The Probability Broach, chapter 16

Ed and Win Bear have burgled the house of their enemy, John Jay Madison, and successfully retrieved proof of his evil schemes.

At the same time, Madison sent his goons after their friend Clarissa Olson. She escaped, shaken but unharmed. But she’s outraged—they all are—because Win is showing his friends the military training films from his world that he took from Madison’s place. Specifically, the ones about the atomic bomb:

“Horrible!” cried Clarissa. Ed sat paralyzed, his face a frozen mask.

… “They purpose doing that to us?” Deejay trembled with anger as the films showed buildings, automobiles, ships resting innocently at anchor, vaporized beneath the mushroom cloud.

“Only if you don’t knuckle under. It’s pretty simple. An old game where I come from. They finish their Broach, bring in troops and weapons, and the Hamiltonians are suddenly in charge—under SecPol supervision, of course.”

Win grimly explains that there’s no chance of fighting the bad guys when they make their move. Once they have their own Probability Broach, they can appear anywhere, and with nuclear weapons, they can hold entire cities for ransom. He concludes, “Give them a week and they’ll own this world. With the resources and the technology available here, they’ll own mine, too.”

Fortunately, Dr. Deejay Thorens, the scientist, tells them there’s still time. She reviewed the recordings that Win made in Madison’s house, and she’s concluded that they’re weeks away from getting their Broach working. (In this book, as in Atlas Shrugged, all smart and competent people have the same politics. Only libertarian capitalists can invent anything, and people with other ideologies can only clumsily copy what they come up with.)

But they’re still under a deadline. Win is exasperated that they know what Madison is planning, but under the laws of this anarchist society, they can’t do anything about it. Captain Forsyth, the chimpanzee bodyguard-for-hire, explains why:

“I don’t understand! These people have shot me, attacked Ed and the captain, murdered their own hitman, and now this latest outrage on Clarissa! Why don’t we just round up some muscle and—”

Lucy sighed. “Winnie, ain’t a body in this room—least of all me—wouldn’t do that in a minute, ‘specially after what happened to Clarissa last night, but… nobody’s gonna break into that fortress of theirs twice.”

“That’s right,” the captain said. “My dispatcher says they’ve ordered three squads from Brookstone’s, and a weapons specialist. That means lasers—big ones.” He wrinkled his upper lip and bared his teeth—definitely not an expression of good humor among his people.

In the last chapter, Ed suggested that once they had the evidence in hand, they could sue Madison for attempted world domination. Even L. Neil Smith seems to realize how ludicrous this is, as it’s never brought up again. (Even if they sue him and he loses, what stops him from just bringing in the nukes and conquering the world anyway?)

“Why not get four squads, then, and even bigger lasers? Once everybody understands, every security company in Laporte will—”

“Companies don’t fight each other… Nobody’d last five minutes in this business—wouldn’t deserve to—if all justice amounted to were ‘My thugs’re tougher’n yours!’ We’re supposed to preserve the peace—otherwise, we’d just go back to your arrangement, and have some real wars.”

“What the captain isn’t saying,” Ed added, “is that there’s simply no profit in smashing one another to pieces. That was settled, long ago.”

As a historical howler, this ranks right up there with Ayn Rand claiming there were no “fortunes by conquest” in America.

Smith says that only governments wage war, and because there’s no government in his anarcho-capitalist world, war is nonexistent. There are private security companies with armies at their disposal, but they only deploy them to protect their clients. They don’t fight each other directly, because it wouldn’t be profitable to do so.

Really? Private wars aren’t profitable? History begs to differ.

In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to a group of merchants to manage trade with Britain’s Asian colonies. This became the British East India Company, one of the world’s first corporations. It was run by a board of directors and sold shares of stock to the public to raise capital.

The East India Company was immensely profitable, and it used those profits to form private militaries to protect its trade routes and enforce its brand of law and order in the colonies it administered. At the height of its power, it commanded a quarter-million soldiers—more than the actual British army. It had infantry, cavalry and artillery, as well as its own navy.

Its “branch officers” wrote the laws and controlled the justice systems in the British colonies it managed. As Dave Roos writes on History.com:

This would be the equivalent of Exxon Mobil drilling for oil in coastal Mexico, taking over a major Mexican city using private armed guards, and then electing a corporate middle manager as the mayor, judge and executioner.

The East India Company’s most infamous exploit was the Opium Wars. Chinese porcelain, silk and tea were in high demand in Europe, but there was little that China wanted in exchange. British merchants had the bright idea to export opium to China, getting people addicted and raking in the cash. When the Chinese emperors tried to outlaw the drug, the East India Company called in the warships. China was defeated and forced to agree to one-sided terms.

Also, the U.K. wasn’t the only colonial power at the time; other European nations had similar trading companies. Did these firms fight each other? Yes, yes they did.

To gain control of India, the British East India Company had to elbow out its colonial competitors. It defeated the Dutch East India Company in the 1759 Battle of Chinsurah, and the French East India Company in the Carnatic Wars.

Granted, in this era, the line between corporation and state was blurry. The trading companies served the interests of their monarchs, and could call in the mother country’s military at will. But to say that capitalists found war unprofitable is utterly false.

Colonialism was very profitable for the colonizing power—which, of course, is why it happened! With so much money at stake, those who stood to profit were more than willing to go to war, to gain control of a rival’s turf or to defend their own. L. Neil Smith has to ignore vast swaths of history to say otherwise.

Back in the book, Win’s friends give him a mini-history lesson about why security companies don’t fight each other:

Lucy nodded. “Little village off the East Coast—one gang decided they’d try running things, four or five other companies objected. Before the dust settled, they’d nearly wiped each other out. Manhattan, if I recall correct. Ever since, security outfits—and their insurance companies—have been big supporters of adjudication.”

This is Smith’s explanation of why there’s no New York City in the North American Confederacy, although it doesn’t explain why it was never rebuilt. (It’s an excellent natural harbor that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Hudson River, making it an ideal shipping port. That’s why the city was built there in the first place.)

But I see a bigger problem with this. If two security companies go to adjudication, and the bigger, better-armed one loses the case, is it going to peacefully accept that? Again, it ignores history and human nature to say yes.

The reason it works this way in our world is because the state, which operates the judicial system, also has a monopoly on force. If you ignore a court’s ruling, it can deploy state power to enforce it. Litigants are compelled to accept judicial settlements, rather than continuing their argument by other means.

Smith assumes that if you remove the state backstop, judges will still have unquestioned authority, even though they have no way to enforce their judgments. This is more libertarian cargo-cult thinking.

When powerful and unaccountable entities don’t get their way, they pull out the big guns. In addition to the colonial trading companies, a modern example is drug cartels who go to war in the streets over turf.

These are privately owned, profit-driven firms in the libertarian sense, so why do they fight and kill each other? According to L. Neil Smith, there’s no profit in that. Why don’t they just work out a peaceful arbitration process among themselves and voluntarily agree to respect the results? It sounds absurd—but that’s exactly what Smith expects to happen.

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach