The Probability Broach, chapter 8
Speaking as a policeman, Win Bear is still incredulous that the anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy has no such thing as license plates or driver’s licenses. He’s disturbed that his counterpart, Ed, is nonchalant about it:
How could I explain that licenses are necessary to public safety, especially when his culture apparently found no use for such a concept? “Look here, Ed, how many people get killed on your roads every year?”
… “No idea at all.” He reached for the Telecom pad. “Last year, around five or six hundred if you discount probable suicides.”
“What? Out of what population—and how many of them drive?”
More button-pushing. “Half a billion in North America, and maybe three vehicles for every person on the continent.”
This passage is a nested onion of implausibilities. Let’s unpeel them one at a time.
First: How does Ed – or anyone – know how many people are killed by car accidents in the North American Confederacy?
There might be media coverage of some car crashes, especially spectacular ones, but there’s no reason to believe it would be comprehensive. There’s no census, no Social Security Administration, no government agency keeping track of people. There are no police whose duty it is to investigate fatal accidents. There’s no requirement to report a death, and no central registry to report it to.
So, again: Where does Ed get this number from? Shouldn’t the only possible anarchist answer to this question be “I have no idea”?
Second: How can it possibly be true that the NAC has fewer traffic fatalities than our reality (which suffers around 40,000 traffic deaths per year)? Smith never even tries to justify this. Just think of what doesn’t exist here, in a society with no laws about what you can drive or how.
There are no speed limits. Not just the highways, but every road is an Autobahn. You can floor the gas pedal and roar at top speed through quiet residential neighborhoods where kids are playing. You can do wheelies in front of a school or drag-race through crowded streets for fun. (Even Germany is contemplating speed limits for its famous Autobahn, to reduce pollution and prevent deadly crashes.)
Since there are no driver’s licenses, there are no restrictions on who can drive. You can get behind the wheel if you’re a little kid, or if you have impaired vision, or if you have seizures. You don’t have to pass any test to prove you know what you’re doing.
There are no drunk driving laws. You can get behind the wheel blackout drunk, or high as a kite, or stoned on whatever recreational substance you like.
There are no laws regulating the size or shape of cars. In fact, you can intentionally make them more dangerous. You can mount a bulldozer blade on the front to push other vehicles out of the way. You can put spikes on your bumpers to defend against other drivers, as I suggested previously. You can add rocket boosters to go faster, and too bad for anyone who’s behind you when you hit the afterburners.
Or, in a less fanciful example, you can drive cars so massive and heavy that anyone you hit is almost certain to die. In the U.S., pedestrian fatalities have been rising, and our national obsession with heavy trucks and giant SUVs is the reason why.
You don’t have to have crumple zones, airbags, anti-lock brakes, or any of the other safety features that governments have mandated from years of hard-won experience. You can own a car that turns its passengers into projectiles, or explodes in a violent fireball, if it collides with something. (After all, safety features cost money! Why not leave them out to get a cheaper price? I know I’m a good driver, so nothing bad will happen to me.)
You can drive any kind of weird or experimental vehicle you want, whether or not it’s been through safety testing. You can roll out computer-controlled driving with insufficient testing, and use your customers as crash test dummies.
In flavor text from a later chapter, Smith not only agrees with this, he doubles down on the idea that you can drive literally anything you like, including cars powered by dynamite or on-board nuclear reactors:
North Americans adore any contraption that moves under its own impetus; they’ve harnessed every conceivable form of energy (and not a few inconceivable ones) to propel that most fantastic of their inventions, the private ground-effect machine. Steam and internal combustion compete with electricity and flywheels; there are fables of “hoverbuggies” run by enormous rubber bands, caged animals, charges of dynamite; and now, nuclear fusion. Secretly playing Prussian Ace in a cloud of turbodust or reading quietly while computers guide them along the Greenway at 300 miles per hour, they don’t care much about the power source. Within the portable privacy of their road machines, they have tapped a greater source of energy, the inner contemplation of a powerfully creative people, which is the source of all their lesser miracles.
The obvious fallback for an anarcho-capitalist would be to say that there’s no government which makes laws, but the private companies that presumably own the roads do mandate safety features. However, if this is Smith’s solution, he never says so, and excerpts like the one above suggest the opposite.
