New on OnlySky: Will China build the future?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about which nation will build the future, if the U.S. plans on abandoning funding for science and technology. If it’s not going to be us anymore, who will pick up the crown of technological progress?

There’s one obvious contender, especially in light of this news: China recently announced that it’s built and is successfully operating a nuclear reactor based on the element thorium, which is more abundant and cleaner than uranium. It’s a design that was tested and proven to be feasible by 20th-century Western research, but was never deployed on a large scale.

How should we Americans feel about this? Should we be worried and dismayed that we’re losing our dominance and sliding into backwardness? Or should we be heartened that someone is continuing to make progress, even if it’s not us? What does this mean for the future of science – and the future of democracy, if an authoritarian state like China is stepping in where we won’t?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

In the long run, scientific and technological achievement benefits all of humanity. New discoveries spread and diffuse until they’re part of the common knowledge base of the world, which raises everyone’s living standards. China, after all, can claim credit for bringing the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing into existence. These inventions changed the world for everyone, no matter where they were created.

At this moment of history, when some nations are falling under the shadow of malignant anti-intellectualism, it’s reassuring to know that progress is continuing somewhere. Even if the US is marching backwards, we’re not dragging the rest of the world with us. Smarter nations will continue to fund research, make discoveries, and build the future whether we join in or not.

That being said, there are also reasons to feel ambivalent about this story…

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Free-market mafiosi

Al Capone's mugshot

The Probability Broach, chapter 3

Chapter 3 opens with another fictional quote, from the book Jenny Noble gave Win Bear last chapter:

Stating merely that there is no conflict between human rights and property rights surrenders half the argument to the enemies of liberty. All human rights are property rights, beginning with the right to own your own life, the right to own and control the body that houses it, and on, to every feeling and thought, every opinion and idea, every good and service that life and body are capable of creating.

-Mary Ross-Byrd
Toward a New Liberty

Just to point it out, “Mary Ross-Byrd” is a gender-swapped pun on Murray Rothbard, an anarcho-capitalist who wrote a book called For a New Liberty.

This is the kind of oversimplification that libertarians habitually indulge in. Smith says that all rights are property rights and that they all stem from the same root.

If you wanted to, you could define autonomy over your own body and life as a kind of property right. But property rights over the external world are a different animal.

You don’t need to compete with anyone else to control your body – you’re the only one in there, so to speak. But when it comes to, say, a plot of land, it’s not so clear-cut. How does something that no one owns become property belonging to a specific person? (This is a perennial problem for libertarians of all stripes.)

What counts as a means of establishing ownership, and what doesn’t? How do you know if something has a rightful owner or not? How is property transferred from one person to another, and under what circumstances? If there’s a dispute about who owns something, how do we settle it?

The answers to these questions aren’t self-evident. They depend on a raft of complex theories about politics and economics. Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists like to act as if their entire worldview can be trivially derived from a few axioms. In reality, it’s not that straightforward.

Back to the story, Win reports in to the chief about the progress of his investigation:

At five, I had a call to go see the division chief, Captain Roger MacDonald, the only man on Homicide shorter than me. But where I’m wide, he was round, with hair like a coat of wet paint and palms that were always damp. Naturally, he was the type who insisted on shaking hands.

The chief seems nervous. Rather than his office, he insists on meeting Win in the men’s room, and he turns on the water before he starts talking to create a protective screen of noise.

Win snarks about how much water he’s wasting (“Water Board’s gonna love you, Mac”), but the chief isn’t amused. He says his office and his telephone are bugged and he can’t speak freely:

“Win, listen! I’ve got to take you off the Meiss thing. I’m not supposed to tell you why, but I’ll be damned if—what can they threaten me with? Losing my devalued pension?”

I nodded grimly. “Especially since you have to put in forty years, now. Times are tough all over. Go on.”

“The word’s been passed down the line, from god knows how high. There’s more to this than I can tell you, more than I know myself… or want to! Anyway, you’re off the case.”

Win is disgruntled. He objects, like the cynical-but-honest cop he’s supposed to be:

“You’ve got to understand…” MacDonald pleaded. “There’s something big—”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of the shiny golden coin in my pocket. “Who is it, Mac, the local Mafiosi—the government, maybe?”

Mac’s piggish little eyes widened a fraction. “My God, Win, what makes you think there’s a difference? Where have you been the last thirty years?”

This is another vague gesture at the backstory that Smith never gives for his dystopian world. It implies that organized crime has gotten so powerful that it’s taken over the government – or merged with it. Either way, instead of a just government that protects its people and upholds their rights, the U.S. is run by a cabal of greedy and tyrannical rulers bent on extracting as much wealth from their subjects as possible, no matter how much cruelty or violence it takes.

We can all agree that this is undesirable. So here’s my question: what would prevent this same thing from happening in an anarchist society – either a left-wing communist anarchy or a right-wing capitalist anarchy?

All it takes is a bunch of power-hungry sociopaths (of which there are guaranteed to be a few in any sufficiently large number of people) to recognize that a society without laws is ripe for the picking. They can band together, become a gang, and impose their will on everyone around them through violence and intimidation.

You can imagine it happening the other way, too. You could imagine an organized-crime group that starts as a legitimate business, but as they become wealthier and more powerful, they become increasingly unwilling to tolerate competition or worker unrest. Eventually, they start using dirty tricks or outright violence to chase off competitors, break strikes, and dominate everyone in their area of influence.

Either way, the result is the same. This free-market mafia can exact protection money through blackmail. They can skim the profits off businesses they control. They can seize control over valuable assets like factories. And they can use this ill-gotten wealth to attract still more people to their side, as others make the rational calculation that it’s better to throw their lot in with the bosses and reap the rewards of loyalty, rather than becoming one of their oppressed serfs.

If this free-market mafia grows large and powerful enough, they can effectively become the government, controlling the economic flows in whatever area they have dominion over and imposing their own ruthless brand of law and order. Indeed, according to some researchers, this was the historical role of the actual Mafia, moving in and taking over where the legitimate government was weak:

Scholars such as Diego Gambetta and Leopold Franchetti have characterized the Mafia as a “cartel of private protection firms”. The primary activity of the Mafia is to provide protection and guarantee trust in areas of the Sicilian economy where the police and courts cannot be relied upon. The Mafia arbitrates disputes between criminals, organizes and oversees illicit business deals, and protects businessmen and criminals from cheats, thieves, and vandals. This aspect of the Mafia is often overlooked in the media because, unlike drug dealing and extortion, it is often not reported to the police.

L. Neil Smith’s ideology holds that because government is bad, the right thing to do is abolish it. But he doesn’t have an answer for what would stop a scenario like this, where someone moves into the power vacuum and tries to become a new government by force. It’s especially ironic because he knew it was a possibility: the villains in The Probability Broach have a plan along these lines.

The closest he comes to an answer, as we’ll see, is saying that everyone should carry weapons so they can defend their liberty. But one person with a knife or a gun can’t put up a fight against a dozen or a hundred heavily-armed thugs. The Hollywood image of a lone action hero single-handedly defeating a gang of bad guys is feel-good fiction. In reality, the person who has the bigger army on their side almost always wins.

The conclusion to draw from this thought experiment is that anarchist societies are unstable. Without any organized body capable of force, they have no means to defend themselves against outside incursion or takeover from within. Even if it were possible to create such a society, it would always be in jeopardy of collapsing into a mafia state, controlled by the people who have the most instruments of violence and the fewest compunctions about using them.

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New on OnlySky: How to warn the future

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the philosophical problem of how we can warn the distant future about long-lived hazards we’re creating today.

In 2011, I saw a documentary called Into Eternity, about the Finnish government’s plan to dispose of high-level nuclear waste. They’re digging a deep subterranean vault, named Onkalo, where spent fuel rods and other radioactive material will be permanently interred.

Fourteen years after that documentary, and more than twenty years after the start of construction, Onkalo is ready to begin operations. The radioactive waste it’s meant to contain will be dangerous for 100,000 years, so it has to last at least that long. But geology is a known quantity. The bigger problem is what warning we should leave for our distant descendants, who may not remember why the repository was constructed, who may not speak our language, who may not even share our scientific view of the world. Is there any truly universal symbol for danger that transcends the idiosyncrasies of culture?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

We can’t depend on uninterrupted transmission of information over time. Memories fade, digital storage degrades, libraries burn, and stone carvings weather away to nothing. Civilizations collapse in war or disaster, and their knowledge can be lost with them. Over timescales of millennia, these are all very real possibilities.

The civilizations that come after us may not remember where the repository is or the reason it was constructed. If they dig into it, how can we warn them so they don’t accidentally irradiate themselves?

A language like Linear A, which is “only” thirty-five centuries old, is indecipherable. It’s likely that no written warning would still be comprehensible in ten thousand years—much less a hundred thousand. Even our basic symbology, like the red circle-and-slash or the yellow-and-black radiation trefoil, might mutate over time to the point of unrecognizability or be forgotten entirely.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Metal detectors cause terrorism

A clear plastic bag with bottles inside, reading "This bag was screened by the aviation security authority of the Federal Republic of Germany"

The Probability Broach, chapter 2

As I’ve mentioned, The Probability Broach is a work of evangelism. Unlike Ayn Rand, whose default mode is to condemn anyone who doesn’t already agree with her, this book wants to persuade. It doesn’t assume that its audience already knows everything it has to say. It tries to introduce the author’s beliefs to readers one step at a time, and to make a case for them as it does.

However, L. Neil Smith faces a problem in doing so. Some parts of his anarcho-capitalist worldview are almost reasonable, while others are way out there. And he doesn’t know which is which.

Smith is so deep in his own ideology, he’s not cognizant of which parts of it will strike an average reader as bizarre, ridiculous, or offputting. Often, one of his wackier beliefs breaks through – surfacing from the narrative like a fly in the soup – and derails his argument. This chapter has one of those WTF-worthy moments.

To begin with, Win Bear shows off his regular-joe credentials by saying he doesn’t like most of the laws he’s supposed to enforce. He looks the other way rather than arrest people for breaking them:

“Jenny, I didn’t pass the Confiscation Act, and I feel the same about dope and tobacco: just don’t wave them around in public so I have to bust you. Hell, I even – oh, for godsake, do you have a cigarette? I’m going into convulsions!”

She shuffled through a drawer, coming up with a pack of dried-out Players, hand-imported from north-of-the-border. I lit one gratefully and settled back to let the dizziness pass. “If you repeat this, I’ll call you a liar. My hide’s been saved at least twice by civilians – people who figured we might be on the same side. Totally forgot to arrest them for weapons possession afterward. Must be getting senile.”

In this world, the U.S. has become an authoritarian socialist state, but Canada is the land of liberty. That’s a trope I haven’t seen before. (Does tobacco grow in Canada? Somehow I doubt it.)

“Vaughn’s gun didn’t do him much good, though.”

I shrugged. “Not against a machine pistol. Yes, that’s what it was. The thing about gun laws, if you’re gonna risk breaking them, it might as well be for something potent. The law only raises the ante. Look at how airport metal-detectors turned hijackers onto bombs. If it’s any consolation, it looks like your professor managed to take at least one of his attackers with him.”

There’s a germ of logic in this when it comes to zero-tolerance policies that treat all crimes as equally serious. If the punishment for every crime is the same, a criminal might as well gamble on committing a big one, if it means a bigger reward. If burglary and murder both get the death penalty, there’s no reason for a burglar not to kill the witness.

For most people, this is a reason to design laws and penalties thoughtfully. We should try to discourage people from breaking the law, but if they do break it, we should give them an incentive to come clean rather than keep racking up more crimes on their record.

But that isn’t L. Neil Smith’s take. He claims that any law against anything is useless, because laws have no effect on people’s behavior. People who weren’t inclined to commit a crime wouldn’t have done so whether there was a law against it or not, and people who want to do an illegal thing will just break the law anyway. (He says so later in the book, using almost this wording.) The idea that laws can deter crime never occurs to him.

This chapter is an expression of that viewpoint. He claims, in all seriousness, that no one would ever have taken a bomb onto an airplane if their original plan to take a gun onto an airplane wasn’t foiled by metal detectors. To put it another way: he thinks metal detectors cause bombings.

Obviously, airplane bombings aren’t an escalation of hijackings. They’re different crimes, committed for different reasons. Most airplane hijackers want to take hostages, either for ransom or to use as political bargaining chips. Airplane bombings are acts of pure terrorism, intended to inflict suffering and spread fear rather than to accomplish a concrete goal.

There are reasonable points to be made about “security theater” – measures put in place because they look good, not because they’re effective. Still, if you’ve ever flown on a plane, ask yourself: would you feel more or less safe if you knew the other passengers didn’t go through metal detectors?

Win asks Jenny Noble if Meiss had any enemies she’s aware of, but she says no. He shows her the mysterious gold coin he found at the crime scene, but she doesn’t know anything about that either. All in all, this meeting was a bust, giving him no leads to go on (but giving the author ample opportunity to lecture readers about his beliefs).

“Jenny – something else I’ll deny saying if you repeat it: Meiss knew he was going to die, but he stayed cool enough to pull the trigger four times. I disagree with nearly everything you believe, but if you’re all like that, there’ll be Propertarians in the White House someday.”

She looked at me as if for the first time, then grinned and patted me on the cheek. “We’ll make an anarchocapitalist out of you yet, Lieutenant.”

This is, of course, so L. Neil Smith can talk up how brave and manly his anarcho-libertarian freedom-lovers are. Even the skeptical cop thinks they’re badasses!

However, there are two problems with this.

First: Win says, “I disagree with nearly everything you believe,” but that’s just a lie. When he gets transported to anarchocapitalist utopia in a few chapters, he fits in immediately.

Indeed, his dialogue in this chapter shows that he was already sympathetic to their ideology. Despite being a police officer, he doesn’t dislike or distrust them, and he just said that he doesn’t enforce laws he doesn’t agree with if he has an excuse not to. This isn’t genuine disagreement; it’s the Lee Strobel trick of pretending to be a skeptic so your “conversion” seems more convincing to naive readers.

Second: Win’s praise falls a little flat when you consider that Meiss was killed in a drive-by shooting. That’s not the kind of death that affords ample time for reflection.

He was able to shoot back, but that’s not proof that he “knew he was going to die, but he stayed cool”. He might just as well have reacted on instinct, firing in blind panic before he knew what hit him.

Image credit: Kgbo via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

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New on OnlySky: The coming dark age

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about America’s descent into a new dark age – and I don’t use this word lightly – of stupidity.

Trump, Musk and their cronies are engaged in a deliberate assault on public servants, scientists, higher education, and every other agency and institution whose purpose is either to educate people, to expand the borders of our knowledge, or to generate fact-based research for the purpose of guiding policy. They’ve adopted a policy of willful rejection of expertise, evidence, and the scientific method, and the predictable, disastrous consequences are already happening.

In this column, I ask whether there’s any role left for intelligence, in the sense of respecting expertise and wanting to be guided by facts and evidence. Is it now a suboptimal survival strategy, or is it a vital means of survival in the coming era of intensified chaos?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

What’s going on here can’t simply be chalked up to ignorance. Ignorance just implies a lack of knowledge, and that’s not the root problem. There’s no shame in ignorance — all of us are ignorant about some things. More importantly, ignorance is correctable with education, something that Trump and his cronies have no inclination to engage in.

It’s also not just poor judgment. That term implies that the person in question was aiming at a good goal, but made bad decisions and so failed to achieve that goal. Again, this can be tempered and tamed by experience, but it too isn’t an adequate descriptor of the situation we’re facing.

The mindset I’m referring to is more malicious than either of these. It encompasses both ignorance and poor judgment, but also an aggressive disdain for the very concept of expertise. It’s a mindset which refuses to admit that some people can know more than others. It refuses to admit that reason and evidence should guide our decisions, or that there are facts which don’t bend to political ideology.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

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!

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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.

The Probability Broach: Anarchist standard time

A blueprint diagram with a ruler laid across it

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.

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New on OnlySky: Suffering is optional

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about human suffering, and how it isn’t a cosmic necessity, but a reflection of our choices and priorities.

This wasn’t always the case. For most of history, life was painful, chaotic, unjust, and laden with toil. Every culture invented its own stories and myths to explain this state of affairs, justifying humanity’s place in an unsatisfactory universe.

But that era came and went, without most people noticing. Technology has given us the power to create abundance beyond the dreams of our ancestors. Machines do most of the work that used to break people’s backs and grind down their bodies. Science has allowed us to fight off the diseases and disasters that plagued past civilizations. We have the power, collectively, to eliminate almost every remaining cause of human suffering – if only we had the wisdom to make better choices.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

One of the larger obstacles to this better world is that those old stories, invented to give people the spirit to persevere despite suffering, now serve as positive defenses of suffering. Millions of people believe that life should be hard and painful, because their founding myths were written at a time when it was. Rather than accept that their beliefs are outdated, they want to hold the world in stasis to bend reality to their view of it.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Soda pirates

A CD printed with a federal anti-piracy warning

The Probability Broach, chapter 2

The second chapter of TPB begins with a vignette:

ATLANTA (FNS) – Over 100 heavily armed agents of the Patents Registration Tactical Arm staged an early-morning raid on a small suburban home here, ending the fugitive careers of two Coca-Cola executives, in hiding since January. Federal News Service has learned that the two, listed in warrants as “John Doe” and “James Roe” were taken to Washington’s Bethesda Naval Hospital for what PRTA officials term “therapy.” Unofficially, spokespersons expressed hope that the two would divulge certain “secret formulas” held for over 100 years by the Atlanta-based multinational corporation. Proprietary secrets of this nature have been illegal since passage last year of the “Emergency Disclosure Act.”

—The Denver News-Post
July 7, 1987

L. Neil Smith is mocking what he sees as government’s power-mad tendencies. In his view, the state deprives people of what rightfully belongs to them. This includes sending jackbooted thugs to persecute corporations and deprive them of their valuable intellectual property.

But there’s a problem: in his preferred politics, the same thing would happen. In an anarcho-libertarian society, it’s impossible for patents to exist!

