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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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach