For most of us, our only point of comparison is life under the authority of the state and capital. Superficially, decision making in this context might seem very efficient. We are allowed to make vanishingly few decisions for ourselves—mostly about which brand of commodity we’ll purchase or which of two elite candidates we might periodically vote into office.

Beyond this, our choices are heavily constrained—you might choose which employment offer to accept but certainly not whether to participate in wage labor—or non-existent, when it comes to our participation in a community. Take a look around at, say, the built environment around you: the roads, the sidewalks, the schools and school districts, parks and police stations, and ask yourself, what say did you have in any of these decisions?

2/10

The answer is invariably “virtually none.” Most decisions are made for and imposed on us. By bosses, managers, bankers, bureaucrats, politicians, technocrats. Do you like having a job and feeding your family? Too bad if Jerome Powell decides to raise interest rates in an attempt to slow inflation, driving up unemployment and turning your life upside down. Do you like your town and community? Too bad if some finance bros halfway around the world make a bad bet that crashes whatever industry was anchoring your local economy. Do you want your community to stay out of violent conflicts in the Middle East? Good luck with that!

What say do you have in these decisions? What say could you possibly have?

3/10

The anarchist alternatives seem inefficient only in comparison to a system that has streamlined decision making by confining the vast majority of choices and decisions to a tiny elite. We might think of the status quo as efficient only because it enjoys massive subsidies—subsidies of violence.

We have so little say because our elites have interposed themselves into the organic processes by which we’d otherwise make decisions together. And that interposition is enormously, incredibly expensive.

The armies. The police. The surveillance. The cadastral surveys and property records, the courts and legislatures, the tax assessors and tax collectors, bureaucrats and the technocrats, schools to teach obedience.

More than a million Americans are employed as police officers or support staff. The US spends well over $100 billion each year on coercive policing and then another $40-50 billion on jails and prisons.

All of this is immensely costly, both in terms of the resources involved and the harms imposed on us, and incredibly brittle. Centralized, top-down decision making only feels more efficient because it is bought at the price of gold and blood.

4/10