideas on display. Nearly all of the anti-Tesla protesters brought signs and posters, all of them handmade, and every one of them expressing its own creative message. There were signs about standing up for science, preserving the national parks, protecting Social Security, defending the rights of immigrants and transgender people, and lots more. Two of my favorites were the person with a sign that read “Let’s Send Elon Musk to Mars”, and another with a Tesla logo turned upside down so it looked like a KKK hood.

We ranged along the sidewalk, across the street from the Tesla dealership we were there to protest. We chanted, played protest songs and waved our signs for two hours, garnering lots of supportive honks and thumbs-up from passing drivers.

Several of the Tesla customers came outside to stare at us. Judging by the absolute bafflement on their expressions, we might as well have been aliens from outer space.

On the other side of the street, there was a pro-Trump counterprotest. It was smaller, and unsurprisingly, it fit a narrower demographic: all white, mostly older. In contrast to our array of handmade signs, they universally signaled their allegiance with things they bought: Trump flags, signs, shirts and hats. It’s telling that they couldn’t think of any way to express themselves, other than by handing over yet more money to the felon-in-chief and subsuming themselves in his branding.

They even had an inflatable figure of Trump grinning cartoonishly and giving a thumbs-up. It looked so ugly, tasteless and garish, it was hard for me to believe they brought it in the sincere belief that it made them look good. I felt embarrassed on their behalf just looking at them clustered around it. If I spent my hard-earned money on something so hideous, I’d do my utmost to keep anyone else from finding out about it.

Pro-Trump counterprotest

Lack of taste aside, there was something else I noticed about the counterprotest that’s deeper and more telling. It’s this: no one in that crowd had a sign that expressed any coherent message.

There were no real ideas to be seen among them. No policies, no opinions, no arguments. To the extent that they had any message at all, it was “Trump”.

Their political ideology begins and ends there: not with a philosophy, not with an ethic, not even a complete sentence. It’s a single man’s name, and they worship him with the fervor of pagans bowing down to a golden calf. They loudly cheer whatever he tells them to believe or whatever random impulse strikes him on any given day. You couldn’t ask for a better illustration of what it looks like to surrender your sense of self and identity to a con man.

This must be what cults look like in their early days. It’s characteristic of a cult – religious or otherwise – to annihilate its devotees’ personalities and replace them with loyalty to the group. Even so, most cults have some kind of ideology backing up and explaining why they believe what they believe. This is pure blind adherence, without even a skeleton of reasoning behind it.