Smith believes that there should be no government and no laws – full stop. That means no protection for intellectual property. If you invent a great new product, anyone else can reverse-engineer it and start selling it themselves.

We’ll return to this point in a moment, but first, let’s pick up the storyline. Among the late Dr. Vaughn Meiss’ possessions, Win finds a business card for the “Colorado Propertarian Party”. It’s the only lead he has, so he goes to check them out.

The Propertarians rent a suite in a grubby office building on the bad side of town. Win knocks and lets himself into their office:

The place was freshly painted and didn’t smell of piss like the rest of the building. It was brightly decorated with posters: “ILLEGITIMATE AUTHORITY” IS A REDUNDANCY and TAXATION IS THEFT! A small desk with a telephone and answering machine occupied one corner beside a rack of pamphlets. I could hear the illegal rumble of an air conditioner. First time I’d been comfortable all day.

A woman entered, tall and slender, thirtyish, lots of curly auburn hair and freckles. She wore the jacket to a woman’s business suit and faded blue jeans, a lapel button declaring I Am Not a National Resource! “I’m Jennifer Noble. Vaughn is dead?”

Win asks some questions about Vaughn and his beliefs, trying to get a handle on who might have wanted him dead. Jennifer Noble, who carries the exposition ball in this scene, explains their politics to Win: “Propertarians believe that all human rights are property rights, beginning with absolute ownership of your own life.”

This sounds reasonable, but on closer look, it falls apart. Smith holds property rights as sacred, but believes there should be no government. Those positions are self-contradictory.

Property rights (and rights in general) don’t just exist of their own accord. They’re not natural phenomena, the way mountains and storm systems are. They’re human creations; they arise as the result of a democratic covenant, and they can only survive if there’s a government that upholds the rule of law. Without a means of enforcement, people are helpless to stop others from stealing the things they create.

A case in point is the story of Ephraim Bull, a 19th-century American horticulturist who tried to breed a grape that could grow in New England’s cold climate. He spent years planting, crossbreeding and selecting vines, until he came up with a sweet, fragrant, cold-hardy cultivar: the Concord grape.

The Concord grape was a runaway success. To this day, it’s the most commercially successful variety, widely used to make products like jelly, juice and wine. But Bull made almost no profit from it, because nobody bought the grapes from his vineyard. They just planted the seeds and grew their own. Bull’s bitter epitaph reads: “He Sowed, Others Reaped”.

In an anarchist society such as Smith envisions, with no patent laws or courts, this kind of thing would happen all the time. Companies could skip burdensome, expensive R&D and just copy their competitors’ products. Of course, this is a Prisoner’s Dilemma that ends up in a race to the bottom. Any one business can reason thusly: Why should we pay the cost of innovation when everyone else will free-ride on our efforts? And if everyone reasons this way, innovation grinds to a halt.

An even bigger problem is plagiarism. If I’m an author and I publish a book, someone else can print their own copy and sell it. In fact, they can sell it for cheaper than I can, because they didn’t have to pay the upfront costs of writing it!

This would be a massive disincentive to authors, especially for research-heavy nonfiction and academic works like textbooks. It would make it virtually impossible to write for a living. (Even as it is, plagiarism is a gigantic problem on Amazon; imagine how much worse it would be if there was no copyright at all.)

The same problem applies to all art. In an anarchy, there’s no law against piracy. If you spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make a movie, with top-notch actors and expensive special effects, can I just videotape it and hold screenings in my living room, paying you none of the royalties? If you’re a musician and put your blood, sweat and tears into a new album, can I buy one copy, churn out my own recordings and undercut you by selling them?

In an anarchist society, people only have what rights they can protect by themselves. If you squint and fuzz your vision, you can imagine how you might be able to defend your person, or your house, against someone with evil intentions. But it’s obvious how impossible this would be for abstract rights. If I invent a new gizmo or write a book, would I have to become a globetrotting vigilante, tracking down anyone anywhere who infringes it and using my own gun to enforce my copyright against them?

This is a wedge issue for libertarians. Ayn Rand believed in patents (an evil government forcing her heroes to surrender their patents is an important plot point in Atlas Shrugged), although she ran into philosophical difficulties justifying their legitimacy while also claiming to oppose initiation of force. Still, at least she understood how patent rights could incentivize research and creativity.

L. Neil Smith never comes to terms with this problem. His anarcho-libertarian utopia has ultra-advanced technology, but it just exists magically, as if it materialized out of thin air. We meet a few of the people who invent it, but there’s no explanation of where their funding comes from, or how anyone could have this as a job if there’s no reasonable expectation of turning a profit from it.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, released under CC BY 2.0 license

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