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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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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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.

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.