People in the North American Confederacy appear unused to any rule that restricts their freedom to do as they wish. As you may remember from last week, Ed is unfamiliar with the concept of license plates – suggesting that no private entity requires anything like it either.
What this shows is how L. Neil Smith’s brand of anarchy implies a radical rejection of basic political theory.
In standard political thinking, people agree to come together and create society, giving up some rights in exchange for the protection and benefits that the state offers. You can conceptualize this as a spectrum. On one end is absolute liberty – freedom in its raw and primal sense, where there are no rules except the law of the jungle. On the other end is an all-powerful totalitarian state, which guarantees safety and order by controlling everyone’s lives.
Few people would go to either extreme. But most of us would agree that some rules and some kind of governance are necessary. We just differ about which point along this spectrum strikes the most desirable balance.
However, Smith denies this framework altogether. He seems to believe that there is no tradeoff between liberty and safety – that, by getting rid of all laws, we somehow become safer as well. It’s “you can eat your cake and have it, too” as a political philosophy.
If he made an argument for how or why this win-win scenario could arise, that would be one thing. But he doesn’t. His position doesn’t come from any reasoned argument or consideration of the evidence, but through pure magical thinking.
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Well, Smith obviously hated public transport for some reason, even though they are probably safer than cars. Can I just ask who is making these dynamite- and nuclear-powered cars? This is an uber-capitalist world, so it’s presumably General Motors, right? This is another inadvertent argument against letting corporations do what they want, like so much of the book before.
I also am amused at how superficial Smith’s analysis is. License plates, one of the most benign government institutions, are what annoy him. They exist so that we know who was involved in a crash, and to help identify individual vehicles that are parked incorrectly. (I don’t know if they serve any other purpose than those.) So I was right to think he didn’t consider how society would function and thought that having no government would magically fix everything without considering how to replace the things currently done by government that need to still be done in any modern society. This is why I called him naively antistatist, because you would still have to replace the state with some other form of organization.
Libertarians love slippery slope arguments. Today license plates, tomorrow GULAGS!
License plates are also used for charging tolls. (Means for automated toll charging include transponders and license plate recognition.)
And they’re used by law enforcement in various ways (see “run the plates” for discussion of various applications). And if a car is involved in a crime (e.g. a hit and run) if a witness manages to record the number then it aids the police investigation.
Remember people always naturally do the right thing if there’s no laws to stop them from being total selfish jerks because .. umm,. beocz.. I sez so .. so there!
Don’t think too hard about it. Gliberatearin’ plot magic..
The libertarian would claim that you have a low and condescending view of humanity, making you the bad guy.
I’ve heard that a few times; as in, “I’m sorry you have so little faith in humanity,” or “You’ve been taught to fear and mistrust other people, that’s how the state keeps you down,” or “Wow, you must really trust Big Government to think like that.” Then when I try to remind them of the history and experience that proves I’m right, they simply tune out and disappear.
Libertarians have gotta be the dumbest people ever to think they’re the smartest people in the room.
You mean the ones who think that only through being armed at all times can safety be achieved are the ones with “faith in human nature”? Interesting…
Remember when Volkswagen was caught falsifying pollution data? The government caught on and made them meet minimum standards. In Smith’s libertarian fantasy, there would be nothing stopping car companies from all kinds of dangerous decisions.
He’d likely retort with, “Well they wouldn’t have to lie if the government didn’t impose all these regulations. If the people thought that their cars polluted too much and that air pollution was bad, they wouldn’t buy them.”
… maybe three vehicles for every person on the continent.
About half as many as firearms, I guesstimate.
The gunsmoke balances out the greenhouse gases in Smith’s utopia.
In one of his more recent books, Smith dismisses climate change and environmentalism as a statist fiction. If people are bothered by pollution they can sue the company in private arbitration, but any government attempt to curb emissions is yet another form of tyranny. Besides, it’s the governments fault for holding back innovation that would lead to cleaner technologies.
Which is another one of those things which fails when exposed to reality, of course, since in the real world government funding has long been used to encourage (often explicitly with targeted grants) the innovation which leads to cleaner technologies; while on the other hand many companies have a long history of prioritizing bonuses for the management over doing anything cleanly.
Pollution is pretty much the classic case of an economic externality: the company makes the profits, and the people in the surrounding area or downstream absorb the costs. Regulations exist to force companies to confront that externality… at least in theory, because in practice regulatory capture happens. Not to mention that in many cases the fines from the regulation aren’t enough to coerce behaviour aside from being better at hiding it or bribing the inspectors. Long before Monsanto became known for GMO plants, they were absolutely infamous for dumping chemical run-off from their factories into rivers without cleanup, active interference in government investigations, and yes, in some cases actively bribing the investigators. Because even when they did get hit with fines, they felt it was cheaper than upgrading all of their equipment.
Not to mention that ‘suing the company’… well, for one thing, what’s stopping people from suing the company now? In many cases they have. The government existing and creating regulations doesn’t stop people from suing the company; it generally doesn’t even make it more difficult. Of course, we know exactly what stops people from suing the company most of the time, and that’s that the company can afford lawyers to slow down any lawsuit and bankrupt anybody who tries. And that’s something that Smith doesn’t seem to have any answer for aside from authorial fiat.
Having read Smith’s past work, he’d likely say that those who died from the faulty vehicles they chose were obviously too stupid to breed anyway and that “freedom” weeds idiots from the gene pool leaving the intelligent to survive. It’s Caveat emptor meets eugenics.
I was just thinking… the whole idea that ‘people will shut down misbehaving companies if they don’t get what they want’, along with ‘people will be good if there isn’t a government messing with them’ can be shut down with two words, and annoyingly it’s two words that most of the people like Smith are actively on the wrong side of:
Jim Crow.
Libertarians like this like to say that any sort of bigoted establishment would simply be put out of business by someone who was willing to sell to everybody, and that equality legislation shouldn’t be necessary, but we have generations of history that says otherwise. Nobody’s going to open up a sandwich shop that allows black people to sit at the counter if the local roving gang of thugs is going to torch every one that tries. (And that’s far from a hypothetical example.)
In practice most of the attitude of people like Smith really sees to boil down to “You can’t tell me what to do!”, combined with a “just world” assumption that they are smart and know what they’re doing and won’t have anything bad happen to them because they’re good people.
@7, jenorafeurer: that was beautifully and succinctly put.
And Smith’s attitude can be explained by, “Tell me you’re a cishet white male Boomer without using those words”.
Smith appears to have been really out there even among anarcho-capitalists (which is saying something). I don’t know that I’ve read them address road safety in particular, though from past experience I’m aware of how they generally answer these things. So yes, most would say that private road companies, private police and car insurance would mandate their being license plates along with other safety features on vehicles, which makes since given it could help protect their property and customers. Apparently for Smith this would all just work out on its own.
Another Steward: “License plates are also used for charging tolls. (Means for automated toll charging include transponders and license plate recognition.)”
And since all the roads in the NAC are private wouldn’t they be toll roads? Ed Bear should have a car covered with a dozen different private license plates, one for each system of toll roads he needs to travel on – that’s the libertarian way (and it’s not inherently bad – it’s just inconsistent with the idea that Ed is completely unfamiliar with the idea of having cars be identifiable)
Well, to be built and maintained, roads have to be paid for, but there are a few methods possible.
Toll roads are certainly a possibility. Although, if you look at the various toll roads around the country today, I don’t know if any of them generates enough income to fully maintain the road. Tolls are put in place to help a state defray the costs or to reduce congestion by encouraging some drivers to use other routes. (As an aside, I was in a meeting about public transportation a few years ago and they admitted than no public transport system in the world, anywhere, is completely paid for by the riders of public transport. The state always has to fund some portion of it. However, the state generally feels that encouraging public transportation saves on other costs (including road repair) so finding the extra funds for public transportation is a net public good and an overall lower cost for the state.)
But there is another real problem with all roads being toll roads. Among other things, the prices of your groceries would skyrocket. Near to where I live there is a mile of dirt road, Vreeland, where the only house on that section of road is a farm. Which means there are a couple of options. Either the farm owns and pays for the maintenance of the road, or another company does and charges the farm tolls for them to use the road, with the expectation that the farm pays enough to keep the road in repair plus a little profit fo the company. Regardless of whether the farmer paid the tolls or owned the road they would need to recoup that cost from what they produce. Which means the cost of the food produced on that farm would go up. The libertarian ideal of all roads being toll roads will probably kill most small farms leaving only the large agribusiness conglomerates operating, and raise the cost of everyone’s groceries.
