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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New on OnlySky: The future of food

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the future of food, and a new technology called precision fermentation that’s going to transform it.

Humans have been taking advantage of natural fermentation for thousands of years. We enlist microbes such as yeast and bacteria, feeding them sugar and other molecules that they like. In exchange, they make molecules that we like, such as alcohol. More recently, we’ve genetically altered some microbes to produce expensive special-purpose drugs that are hard to make in any other way.

However, the advent of newer, more powerful genetic engineering technologies is making it downright easy to custom-tailor microbes to churn out almost any product we want. What will happen when we can make milk without cows, eggs without chickens, meaty proteins without livestock – or brand-new foodstuffs never before seen in nature?

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:

Traditional cheesemaking relies on a substance called rennet, which curdles milk so it can be separated into curds and whey. In the past, rennet was harvested from the stomachs of calves. However, since the 1990s, rennet (technically, its key enzyme, chymosin) has been made by yeast. Nearly all hard cheese is made this way.

The first use of precision fermentation is even older. In 1982, the FDA approved insulin produced by bacteria. This breakthrough replaced the old method of purifying insulin from cow and pig pancreases.

In the past, creating a genetically engineered organism was laborious and expensive. Insulin, rennet and the like were ideal because they’re high-value products only needed in small quantities.

However, new technologies like CRISPR have made genetic engineering almost trivially easy. With this power, we’re about to see an explosion of new uses. Some of them may soon be on supermarket shelves.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Worthless yellow rocks

A stack of gleaming gold ingots

The Probability Broach, chapter 1

Among the possessions of murder victim Vaughn Meiss, Win Bear spots something unusual:

The ambulance was ready to take our client to the taxidermists downtown. One of the techs passed by with a collection of plastic baggies containing personal effects. “Hold on. Let me see that.” He handed over a bright golden disk, larger than the silver dollars I remembered from childhood, in deep relief a picture of a bald-headed old coot with ruffles at his throat:

ALBERT GALLATIN
1761 C.E.-A.L. 76
REVOLUTIONIST, PRESIDENT, SCHOLAR OF LIBERTY

On the other side, an old-fashioned hillbilly whiskey jug, and forest-covered hills behind:

ONE METRIC OUNCE
GOLD 999 FINE
THE LAPORTE INDUSTRIAL BANK, L.T.D.

Win is puzzling over the strange coin and the unfamiliar dating system it bears when he’s interrupted by Oscar Burgess, the state security thug mentioned last week. Burgess doesn’t hesitate to pull rank, announcing that he’s taking over the investigation, which Win finds suspicious:

“What brings SecPol into a simple street killing, Burgess?”

… “You ought to know better than to ask foolish questions. We’re thinking about preempting this case – National Security. When the papers come through, you’ll have to turn everything over to us and go back to busting jaywalkers.” He grinned and watched his men confronting mine, knuckles white on holstered pistol grips all around.

“Didn’t realize there was a full moon last night, Oscar,” I said. He turned back, puzzled. I pointed to a tiny cut on his pockmarked forehead, dried blood at the edges. “Cut yourself shaving?”

He whitened. “Mind your own stinking business, Bear, or I’ll have you back working curfew violations!”

This, of course, is the injury that Win infers Meiss’ killer must have suffered. The book all but shouts it, so it’s not a spoiler to say that Burgess is the killer.

The reason he murdered Meiss, rather than arresting him, won’t be revealed until later. However, it has no meaningful impact on the plot, so I’ll spoil it here: Burgess has gone rogue. He’s running his own scheme on the side that he doesn’t want his superiors to know about yet.

After delivering the stock “you’re off the case” message, Burgess storms out. Win holds onto the coin, spitefully resolving to pursue the investigation on his own:

I signed six different forms and took the coin, to be surrendered at Properties tomorrow, on pain of pain. Eventually it would wind up in some bureaucrat’s pocket, or melted down to feed a multi-quadrillion neobuck federal deficit. Probably the former.

This is another detail that’s only vaguely sketched in, but it seems that in this dystopia, individual possession of gold has been outlawed. Win narrates: “Gold, legally kosher a few brief years ago, was presently hotter than vitamin C”.

