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!
Unfortunately, I think anarchists suffer from the “why should there be something, rather than nothing?” problem, which hauls in, as you say, the problem of a just state.
What would and does a just state look like? I think many, from Plato to Howard Zinn (I was trying to come up with A-Z) would agree that the just state balances between the needs and desired of the governed and the environment of that state.
Where it always seems to get ugly, to me, is that states exist in a nationalist framework in which conquest may be advantageous, in which case states immediately have to worry about state on state violence. Once that’s solved it seems relatively simple to elect someone to wear a big hat and have a controlled portion of mild advantages.
I guess once a state can will itself into existence, it can also will itself into imperium
The purpose of a State is to protect the weak from the strong, so a person with a big stick can’t go around taking everyone else’s nice stuff for themself.
The only possible objection to that could come from someone who wants to go around waving a big stick in people’s faces and threatening to harm them unless they hand over their nice stuff.
Or someone who will point out that you’ve effectively just handed the state a big stick, with the hope that it magically won’t do exactly what people always do when they have the bigger stick.
Yes, but by definition, there is necessarily going to be a Biggest Stick Of Them All somewhere out there; and it’s simply best for all concerned if that is held by the State, rather than some individual or corporation.
The analogy I like to use is that power is a liquid. It takes the shape of the society it’s contained in, but it has a fixed volume that can’t be eliminated.
No matter what kind of society you live in, someone is going to be the most powerful person around: whether that’s an elected official, a feudal landlord, a corporate CEO, or just the guy in the neighborhood with the most guns and the most friends.
The question is, what recourse exists if that person abuses their power?
In a democratic state with a judiciary, you can vote them out, sue them, impeach them, or lobby to change the laws. In an anarchist society, by definition, there’s no way to compel them to do anything they don’t want to.
Aristotle?
The key is then making the state not act like just any private individual or organization would when given that kind of power. Making the “will” of the state be subjected to a constant tug-of-war by all of the people is the best we’ve come up with so far.
Oh, and I’ve been meaning to ask: what does the “rizla” in your nym mean? Feel free to ignore if you don’t like that kind of question.
I erred in my previous correspondence on this comments section, because though I asserted that anarcho-capitalists are not anarchists and the latter should not be lumped in with the former, I provided no evidence for this assertion. Of course you wouldn’t believe me; I failed in my due diligence. I intend to correct this now, providing actual evidence that the two are different and that I am firmly on the anti-capitalist side and agree with you that L. Neil Smith is an ideologue and that his North American Confederacy could not possibly function as a utopia the way he claims but instead would collapse into dystopia as soon as authorial fiat was removed. I am only asserting that the problems inherent to propertarianism are not shared by actual anarchism.
The argument I shall link to is not mine, and the credit properly goes to the blogger using the online handle of JudgeSabo. His article defending his assertions is so long that I could not replicate the argument by quoting portions without vastly exceeding the word-count limit, so I am just going to link it so that you can read the whole thing and decide whether his argument is reasonable.
https://judgesabo.substack.com/p/property-is-despotism
Thank you for your time. I apologize for my epistemological error.
anarcho-capitalists are not anarchists and the latter should not be lumped in with the former
There are many forms of anarchism; that’s one of the problems with the topic – a lot of people mistake “anarchy” for “chaos” or “Hobbes’ playpen” or whatever it is that gun nuts imagine emerges after a social collapse. There are anarchies like Howard Zinn seemed to favor, where control rested in small communities of interest, and (magically) there was no need to assemble the vast organizations and hierarchies necessary for war. Then there are the anarcho-syndicalists, who favor the idea that the workers control companies, and that companies form a web of mutual interest in civilization. I opine that anarcho-capitalists are anarchists who favor the idea that control of civilization should rest with corporations’ interests – not the workers’ interests, the corporations are promoted to being individuals with rights and act in the corporations’ own interest. That’s a completely incoherent position (IMO) so I tend to ignore the anarcho-capitalists as a flavor of libertarian, i.e.: someone who really doesn’t understand a frigging thing about how civilizations work and fantasize that one of the many controls of civilization will suddenly be loosed without affecting all the others. They’re the guys who think Mad Max has a serious philosophy behind it and think that they’d make a good Lord Humongous, except that in reality they’d be Lord Humongous’ personal ass licker.
I read the essay you cited, Brendan, and I agree with most of it. The problem I see is that many of the critiques of right-leaning anarchism are also applicable to left-leaning anarchism.
In a right-wing anarcho-capitalist or propertarian society, anyone who owns land that people live on would become a dictator with no accountability and no checks and balances on their power. I agree with that. The question is, what stops similar abuses from happening in a left-wing anarchist society?
Even if there are no property rights recognized by law, some person or group of people is going to have the biggest muscles, or the most guns, or whatever quality it is that allows them to dominate others. If someone is abusing me, coercing me or mistreating me, what recourse do I have? Who can do something about it? If there’s an adjudication system, what oversight is there to prevent that system itself from becoming the means of oppression?
I read Judge Sabo’s entire essay in the hope that it would have an answer for this. Unfortunately, the essay ends without addressing it.
That’s fine. What I really wanted is for you to understand the difference, and you do. Again, not looking to convert you, but if you want to know more about theory I can link to it.
This article is VERY long so I am only linking to the section relevant to your questions: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full#text-amuse-label-seci0
If you still aren’t convinced after that, it’s all right. We don’t all have to agree on the same things.