You can come up with similar examples for other situations. How much more would a company have to pay employees if the employees have to pay tolls to drive to work? Rebuilding a road is about $2M/mile the last I checked, that’s an awful lot of $1 tolls. (Maintenance is less, but even with the best maintenance roads need to be rebuilt every once in a while.)
Further, there are some historical lessons which show that toll roads often do not work. In the 1850’s in Michigan there was a toll-road company formed to build and maintain a toll road from Detroit to Lansing. The Great Plank road. The route followed what is is now Grand River avenue. It was built, but never collected enough tolls to pay for the building of it, and then couldn’t maintain it. So it rapidly fell into disrepair, encouraging people to use other routes. Eventually the company collapsed and the state took the route over. I don’t have a source for this, but family legend is that people would simply ride/drive next to the plank road, forming a dirt track and avoiding the tolls.
Are there solutions other than state-managed or private-for-profit toll roads. I can think of one. A subscription-based model. People could pitch in money to help build a road which badly needs it. Of course, some entity would have to collect the subscriptions and distribute them to however owns and maintains the road. Wait? Isn’t that kind of what we do today through our taxes?
In Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations he proposes tolls on roads, but only on carriages. Farm carts and goods, as well as manufacturing raw materials or final goods, were not to be subject to tolls because of the effect that would have on producers and prices. Thet tax would mainly be paid by noblemen, or other people who didn’t produce anything and could afford the tax.
FWIW, one thing I learned when serving on the township board was that a municipality deliberately does not want to repair all the roads to prime condition in a single year. Because that means they will all need repair at about the same time. So even if they have the money, they would rather budget, say $20M/year, rather than have a $200M spike in their budget every 10 years. I know it makes residents angry if a road clearly needs repairs but it isn’t going to happen for a couple of years, but that’s often what is going on. The township officials usually will say things like, “We don’t have the budget for it this year.” And that’s true. I used to drive all the roads in our township a few times every year in order to get a feel on which roads needed the most attention. This also helped when a resident complained about their road. I could say, “Have you driven the mile on Warren between Gotfredson and Berry? It is in worse shape than your road.” That wouldn’t necessarily shut them up, but it did give them some perspective.
That being said, if a bunch of residents from a single road came to a board meeting and complained, we would be much more likely to advance the timing for repair on their road. Community, cooperation, and a squeaky-wheel can make a difference.
It’s not consistent with how Smith has the NAC wonderfully technologically advanced, but if vehicles have to stop at toll gates every few miles and pay cash then the toll operators don’t need a means of identifying cars. Alternately the operators could club together to operate a single license plate scheme – there’s no need to have multiple private license plates. (A vague analogy is that you can buy a through train ticket for a journey that has legs operated by different companies – though there are anomalies in UK ticket pricing; sometimes split tickets are cheaper than through tickets.)
@another stewart: Ah. Good point. Different toll companies could work together to resolve some of the complexities that would otherwise arise. It would have been interesting to see Smith explain some of how that (and similar issues) work. Note that Ed would still be familiar with the idea that people would find it convenient to have their vehicles identifiable (so they wouldn’t have to stop to pay cash)
On one end is absolute liberty – freedom in its raw and primal sense, where there are no rules except the law of the jungle.
Yeah, and under “the law of the jungle,” no one — except maybe the strongest and most brutal of each tribe — has any real freedom to do anything other than day-to-day survival and reproduction. Anything beyond the hunter-gatherer level requires some form of social organization, obedience to some set of rules, and sacrifice of some “freedoms” in order to obtain much greater REAL freedoms that civil society provides.
I’m not an expert, but it’s my understanding that even hunter-gatherer tribes have those things, at least to a degree.
They did; but getting to the next level of stable agrarian society requires some scheme of land-ownership, and coercive state power to enforce it. That’s both where states get more coercive, AND where human liberty increases. That’s not a coincidence.
Human liberty increases, but human freedom may decline.
The state becoming the source of coercion means the individual no longer has the freedom to force others to do what that individual desires, which increases the liberty of those others. In an abstract sense of course, there is no perfect state, or perfect liberty.
“Half a billion in North America, and maybe three vehicles for every person on the continent.”
Half a billion? What’s the current population of the US, Canada and Mexico today? And THREE motor vehicles per person?! That’s not economical or useful in ANY socio-political scenario, even if everyone is above average and wants for nothing. Two vehicles per couple (with or without kids) makes sense. Three vehicles per person is just ridiculous.