This is reminiscent of when FDR made it illegal to own gold in 1933. It was a first step toward getting the U.S. off the gold standard, which was strangling economic recovery and prolonging the Great Depression. As long as the government was constrained by the requirement to be able to redeem dollars for gold, it was hobbled in what actions it could take. It was an arbitrary and artificial limit on the money supply that led to a deflationary spiral.

When the dollar was no longer tied to a finite gold reserve, the government could issue debt to pay for New Deal social programs, kickstarting the economy and ending the depression. The plan worked as intended, but despite its success – or more likely because of its success – libertarians and other goldbugs are still mad about it. They believe that the confiscation of gold inaugurated an era of government tyranny. There’s an echo of that reaction in this book.

The unusual thing is that unlike Ayn Rand, who declared that gold was “the objective value”, Smith doesn’t believe gold has any exalted metaphysical status. In his utopia, there are competing private currencies backed by commodities like wheat, iron, even whiskey. This is a consistent application of his anarchist politics.

But in spite of this, he persists in treating gold as specially significant. It’s no coincidence that the first big clue is a gold coin from another world (rather than, say, a paper banknote). It’s also not by chance that Smith’s tyrannical government hoards gold as part of its program of social control.

Libertarians have always assigned a talismanic, almost religious status to gold. They believe it’s “real” money in a way that fiat currency isn’t. Gold fever is so common among Smith’s ideological confreres, it seems he’s unconsciously adopted the same attitude, even though his philosophy doesn’t require him to. It’s almost like a vestigial trait.

New on OnlySky: The benefits of disconnecting

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how the internet has made everyone connected all the time, and why we may want to think about reversing that trend.

Thanks to computers in every home, smartphones in our pockets, smart-home appliances, and networked cars, the average middle-class Westerner spends their life at the center of a digital spiderweb of connectivity. But it seems clear that all this information hasn’t improved our lives – just the opposite. It’s fed toxic rivers of misinformation, bolstered an unsustainable always-on work culture, and made us isolated, anxious and depressed.

If ubiquitous connectivity is the problem, disconnection could be the solution. If we deliberately went offline more often, would it make our lives better?

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:

This is more stimulation than our brains evolved to cope with.

For most of our species’ history, communities were small and local, and life moved at the slower pace of nature. Now news is deluging us faster than ever, as if everyone needed to know everything happening all over the world in real time. It’s no wonder so many of us feel stressed and overwhelmed. We don’t have the bandwidth!

There is a persistent misconception that more information naturally and automatically leads to truth and progress. Ignorance results from not enough information, goes the thinking. Increase the information and you increase understanding of the truth. This misconception is most prevalent among those with advanced education — those whose exposure to more information led (in their view) to more truth.

But this assumption of the automatic benefit of more information is demonstrably false.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Corpus delicti

The Probability Broach, chapter 1

Lieutenant Win Bear’s brooding is interrupted by a priority call:

“Five Charlie Nineteen, respond Code Three, possible homicide, southwest corner of Sixteenth and Gaylord.”

…I threw the papers on the backseat and started the engine. It coughed asthmatically and a surge of adrenalin washed through me as it caught.

…Four scuffed black-and-whites straddled the street, their lightbars blinking round and round by a littered curb fronting a crumbling neighborhood mosque that had seen previous duty as a Mexican Catholic church.

…A body lay half-propped against the wall, blood streaming across cracked cement into the gutter. “What do we have here?” I asked the patrol sergeant. “Another VN-Arab rumble?” He shook his head and I remembered with embarrassment that he was an Arab himself. “Sorry, Moghrabi – just a bad day today.”

This is the kind of interesting small detail that, alas, never gets any followup. Are we supposed to view this in a positive light, that society has become more diverse and multicultural despite government oppression? Or are we meant to infer – as many Christian nationalists and white supremacists fear – that one reason for this dystopian world is that Christianity has faded away and Muslim immigrants have “taken over” the country?

Win’s courteous treatment of an Arab officer suggests that Smith wasn’t trying to portray non-white cultures negatively. Then again, every racist boasts about having a minority friend who’s one of the good ones.

Police technicians are examining the body of the victim, who was killed in a drive-by shooting:

The victim – late twenties – lay clutching his middle, as if to keep his guts from falling out. He had good reason to try, stitched from hip to shoulder the way he was. A gap in the closely grouped pockmarks on the wall above said he had fallen where he’d been shot. In one outstretched hand was a stainless-steel snubbie. No punk’s gun, anyway. A Bianchi holster identical to mine was exposed by his blood-soaked jacket.

Win inspects the gun in the dead man’s hand. He shot back at whoever attacked him, but doesn’t seem to have killed anyone:

I got an okay from the video techs, bent over the body, and gently pried the revolver from its stiffening fingers. Ruger Security Six, like I’d figured. I opened the cylinder; dimples in four of the primers twinkled up at me. Four shots fired, Norma .357 hollowpoints. If any had connected, we’d be finding another corpse, possibly in worse shape than this one.

However, he notices broken glass in the street, and some of the shards have blood on them. He tells the officers that whatever car the fatal shots were fired from, it will have broken windows and the shooter will be injured.

As for the victim:

His travel permit said he was one Meiss, Vaughn L., from Fort Collins, sixty miles to the north. His work assignment: Colorado State University. As a Ph.D. on the Physics faculty, he rated his own wheels and the fuel to roll them.

Travel permits are standard dystopian stuff. What I find interesting is the implication is that scientists are given privileges not available to the rest of the population.

What kind of dystopia is this, anyway? Is it a plain military dictatorship where the government rules by force, with no aim beyond perpetuating itself? Or is it an elitist technocracy run by intellectuals and academics?

Yet again, Smith spends very little time answering these questions. We’re soon to be whisked out of this world, never to return. I don’t think it’s a leap to guess that, because he was opposed to all government on principle, he was uninterested in the distinctions among them and how one kind might be better or worse than another.

As Win is inspecting the crime scene, he hears a familiar – and unwelcome – voice:

I turned resignedly to confront Oscar Burgess, several years my senior and small-arms instructor during my academy days. While I had slogged from rookie to patrolman, from investigator to homicide lieutenant, he’d left CLETA for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms during its heyday in the early eighties, and now was Denver station chief for the Federal Security Police.

The years had only refined our mutual distaste. Where I was… let’s say “heavy set,” he was gray and lean, cat-fast, with a frightening moon-map of a face, the hideous legacy of minipox. Behind him, his crew in fresh-creased jumpsuits brandished automatic shotguns. Their unit crest was emblazoned on the side of a black and scarlet van: a mailed fist grasping the naked edges of a dagger, blood creeping out between the fingers.

No prize is awarded for guessing that Burgess is a villain. What’s more worthy of note is Smith’s offhand mention of his scarred face and a disease called minipox. (Does he think socialism creates disease?)

When this book was written, novel pandemics were a distant memory. Ideologues of all kinds could proclaim what they’d do in case of a deadly new disease, safe in the confidence that their theories would never be put to the test. Unfortunately, all of us who lived through 2020 now have hard-won experience of what works and what doesn’t.

At the beginning of COVID-19, our only weapon against the virus was lockdowns. Governments around the world told citizens to stay at home; to close nonessential businesses; to restrict visitors at hospitals and nursing homes; to skip travel, wear masks, practice social distancing, and meet outdoors. All these measures were intended to slow the spread of the virus so that scientists would have time to create treatments.

As unpopular as the lockdowns were, they worked. They didn’t stop the virus entirely – COVID was too contagious for that – but they saved thousands of vulnerable people. They bought precious time for us to figure out how to treat the sick and, ultimately, to create vaccines. (A strong line of evidence for lockdowns is that one strain of flu virus went extinct because of them.)

The alternative was letting the virus rip, which would’ve resulted in a tsunami of infection where everyone got sick all at once. That would have been a much bigger catastrophe. It would have overwhelmed hospitals, leading to the collapse of health systems and the deaths of many people who could have been saved if they’d gotten medical attention.

