Topic: Question for the "anarchists" in the crowd. (Read 5867 times)

I don't want to discount the validity of your question -- it's a legit question, after all.

But I do want to put forth the following observation: systems to organize society can't be dismissed on the basis of ultra-extraordinary situations.  There will always be a "what if" that no system whatsoever can address properly.  The system is not a recipe for 100% perfect harmony and cooperation, and one made-up hypothetical scenario that is very unlikely cannot be used to say "See?  Your system doesn't work".  Just like the statement "man is a biped" cannot be proven to be false by saying "Imagine men coming from war without legs.  See?  'Man is a biped' is a lie!".

This, I think, is a thought that quite often gets lost in the frenzy to "prove" that this or that system is "bad" or "unworkable".

On the other hand, systems to organize society can and should be judged on their usual performance.  And when you do that, you'll gain a new disrespect for political systems.  Look at the miserable failure that are the contemporary "justice", "legislation", and "law enforcement" systems. Look at how horrible these systems are at resolving human conflict; they are so shitty that people actively avoid or dread resorting to them.  Look at how many people were slaughtered by their own rulers in the 20th century: 270 million human beings.  Resist a man in a blue costume because he is being unjust?  Chances are he'll kill or maim you, and blame you for it.

When you see reality over thought experiments, it becomes pretty clear that pretty much any other system (save perhaps for mass and total suicide) can dramatically improve these criminal disasters that are ruining people's lives right now.

So, honestly, who cares if voluntaryism can't "solve" the "Mary Typhoid" problem?  At least I know voluntaryism won't cause the mass murder of 300 million people, and marginalize / gulagize more people than that.  That is strictly better, and I'm pretty happy with that solution to human conflict.

Your house is up in flames and you're asking me whether my firetruck can put out a lit match.  Maybe let's focus on your house before it crumbles in ashes to the ground?

That is my humble view on the subject.  Thanks for your question, it is appreciated.

Dude, you're interfering with the 'ignore' function.

"Society is able to function, despite the stupid rules made by stupid people in authority, only because smart people treat subSTRATA as damage and route around it."

Interesting thread by the way. Too bad one self-important kid who beliefs he knows something derails it on the last page or so.

hardly true

Completely off-topic for the thread, but entirely apropos to your post, I found a wonderful quote today from Kevin Carson:

"Society is able to function, despite the stupid rules made by stupid people in authority, only because smart people treat authority as damage and route around it."

i could do good

I think the role of government should be advisory, not forcefulness

Yeah, even I have to admit that the external security threat issue has long been hashed out, with historical examples to support it.  Even in the absence of defense companies, militias form readily when the society is under an external threat.  During and prior to the American Revolutionary War, militia companies formed by electing their captian from amongst their own membership, and had the right to withdraw from any militia company at any time before hostilities have already commenced.  They would agree in advance that once the shooting starts, anyone among the group who then turns 'yellow' under fire is endangering his peers due to lack of commitment.  This rarely happened during the Revolutionary War, but those that did this ever more rarely lived to see a trial of any sort.

Internal security is a different issue, but is also well hashed out.  There are numerous examples today of private security companies with varying degrees of competancy able to take over the work of public police forces at any time.  Most likely, the private security companies would also be the defense companies, but since collective defense is a much rarer risk it's possible that one defense company could be sub-contracted by a large number of smaller private security agencies.  This is similar to how "constables" function in my own city.  The Louisville Police Department draws it's legal authority from the county sherriff's office, but there are also two constables' offices in the county that also have similar legal authorities, but are not paid by the government in any meaningful way.  The constables' offices are technically elected positions, but are (in practice) simply held by some joint-owner of a pair of private security firms that hire the city cops for off duty gigs, such as for major event security at the convention center or bank branch security with full police powers.  If those two companies can't keep one of their own in the constable's seat, then they can't honor their contracts because city cops cannot be hired directly (with their full police powers intact) without the government title because the constables themselves are usually not cops themselves, but businessmen, and the police union would get sideways with the private companies if they didn't have some kind of "official" government title to cling to.

It should be obvious that, should the sherriff's office ever cease to exist, either one of these two companies woudl be both willing & able to step into the gap without skipping a beat.  There is already a smaller city (Jeffersontown) that "contracts out" their entire police force in a similar manner within the county itself, and there are numerous examples of smaller class cities doing similar things rather than directly hire a couple of their own for each of three shifts, seven days directly.

Well, this isn't really the thread for it (even if the stated purpose of the thread has pretty much been hashed out), but AnCap (aka market anarchy) allows for defense quite simply. Defense companies. Like private police/military agencies. They'd compete in the marketplace, not on the field of battle.

I think a system of anarchy would be overthrown by any type of organization, a king, a militia, anything.

I can't really argue with anything, here. Personal responsibility goes both ways. Of course, the cultural assumptions in Typhoid Mary's case were quite different from today's.

To be frank, this really does depend on the norms of the society, and that also applies in the case of Mary. That's because the norms of society are what people are going to apply when the information about the case comes out.

If we are using a model like presented in Molyneux's Practical Anarchy, then the social norm could be that people would be expected to carry some kind of certification of health from a trusted authority. When Marv gets tested for HIV and it comes back positive, that authority would take away his certification, or at least update it to be HIV+ (after all, HIV+ people do date, but they may not jump in bed with someone else who also has hepititus, etc). A person might say that it would be up to the woman to inquire about this certification and it would be up to Marv to be truthful about that inquiry. Thus a person could have the view that if a man or woman is too interested in sex to inquire about the health certification.

One thing that is important, though, is that in a voluntary society, the people around you define the response. So if the people in Marv's town agree that the women should have been more cautious, then they would continue to trade with him. If, however, they do feel he should have been more forthcoming with the information, they may just decide to not trade with him, making it so that he would have to self sustain or move to an area that does accept what he did. Almost certainly, people who know and are friends with this woman would be unlikely to trade with Marv and may also decide to not trade with people known to associate with Marv, which could be limiting to his life.

I bring this up because it seems like people have this impression of creating a black and white test for NAP violation, and then applying that to determine a person's status in the society, but because everything is voluntary, there is no exact answer to these questions.

Please stop equating legality with morality. Even if we accept the US/[insert your fav country] is a democracy/republic and actually uses what an informed majority thinks is right or wrong as a heuristic in making good laws, it is still based on argument from consensus fallacy. So at best it is a practical solution to a hard problem, in other words it is not necessarily ideal.

Telling people to not work towards an ideal society is what?

Sigh... Does nobody understand English anymore?

I'd like to point out this line from the Declaration of Independence:
Withdraw consent, and you withdraw their "just powers."

It isn't a society. It has no historical culture to make it one. It's a (imo cute) contrivance that utterly fails at it's goals by one simply fact. You cannot annex land in the USA and simply declare sovereignty. It doesn't matter if you own that land or not. This is illegal, immoral in the extreme and while well intentioned it just doesn't work.

Now maybe if you stayed strictly in your shire... you might legitimize the idea that law enforcement and government agents coming into the shire were violating your (illegal) sovereignty, but the simple fact that the participants are traveling in and out constantly makes the entire thing seem stupid. Every sovereign nation on the planet has paperwork, laws and enforcement - can't remove yourself from them by simply stating that you're not participating. You can only remove yourself by... actually removing yourself from that nation, not by annexing and occupying it illegally.

The Shire Society is not a place, it is a society. However, over 1100 people have moved to "the Shire," though it's not clear how many have officially joined the Shire Society, all of them (plus almost another 12000) have joined The Free State Project, another society which is not a government.

You should probably stop digging while your head is above ground.

BTW, what's a "socity"?

Yes, thank you for demonstrating that. You can go now.

O RLY?

That sure looks like a society sans government. Maybe we've evolved past the way remote tribes in the Amazon do things. Certainly we've stopped eating other people or painting our faces with mud.

I'd also point out that society ≠ government. You can most certainly have society without government, and often a government barely qualifies as "society."

I understand freedom very well, young man.  And insulting me does not constitute an argument.  Normally I'd just delete your bs for violating civility, but instead I'm going to leave it here so everyone can see your stupidity.

You make an excellent point. And in a voluntary society that had those options available, and the knowledge we have now, you'd be absolutely right. But the assumption at the time was that if you weren't sick, you were healthy and fine. She was not, even though she was outwardly healthy.

The reason I don't trust you when you tell me I have a horribly infectious disease is not (necessarily) that you're not a doctor. It's because you haven't done a single test to establish that I am infectious. They performed a test, and combined with the fact that she had been leaving a trail of sick and dead employers, is sufficient evidence that she actually was infectious.

Let's update the case. We have a man, let's call him "Typhoid Marv." Here's the thing: He doesn't have typhoid. He has HIV. He doesn't know it, though, so he has a string of girlfriends who all come down with HIV or AIDS. They tell him to get tested, and he does. It (not surprisingly) comes back positive. Of course, he doesn't believe it, (he read on the internet that sometimes these tests give false positives) so he keeps having unprotected sex.

Is it the women's fault for not asking, or his for not telling?

myrkul, you have a horribly infectious disease that will kill all the people around you.

Now I'm guessing that since you've been told, you will not take any action on this. This is because you don't believe me. So now do we need to create a standard for belief? This is what the statist system does: it creates the AMA and the people within it have authority to decide if someone has a serious enough disease that force can be used against them.

However, in a voluntary society, each individual sets the standard by which they go. So when the employer interviews her, they say "Has an insured doctor ever examined you for disease? Did they conclude you were disease free? What is that doctor's name?" There's even more complex things like there could be cooks' insurance companies that will bond a cook for not having infectious disease, and the employer could just ask if they are bonded for it. And then when she is not bonded, they don't hire her. This put it on the employer, not on Mary.

And if an employer wants to take a chance and use her anyway, then they should be allowed, even if it would probably result in their certain death. This is the point of voluntaryism.

But I agree that the end result for her will be that she would be ostracized at some level and she would then only have the option to self sustain as a hermit or voluntarily check herself into a charitable quarantine.

A trespasser is an "ethical subject", somebody capable of taking rational actions, thus somebody with rights, and by extension, somebody that must respect other people's rights and should be deemed responsible if s/he doesn't. A disease is not a responsible, rational being.

Let's put it in another way: imagine you have a restaurant, and without noticing it you serve rotten food to a client. The client gets sick. I consider you to be responsible. You can't blame it on the bacteria that "invaded" the food.


Not that "immediately", of course. Even if something is considered to be a violation of the NAP, there are several justice principles, like proportional punishment, presumption of innocence etc. These principles would render such scenario quite rare. For less dangerous diseases, nobody would bother searching a "guilty" transmitter, because even if you do find it, any applicable punishment would likely not pay for the trouble. And even for serious diseases, you'd need to prove that it was person X specifically that passed it to you.
That's why I don't think that, in a free society, people would manage dangerous transmittable diseases this way. It would likely be something closer to what Robert Murphy describes in the article I linked above: people using their discrimination rights to block sick people from their properties.

Haha, I think it would take a bit more than a business plan to make work and personally get something out of it. But yea, it's an "out-there" concept.

You need to talk to a bank about this. Draw up a business plan. I'm serious.

Yea, and they are mostly unpleasant places. For that reason, most people will put up resistance against being put in a hospital unless undeniably ill. Make hospitals like McDonalds for adults and people will willingly go. Casinos, etc.

Ah, definitely, but as has been pointed out, there are places for those who are infected with contagious diseases and thereby ostracized from society. Those places are called hospitals.

Once again agreed, but if the default response to being infected is to ostracize the person, then the expected result is antisocial behaviour. I am talking about what happens due to the initial diagnosis.

Anti-social behavior should lead to ostracization.

I agree somewhat. It is also on others to create an environment that allows the information to flow as accurately as possible about who may have bad disease X, so that anti-social behaviour by the infected person is not significant point of failure in the system, while not leading to undue ostracization.

Fault definitely applies. Maybe not the first time the disease gets passed on, but once they've been told they're contagious, it's on them to see that it doesn't happen again.

Couldn't this be taken as support for anarchism? The current methods have failed to solve it.

Proof enough that this is not a simple or settled problem.

I don't think the concept of fault applies. The reality of the situation is that it is bad for the infected person to be around others until a solution is found, one way or another this problem will be dealt with. We see how the government dealt with it. It could be done better, but usually such decisions are made under uncertain conditions. Noone knows how infectious the disease is or the route by which it travels, etc. Ideally, symptomless carriers should be rewarded somehow.

A carrier's immune system is not overpowered (that leads to death of the host), it has made peace with the disease. It may not be a conscious act, but neither is digestion. That disease is now part of her body.

How is an immune system giving up or being overpowered in any way like inviting someone in. It's not even a conscious act. If my intruder has me pinned down, it somehow makes him welcome and me liable?

That analogy is not accurate. It would be more like a guest in your house (Mary's immune system had ceased fighting the disease, effectively coming to a truce) used a sniper rifle to kill people in your neighborhood. It's his doing, but if you let him stay, it's your fault if he keeps killing.

I feel that I agree that a disease in you body is your own property since it is an invader. A guy trespassing in my house might kill a guest there, but I don't think that I'm responsible. It would be different if Mary intentionally infected herself to then go on and intentionally infect others, but in this case she didn't even know.


And this would be a situation where he defrauded the women he was with, similar to if Mary was asked if she tested positive for some disease and fraudulently claimed not.

I just don't feel that the presence of the sick should in any way be taken as an immediate violation of the NAP.

A small group of people are currently killing thousands and imprisoning millions so... I'll take my chances with the sociopaths not having a veneer of legitimacy?

Actually, no... he can be (and people have been) prosecuted on murder charges for that. Likewise in a libertarian society, he would be treated as a murderer.

I believe you can argue that she was violating people's rights. You're responsible for your properties. If your dog escapes and hurt the neighbor's son, you're responsible. If your car loses its breaks all of the sudden, while parked, and end up running over some one, you're still responsible, even if you were not driving it. If your factory or nuclear plant leaks pollution and hurt people living nearby, you're responsible. And so on.

Mary was responsible for her body. Her body was the transporting a lethal disease. She could be deemed responsible.

I know a real case of a disgusting man who knew he had AIDS, and still would convince his sexual partners to drop the condom, obviously lying about his health situation. He managed to contaminate multiple women on the course of the years, on purpose. I mean, he wanted to infect the highest number of women possible. I consider this man is an intentional murderer - a serial killer if you will. And yet, there's no law or any recourse his victims could use to punish him.

All that said, I find the scenario presented by Murphy in his article more reasonable than a scenario in which victims would prosecute those who transmitted them the disease. For a start, it's hard to determine who gave you the disease. But yeah, if this second approach start being applied, insurances would probably cover your legal costs if you infect people. In such cases, these insurances would have an interest in isolating you from society once you get a transmittable disease, in order to reduce their expanses. Such quarantine could be foresee in your contract with the insurer, making it no longer coercive. There you have it, another potential solution to the problem. Both solutions may coexist.

You mean... when people don't have to take personal responsibility, they don't? 

I'd say it's their fault for the first set of illnesses, and hers for the second. The first ones, they should have asked, the second, she'd been informed, and even seeking employment in food service is a bad move.

Yeah, but that's their fault, not hers. It remains the case that if this were really an important issue, then they would ask.  One can even argue that statism make people more vulnerable to being taken advantage of in several ways because people are not used to vetting their trading partners. This is one of the reasons why I feel Trendon Shavers was able to con so many people.

This makes sense. Of course, it's questionable whether her employers ever asked, or even would have thought to ask.

Because not all flavors prefer that term, since it has negative connotations in certain circles.  It's also not literally accurate, since it literally means "no government" and not "self government".  Any particular individual can either govern himself, or he cannot.  He may not have ever been taught to govern himself, as is the present case with way too many publicly educated Americans; or he may have simply never accepted basic mores with which to govern himself with; or he simply may be mentally incapable of reliablely governing himself.  I can certainly accept that 98+% of the adult population is capable of self-governance from the age of reason (roughly 12, depending upon the person) till either death or senility, but it cannot be argued that those people actually will.  In a truly anarchist/libertarian/minimalist/volunteerist society, most crimes today won't be crimes and the crimes that remain will have immediate and permanent effects upon the violator; so it's not hard to imagine a society with a vanishingly small incidence of violent crime simply due to Darwinistic 'survival-of-the-least-offensive' forces.  Still, there will always be that vanishingly small percentage of people who are actually incapable of reliable self-governance, which is why I consider a truly anarchist society (The Probability Broach) to be impossible.  A more likely outcome would be voluntary self-identification, such as the 'phyles' concept (The Diamond Age).  Either way, we can't get there from here, so at some point we are going to have to transition through a harsh period of hightened suffering and violence, (Alongside Night) which is exactly the condition that Karl Marx suggested would be the best opprotunity for socialists to change the nature of socity itself into his dream world.  Obviously, history shows us that socialism doesn't work, but that same history also shows us that such retoric does work, if the true goal is snatching of power by a core of like minded sociopaths.  If any minimalist society is to ever become real, it's only possible if by a deliberate plan involving years of education and development.  Periods of civil unrest are unlikely to result in a peaceful & anarchist society and are very likely to result in a dictator (in fact, although not likely in name).