How would an anarcho-libertarian world respond to a pandemic? The only option open to them would be the let-it-rip scenario. That would remain true even in case of a novel virus that was even deadlier or more debilitating than COVID. Are millions of deaths, widespread chaos and economies disintegrating just the price of freedom?

Pandemics are the essence of a collective-action problem. Viruses ignore the social constructs we invent to divide people; they cross property and class lines with impunity. We can only protect ourselves against collective threats by admitting that, sometimes, we have to accept temporary restrictions on liberty for the greater good. That may be quarantines to fight disease, or blackout orders in wartime, or mandatory evacuations in case of natural disaster. Either way, it’s a lesson that libertarians don’t want to learn.

The old darkness returns

Transmission electron microscopic image of a measles virus

It was only a matter of time. In Texas, an unvaccinated six-year-old child has died of measles:

The Texas outbreak began in a small Mennonite community near Lubbock, home to 260,000, and has since spread. To date, there have been over 130 cases across Texas and New Mexico, with 18 patients hospitalised, local health officials said.

On Wednesday, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nation’s newly confirmed top health official, called the Texas outbreak “not unusual”, a claim disputed by doctors and local residents.

This is the first measles death in the U.S. in ten years. And more may follow soon, because the outbreak isn’t under control yet. Over 130 cases have been reported so far, but since measles is devastatingly contagious, it’s a sure bet that the true number is much larger. Some of the sickened children were so ill that they had to be hospitalized:

Dr. Lara Johnson, a pediatrician and the chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon that the patients who were hospitalized were admitted because they were having trouble breathing and needed supportive care such as supplemental oxygen.

…She added that her team has cared for “around 20” kids with measles so far. Several of those patients required intensive care. None of the hospitalized had been vaccinated against measles.

As a reminder, measles is far from harmless. 1 in 1,000 infected people will die, with children and infants at special risk. The virus can cause lethal pneumonia, or it can invade the brain, causing coma, permanent seizures, blindness or deafness. There’s also evidence that measles erases immune system memory, making survivors vulnerable to other diseases that they were previously immune to.

The epicenter of the measles outbreak is Gaines County, in rural western Texas. The county is home to a conservative Mennonite enclave, and it’s a hub for homeschooling and private religious schools. Almost one in six kids have skipped one or more vaccines. It’s the exact kind of place you’d expect a disease outbreak to strike first and hardest.

The last major measles outbreak in the U.S. was in 2019, in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave in Rockland County, New York. You’d think that would remind people why vaccines are important. However, they tried their hardest to learn nothing from it, and they succeeded. Three years later in 2022, there was a polio outbreak in the same place.

There are similarities between the 2019 and 2022 outbreaks and this one. In all three cases, the biggest, most glaring commonality at the heart of the problem is religion.

Mennonites are a Protestant Christian denomination with historical ties to the Amish. Like ultra-Orthodox Jews, they have no specific religious beliefs against vaccination, but they tend to be isolationist, suspicious of the modern world, and resistant to secular education. This leaves them uninformed, undereducated and distrustful of vaccines, which makes their communities fertile ground for an extremely contagious virus to rip through.

This old darkness, long banished by science, is creeping back into the world. This measles outbreak can be laid squarely at the feet of anti-vaxxers and religious fundamentalists. These ancient scourges of humanity were finally under control, on the verge of being wiped out.

Thanks to the forces of unreason, we’re lowering our guard and they’re being allowed to return. It’s not a natural disaster beyond our control, but a completely unnecessary and self-inflicted betrayal. It’s like the palace guard unbarring the doors and ushering enemy invaders inside. Those who allowed this to happen, or encouraged it, deserve to be considered traitors to humankind.

Measles was the first, but more will come soon. This week, there was a case of rubella reported in Texas. Like measles, rubella is an airborne and highly contagious virus. It’s usually asymptomatic or mild in adults, but if a pregnant person contracts it, it causes devastating birth defects, miscarriage and stillbirth.

Fortunately, the rubella case turned out to be a false positivethis time. But since the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine has been a particular target of anti-vaxxers, wherever protection against one of these diseases is low, the others have an opening to return as well.

Thankfully, those of us who care about our kids’ lives and respect the authority of science can still get vaccinated. It won’t be as effective as if we had herd immunity, but MMR and other vaccines are highly protective on an individual level. That’s the good news. The bad news is that anti-vaxxers aren’t going away, and they don’t care who suffers and dies because of their bad counsel.

The Texas child who died of measles was the first, but won’t be the last. If we keep going the way we’re going now, over the next few years, these diseases will keep spreading and the deaths will multiply until they become routine. Before long, they’ll fade into the background noise, and people will shrug their shoulders in resignation. They’ll accept it as one more evil that no one can do anything about, the same way we as a society treat school shootings.

Image: Transmission electron microscopic image of a measles virus. Via CDC/Cynthia S. Goldsmith; William Bellini, Ph.D.

The Probability Broach: Blaming capitalism on socialism

The Probability Broach, chapter 1

Lieutenant Edward “Win” Bear sits in his car, contemplating his life choices:

Twenty-seven years on the force, and now the pain was creeping down my left arm into the wrist. Maybe it was the crummy hours, the awful food. Maybe it was worrying all the time: cancer; minipox; encountering an old friend in a packet of blackmarket lunch meat…

Forty-eight was the right age to worry, though, especially for a cop. Oh, I’d tried keeping in shape: diets, exercise, vitamins before they got too risky. But after Evelyn had split, it just seemed like a lot of trouble.

Ayn Rand uses this same dishonest tactic: describing evils that exist because of unregulated capitalism, and blaming them on socialism. This is a case in point.

Smith expects us to believe that government regulation – not greed or the hunger for profit, not sloppiness or corner-cutting, not callous disregard for customers’ health, not relentless competitive pressure in a Prisoner’s Dilemma market – is what compels businesses to sell tainted vitamins and adulterated food.

This assertion runs smack into a wall of reality. When these kinds of scandals happened for real, it was because businesses were unregulated – not because regulation somehow forced them to do it. I’ll quote the famous passages from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle about the American meatpacking industry:

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white — it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one — there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

…and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!

This stomach-churning description has a recent parallel, the 2024 listeria outbreak at a Boar’s Head meat-processing plant. When food safety inspectors checked the plant, they found mold, vermin and filth:

Between Aug. 1, 2023, and Aug. 2, 2024, inspectors found “heavy discolored meat buildup” and “meat overspray on walls and large pieces of meat on the floor.” They also documented flies “going in and out” of pickle vats and “black patches of mold” on a ceiling. One inspector detailed blood puddled on the floor and “a rancid smell in the cooler.” Plant staff were repeatedly notified that they had failed to meet requirements, the documents showed.

Needless to say, in an anarcho-libertarian world like the one Smith envisions, problems like this would be impossible to detect or do anything about. With no regulatory watchdog, there’d be no way to track outbreaks of foodborne disease. There would be nowhere to report them to, and no one whose job it was to connect the dots and figure out what all the sickened people were eating.

Even if you assume private parties would arise to perform this function, there’s another problem. In a world of absolute property rights, there would be no universal rule about what level of cleanliness was required. No business would be compelled to let anyone in to check if sanitation standards were being upheld. Nor would there be anyone with the authority to order a recall. True, a business might do it voluntarily to protect their reputation, but they’d have just as strong an incentive to deny or minimize the problem.

Lt. Bear continues his ruminations:

Maybe it was a depression they wouldn’t call by its right name, or seeing old folks begging in the streets. Maybe I just watched too many doctor shows.

Again, bear in mind that this is supposed to be a socialist dystopia, where the government exercises power over the economy. So why are there are so many homeless elderly begging on street corners? Are there no social safety nets, no public housing, no fiscal stimulus programs? Smith makes it sound like people are completely on their own, which is supposed to be what happens in major depressions in capitalist economies.

It would be one thing if Smith tried to make a case for how this all came about. But he doesn’t. Other than these brief asides, the book contains very little description and no backstory for Win Bear’s world.

For libertarians, it’s an article of faith that the government is the cause of every evil. They don’t view it as a policy position to be justified through argument, but a dogma, not to be doubted or questioned. They take this so thoroughly for granted, they tend to forget that not everyone else believes it.