It's not a flaw in reasoning, it's a misunderstanding of the situation at hand, but the reasoning still is the same. It's the responsibility of the people hiring her to ask her if she has tested positive for this disease, or to check references to see if prior employes are sick, etc. If she deliberately misrepresents this, saying she was never told she had the disease or saying she didn't have prior employers (which is different from saying she doesn't want to provide references), then she would again be acting fraudulently. In a lot of anarchist societies, this would get you a trade ban which is effectively death by starvation.

Possibly some charitable group would offer to feed her if she agreed to quarantine herself.

The one flaw in your reasoning is that Mary worked as a cook in people's homes. No middlemen like a restaurant. Also, she didn't know she was infected, and even after being quarantined and informed that she was, continued to uphold that she was not, putting the responsibility not on the bacteria, but her.

I'm pretty sure it was the typhoid and not Mary that was causing harm. This is a pretty important distinction because I don't see Mary as having violated the NAP. Ultimately, the people who were infected by her cooking were responsible for their own infection because they didn't demand an infection-free guarantee from the restaurant they were eating at. However, if there were such a guarantee in place, then it would be the fault of the restaurant for employing her when there was a risk of her being infected, and this leaves them open to the liability. If they did check with Mary on her condition, and she lied about it, then she has acted fraudulently and there are anarchist solutions for this.

Anarchism does require people to demand the safety they want, though. The power comes from the interaction at the time of trade. If people truly don't think that infectious diseases are a major issue with respect to eating out, they they will risk it. Otherwise, they will make the choice to demand their food sources will have liability.

Unlike the Japanese interned in camps during WW2 Mary was causing harm whether she accepted that or not so both the Anarchists and the Libertarians would likely agree that she must be quarantined or rendered harmless in some way.

The OP argument seems to be suggesting that her right to work and freedom must be held higher than everyone else's right not to be killed in order to satisfy the NAP? Further it sugests that spontaneous order fails because the outcome of either idiom is the forced incarceration or ostracism of the dangerous individual simply because they don't know or don't care if they're dangerous.

What does federally mandated force do other than allow one group to overpower another or make you comfortable since you don't need to take responsibility for any of their decisions?

As an aside why is "anarchists" in the title in quotation marks?

History is full of tales of sick merchants being given a bed to recover in, only to die and pass on the disease to those around them. Of course, they didn't understand the vectors, at that time, either, so now it might be possible to be compassionate and safe at the same time.

And this is, indeed, an excellent article.  However, while I can see the point that pivate business owners (restraunts, hotels, etc.) would be able to refuse entry to known carriers, this is still a far cry from preventing exposure, although likely a fairly effective one in most situations.  Also, I agree that those who know they are ill are going to want treatment and desire to not get others sick, so are inclined towards voluntary sequesteration anyway.  Still, this method of "protecting society" seems cruel to the ill, although practially no worse than the statist version.  I don't know, in a lot of ways it seems wrong to deny even an ill man a safe harbor in a winter storm or a drink of water in a summer heat wave, but then feelings don't make for good public policy anyway.

Yes, indeed.  That is a good point.

Like preventing forest fires. Good point.

I think the original question begs the premise that viral outbreaks are bad for society. Yes, they cause people to die now, but the ones that survive have a better immunity and going forward humans have a sustainable interaction with the virus that is now in the environment. The problem with the statist response is that it leaves us open to a larger outbreak of the virus within the society that has a larger potential for harm.

And thank you for the vocabulary correction!

Great article. Thanks for posting it.

This topic has already been discussed by renowned authors, like Robert Murphy: https://mises.org/daily/2635


Great point. If you require previous knowledge of every possible outcome of a particular move, you'll never move at all.
It's a known fact - thanks to sound economic theory - that free markets are superior to coercive monopolies.

You say that Mary is a household cook. Who is she a cook for? Talk to her clients and inform them of her condition. If they have any sanity, they would fire her in a heartbeat. If not, well, anything goes between consenting adults I guess.

I have always be intellectually curious of cryptoanarchism and agorism, but the more I am involved with bitcoin the more technocratic I become.

I guess the theoretical answer would be that the victims of Ms. Mary would go to their favorite enforcers and tell them that by the negligence of Ms. Mary that they are entitled to compensation.  Then they would go to Mary's employer, union or whatever and come to a agreement of compensation.  Mary is fired and tries for a new job but the unions/employment companies know who Mary is and lost a lot of money on her so they tell her to get lost.

If this would actually happen, I don't think so anymore.  The fact that people on this forum won't even take responsibility for their investments shows that when it is theoretical people will be on board, but when someone has to actually step up, cowardice will defeat *anarchos.

No, that action directly caused the typhoid outbreaks for which she was responsible. We could probably go back and forth over direct/indirect, but the fact is, she caused those outbreaks. Until her first quarantine, she may have been unwitting, but even accidental harm still requires recompense.

Now, this is a fine point. Still, it only works up until that first quarantine.

If she was innocent (not "not guilty," innocent - totally free of any wrong-doing) the first time, she was the second. Since it's doubtful she was not a carrier, then it's doubtful she was innocent.

They sure don't read like guidelines. They read like laws. The only time Maybery's laws can violate each other is when you've agreed to do something that would infringe upon someone's person or property. If you can suspend your duty to follow the second law simply by agreeing to violate it, why have it at all?

Also, the NAP is violated as a matter of course by government agents as well, and as you say, society persists, though certainly not a peaceful one.

Well, first, to answer your question, there are a number of ways a health inspection agency can be funded without taxation. First and foremost, is the donation (charity) model. A charity organization formed to promote the public health might come in and ask if they can test the food, etc. Alternatively, it could be funded by the institutions and restaurants (and possibly even private residences) that it inspects. That little "A" sticker in the window might be worn as a badge of pride, rather than simply the required cost of doing business. (Yes, I know those are a recent innovation, but you get the point.) Note that neither of these methods really give the health agency the ability to force their way in and demand an inspection, but if people are getting sick, you're probably going to be calling someone in to find out why anyway.

Secondly, to improve upon your example:
"Mary would have been arrested by the 'medical establishment', and her own security company would have immediately challenged the quarantine."

Mary most likely would not have been arrested, but if she were determined to be the likely cause of the outbreaks, she would have been tested. Diplomacy would most likely have had to been used, perhaps using the ploy that it was to clear her of suspicion, rather than to prove she's guilty. You be surprised how many people agree to being tested, if only you tell them that it's to prove them innocent, rather than to prove them guilty.

Once proof came back that she was, indeed, the carrier, most likely she would have had to agree to not seek employment in the food service industry. She might have had to pay restitution for the damages she caused, but the judgments would likely have been light. As you pointed out, she didn't mean any harm, and like the "rain god", probably simply thought people got typhoid a lot in the US.

On that second offense, though, that's when things start getting harsh. Even if she didn't flee her job at the woman's hospital, she still took it, after agreeing not to. At that point she is forcibly quarantined, and allowed to support herself, probably through a laundress job there at the facility.

I'm just asking for some speculation.  Some reasoned arguments.  I'm not asking for the world, just a little guidance about how an ancap society could have managed this case (or a similar one) without violating it's own principles, without inaction (which would have been catastrophic in this particular case), and (hopefully) without the degree of violations of Mary Mallory's rights as happend to her in the real history.  Certainly not with the end result being that someone had to assassinate her.

I'm really dissapointed in you guys.

How can you expect any one person to give you an answer only an entire market can figure out? Don't you see you are asking for the impossible?

Let's review a bit.  I'm a libertarian, not an anarchist.  I don't find my own argument above a convincing argument for the abolution of the state.  I'm looking for an actual anarchist to either improve my argument, or present a better one, that a government (i.e. an institution with a monopoly on the use of force) is not a requirement.  For example, in my own scenario above, how does the medical force get it's funding?  It's not a security company in it's own right.  In 1907 New York state, the health department was supported by taxation.  How would the medical institution in my scenerio above afford to exist much less be able to fund an investigation & arbitration agreement? 

That action may have cause indirect harm.  At no point did (prior to her first arrest) had Mary done anything with either the knowledge of possible harm, nor the intent to do so.  She was simply trying to seek income in the occupation for which she was trained & most profitable for herself. 

Her second arrest was most certainly a different matter, as she had been informed of (at a minimum) the possibility that she was a carrier, and had agreed to refrain from working in food service.  But I'm talking about how this all started, not how it ended.

It probably would. There would be an arbitration case, which may well bring to light some of the more important medical facts, and might have sped up the acceptance of cleanliness as being key to preventing the spread of disease. We'll never know.

Given the information they had at the time, an AnCap society might have done almost the same thing, but like I said, there would have been an arbitration case. Who knows, maybe Mary was innocent.