The Probability Broach, chapter 17
This chapter begins with another of the fake quotes L. Neil Smith loves. This one is attributed to his fictional anarchist philosopher Mary Ross-Byrd:
Nine tenths of everything is tax. Everything you buy has a complicated history of robbery: land, raw materials, energy, tools, buildings, transport, storage, sales, profits. Don’t forget the share you contribute toward the personal income tax of every worker who has anything to do with the process.
Inflation by taxation: there are a hundred taxes on a loaf of bread. What kind of living standard would we enjoy if everything cost a tenth of what it does? What kind of world? Think of your home, your car, your TV, your shoes, your supper—all at a 90% discount!
Government can’t fight poverty—poverty is its proudest achievement!
—Mary Ross-Byrd
Toward a New Liberty
We’ve been over this before, but this quote offers an especially vivid example of Smith’s ideologically-driven economic illiteracy. He thinks that all the money we pay in taxes vanishes into a black hole, providing no value in return.
How did that loaf of bread get to the market or to my house? By truck? Those trucks travel on highways, bridges and tunnels—how did those get built? Who paid the costs of construction? When it snows, who plows the roads to keep them open? When there’s a pothole, who fills it? When there’s an accident, who clears it?
Was there any kind of food safety inspection at the bakery, to make sure they’re not putting toxic alum, chalk or sawdust in the dough to save money? Or do you just have to take the company’s word for it?
Where does the factory get electricity to keep the lights on and run the appliances? Who generates it and how? Who regulates the utilities to make sure their reactors don’t melt down and they don’t spill toxic waste into the drinking water?
Even in a hypothetical scenario where there’s no government and private corporations perform the same services, those services have a cost that isn’t zero. Why wouldn’t those costs be built into the price of bread in the anarcho-capitalist utopia, just like they are now?
Smith’s assertion that everything would cost “a tenth of what it does” if not for government is pure magical thinking. It’s on a level with saying all the money we pay farmers is wasted because crops just spring out of the ground on their own.
In this chapter, Win and his friends are doing their best to alert the world to the Hamiltonian threat, and their efforts have borne fruit. The North American Confederacy’s version of Congress has agreed to meet, and our protagonists are traveling to the seat of government (which isn’t Washington, D.C., as we’ll see shortly) to testify in person.
Rather than one of the NAC’s jet liners (“thousand-passenger fusion-powered titanium monsters that bash their way through near-space at five times the speed of sound”), they’re taking a zeppelin, because zeppelins are cool. Smith describes them as enormous and luxurious—a mile long, like floating cruise ships with lavish suites, shopping malls and restaurants on board, with power supplied by fusion reactors which also generate helium for buoyancy.
However, there’s a tiny problem. As you may remember, everyone in this anarcho-capitalist world goes heavily armed at all times. How does that work with air travel?
Riding the corridor to the elevators, we encountered a security setup not too different from the ones back home. Ed bellied up, drew his Browning, pulled the clip and chamber round. Lucy’s horse-pistol materialized from some region of her person, and Clarissa unsheathed her Webley Electric. Following their example, I unholstered my Smith & Wesson, wondering what would happen next.
At home, the officer would lose control of her sphincters, and forty thousand federal marshals would trample in and haul us away for the next several eons…. Whatever happened to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments at U.S. airports? Or the First, for that matter?
This is one of those spit-take moments you keep running into while reading this book. Smith thinks people have a constitutional right to carry guns on airplanes? On zeppelins, even?!
Note that he mentions the Fourth Amendment—i.e., the right to privacy—implying that it’s a violation of his rights to be searched, even at an airport security checkpoint.
“Excuse me, sir,” the attendant said politely. “Is your ammunition in compliance with aeroline policies?”
Ed nodded. “Frangibles, at under nine hundred feet per second.”
Even a gun-worshipping fanatic like L. Neil Smith recognizes the problems that would ensue if people started blasting away in an airplane cabin. This is his answer to that. In his ancap utopia, you’re allowed to bring guns on planes, but only if they’re loaded with special ammunition that kills people but won’t damage the structural fabric of the vehicle.
Everyone’s weapon passes the safety check except Win’s pistol, which is an antique by the standards of this world:
The official took a hard look at my revolver. Naturally, she couldn’t find it in any of her references. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, would you mind if we took your, er, gun, until you reach your destination?”
Ed grinned smugly. “See the trouble that museum piece causes? Use the cartridges in the yellow box.”
…I reloaded cylinder, speed-loaders, and my derringer—which caused another round of dithering—with this new stuff: bright-yellow plastic bullets. They’d explode into harmless powder on aerocraft-tolerance materials.
Thank goodness. Now we can riddle other passengers with bullets without causing midair explosive decompression. Much better.
Note, however, that the attendant makes only a cursory effort to verify this. She asks them to take out their weapons, inspects them, and asks if the ammunition they’re loaded with is compliant with airline policy. No one gets patted down; no one has to go through a security scanner or send their luggage through an X-ray machine. It all seems to be voluntary.
It’s fair to assume that people who outright refuse to cooperate with inspection would be denied boarding. But if you wanted to bring a noncompliant weapon on board, could you just keep it under your coat and not produce it when asked, like teenagers smuggling outside snacks into a movie theater? Or what if you took regular ammunition, but in the box of a frangible brand? Would anyone check or be able to tell?
In the real world, air rage is a problem every airline has to grapple with: angry, disorderly passengers assaulting each other or the crew. It’s almost inherent to the industry. Expensive tickets, stressful travel plans, uncomfortable seats, jet lag, and alcohol create a pressure-cooker environment in which some people’s worst impulses explode. There’s no scenario in which this gets better if everyone is armed, even if Smith makes the token concession of ensuring they can’t accidentally shoot down the entire aircraft.
Much like the section on traffic regulation (or lack thereof), these are wildly dangerous policies that would cause mass death and devastation if they were ever implemented in the real world. But Smith waves these problems away through the power of authorial fiat, scripting a world where they (somehow) lead to greater safety and security, and then holding that world out as an appealing place where we should want to live. It’s a circular argument, using a fictional scenario as proof of itself.
Image credit: Edward Betts, released under CC BY-SA 3.0 license
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This has to got to be one of the stupidest fictional utopias that I’ve heard of. Smith makes it worse by giving more detail than many, so the stupidity is clearer. It keeps astonishing me how many people seem to think fiction proves something in regards to the real world.
… special ammunition that kills people but won’t damage the structural fabric of the vehicle.
The skin and helium bags of a zeppelin are tougher than a human body?
The Magic of the Marketplace gave them a smaller-scale version of the neutron bomb!
Smith describes them as enormous and luxurious—a mile long, like floating cruise ships with lavish suites, shopping malls and restaurants on board, with power supplied by fusion reactors which also generate helium for buoyancy.
Tell us this book is goofy satire without saying it’s goofy satire. I mean WTAF?! If a big honkin’ zeppelin is using the helium it generates for buoyancy, how long would it have to run its fusion plant to fill the balloon with enough helium to loft a whole shopping mall and its fusion energy plant? And how hot would the helium be when it comes out of the fusion reactor into the balloon? Did Smith even know how hot a fusion reactor would get? It’s the inside of the Sun!
“Ed bellied up, drew his Browning, pulled the clip and chamber round. Lucy’s horse-pistol materialized from some region of her person…”
Note the contrast between these two sentences: Smith very matter-of-factly describes a man pulling a concealed firearm; then describes a woman doing the same like it’s a stunning magic trick that even her colleagues have yet to figure out. Is Smith oh-so-tastefully trying to imply that the woman pulled the gun (a “horse pistol” no less) out of her nethers? This has the tone of a very young boy to whom women’s clothes, and bodies, are still a frightening mystery that can’t be talked about directly. I know that’s a lot to read into a single sentence, but it really leaped out at me — along with my long-held sense that lots of libertarians, especially the tech-bro types, really don’t know jaque merde about women, and show no sign of wanting to learn either. (*cough*Heinlein*cough*) Did Smith have woman issues? Mommy issues?
I would ask how the zeppelins work but it’s clear from the description it’s magic. The mechanics written by somebody who didn’t know how zeppelins work or what the constraints are. Same for his idea of using fusion power.
Why can’t they demand no weapons on a plane? It’s a private company, they can set whatever rules they want. Constitutional rights don’t go far on private property, particularly when they conflict with function. Some people in the NAC might avoid them because they prefer to keep their weapons but the airlines would be OK with that unless it was on a huge scale. Better to lose the occasional customer then lose a plane/zeppelin.
There are also many problems with Smith’s lethal only to human’s idea. Gun compatibility and having enough different types for all of the guns. Zeppelins had canvas skins covered in metallic paint, not hard surfaces. Interior surfaces of planes and zeppelins are as thin and light as possible. Not to mention windows. Anything sturdy enough to be a threat to a person would be a danger to these vehicles. And you don’t need to shoot a hole in the plane for it to be a problem, you can always shoot the crew.
Having ammunition that is dangerous to people but not to surrounding hardware would also encourage shoot outs. A lot of people would use it all the time because of reduced collateral damage. This he can likely write off as the special ammunition being more expensive.
Yeah, no anarchist would say what Mary Ross-Byrd says. It’s a bastardization of theory at best. Of course, most anarchists want a library economy instead of a money economy (though like all things there are exceptions).
Meanwhile, I shall LOL at Smith saying there is no airport security inspection in his world and then showing us an airport security inspection. Nothing in his cited amendments disallow security checks. So he understands the constitution as much as he understands anarchism. But I thought he didn’t like the constitution anyway. He can’t just cite it only when it is convenient for him.
Surely the sensible thing would be for passengers to voluntarily not bring any weapons aboard for the duration of the flight? He already thinks no one will be tempted to use them, so why would they need them to protect themselves? It’s not like there isn’t precedent for that even in the Old West, where there were certain places that guns were not allowed.
Off topic a bit, but I just want to make sure that you guys don’t perceive my complaints about Smith as just the narcissism of small differences. I do think there are meaningful differences between what I believe and what he did, but if I haven’t made a good enough case for that, please tell me so that I can do better. Thanks.
No worries, mate, I (at least) think you’ve described real ideological differences pretty clearly. And I don’t have to agree with either you or Smith to see your point (though I do think your version is a good deal more realistic, and much less stupidly hateful, than his).
That’s a good point. You’d think an airline could peace-bond its customers’ weapons, the way sci-fi conventions do now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction_convention#Peace-bonding_and_weapons_policies
Yeah, a lot of people don’t realize that many towns required guns to be checked with the local US Marshal or sheriff when any outsiders came in. The famous gunfight at the O.K. Corall was due to some cowboys refusing.
If I recall correctly, in one of the later sequels, there are airlines that compete for customers based on their weapons policies. I wonder if one of them offers to replace their customers’ firearms for poisoned blowdarts so the customers still feel like they won’t be deprived of the ability to kill someone over the duration of the trip.
Gun control on airplanes violates the First Amendment? Did Ed worship Zardoz who brought his followers “the gift of the gun”? And the Fifth? That would make no sense even if it were government security.
I’m surprised that writing in the late 1970s, Smith doesn’t point out having any gate security was a new thing in response to the skyjackings (e.g. “We went for decades without security, then everyone overreacted because of a few crazies.”). Instead it’s his usual faith that everything is better and safer if there are guns around.
90 percent of the cost of everything is tax? What the hell is he smoking? That explains how everyone can buy a house or a car in just a few months … wait it’s bullshit so it doesn’t explain one damn thing.
The solution to the guns-on-zeppelin problems I’d go with would be magical self-healing dirigible skin rather than magic ammunition. The bullets make me think of Doc Savage’s anesthetic bullets which take crooks down without harm … except they’re being fired from a miniature machine gun so even if they dissolve on contact, they’d hurt (I say this as a die-hard Man of Bronze fan).
For anyone who’s curious, the book “The Skies Belong To Us” is an excellent look at the skyjacking era and the state of airport security at the time.
Thanks. I remember those days, vaguely, mostly from the jokes that were common (every sketch comedy show from Monty Python to Carol Burnett had a “this plane is going to Cuba” bit)
… Doc Savage’s anesthetic bullets which take crooks down without harm … except they’re being fired from a miniature machine gun so even if they dissolve on contact, they’d hurt …
Not if the anesthetic worked fast enough (and with both Doc and Monk cooking up the formula, how could it not?).
Fair point. I wound up researching mercy bullets and Dent didn’t make them up: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11360270/
The idea of a society where everyone is carrying around weapons of mass destruction at all times is absurd, unless there are fights breaking out all the time.
If the only reason people don’t just attack you in the street is they think you are carrying a concealed weapon, then you could achieve the same effect by going unarmed.
It’s very telling that in trying to conceive of a world in which everyone gets their own way all the time, Smith has actually imagined a world in which he gets his own way all the time.
And I’m reminded of this: https://youtu.be/qmuZSTfa1R8
I couldn’t agree more.
If the only reason people don’t just attack you in the street is they think you are carrying a concealed weapon, then you could achieve the same effect by going unarmed.
If someone really wants to attack or rob you on the street, and they suspect you may have a gun, they’ll just be sure to pull theirs first. And that will always work, unless EVERYONE has their guns drawn and ready to fire at all times, every time they go out in public.
It’s very telling that in trying to conceive of a world in which everyone gets their own way all the time, Smith has actually imagined a world in which he gets his own way all the time.
All together now: “…and the future belongs to me (not you)!”
I mean, this is a story about alternate universes; so maybe Smith’s libertarian utopia is a place where everyone is in their own bubble-verse in which they do indeed get their own respective ways all the time.
It’s worse than that. I’m going to stick my neck out and say your eyes are on the front of your head. So if I’m really intent on shooting you in particular, even if you have your gun drawn, loaded, cocked and with the safety off and aiming down the sight I can just… shoot you in the back. Or from concealment/cover. Or from really far away. Or, y’know, all of those things.
As is often the case, this guy comes across as someone who has never had any training in actual tactical application of firearms, and in particular someone who thinks the word “arcs” means big boats with animals in. He’s watched too many action movies where the hero is not only bulletproof but literally clairvoyant. See the well known documentary “Equilibrium”, starring Christian Bale, and in particular watch ANY Youtube review of it by anyone who’s ever picked up a gun. You’ll need to fast forward through the first few minutes of laughter before you get to where they’ve calmed down enough to speak.
See also essentially any time any military patrol of any kind is engaged by an enemy force – pretty much by definition a patrol is moving cautiously with their guns up, loaded and ready to fire. And a large part of the training you receive emphasises that if you’re dealing with anything other than absolute rank amateurs then the first indication you will have that you are being engaged is that one of you will already have been shot.
Here’s some experience from actual training: standard section patrol drill teaches “reaction to effective enemy fire”.
The first thing to understand is – what is “effective enemy fire”. This is partly defined in terms of what it is not. For example: the sound of guns being fired is NOT “effective enemy fire”. It might be your own guys. It might be the enemy, but they’re far out of range. It might be the enemy, in range, but firing at something else. “Effective enemy fire” is:
– rounds landing by your feet (yeah, sure…) OR
– taking casualties, also known as “MAN DOWN! MAN DOWN! OH FUCK! THEY GOT KENNY!”
The drilled reaction consists of:
1. SHOOT BACK. Not aimed fire, just three or four rounds roughly downrange to wherever you think the incoming fire is coming from. You’re not expected to hit them, your intention is just to get the fuckers to STOP SHOOTING and ideally get their heads down for a couple of seconds.
2. RUN. Not far, just MOVE, ideally laterally and unpredictably compared to where you think the shots came from. Super-ideally, into cover (another thing they teach you is that as you advance on patrol you should be constantly scanning for cover where you’d go to in the event it kicks off – patrolling properly is a highly stressful experience requiring full and constant attention at all times).
3. GET DOWN. Hit the deck and be the smallest target you can manage.
4. MOVE AGAIN. Crawl away from where you went down. If someone saw you go down, they can just aim for that point and wait for you to stand back up. Don’t be there when you do.
5. LOCATE THE ENEMY. Now you need to know more accurately where the shot(s) came from. See below for more on this. Until you can do that you can’t start on the next step, which is:
6. WIN THE FIREFIGHT. You’re into section fire-and-manoeuvre now, trying to keep their heads down while you move in close enough to kill them. But (5) can be really hard…
Locating the enemy is likely tricky. Again, unless you’re up against rank amateurs, they
(a) are a long way away – 300m or more.
(b) are well hidden AND behind the cover of something bulletproof, if not an actual trench or pillbox or whatever.
(c) fired exactly ONE shot, the sound of which didn’t arrive until a second or so AFTER the bullet did.
(d) didn’t shoot at the man nearest to them, but at someone behind him. This is done to demonstrate clearly to the man in front that he is IN TROUBLE.
(e) didn’t shoot using a large calibre, lethal round, but with something like a 5.56mm round designed to tumble on impact and
(f) didn’t aim for the head.
(e) & (f) will now have created not a dead man, but a screaming, morale-sapping casualty who now needs a medevac from what is obviously a kill box. (d) has sapped morale further because right now you’ve no idea how many people are in range… it might be everybody.
(c) means your first indication you’re in trouble is a crack and a wet sound, followed by a man going down, just as the sound of the bullet being fired arrives. That’s likely to be your one clue which direction the shot came from, and in anything other than open countryside (e.g. an urban environment) might actually be worse than useless because of the echoes it will inevitably make.
(b) means spotting them is going to be really hard – they’ve had plenty of time to make themselves really hard to see. In training a corporal literally trod on me while moving towards someone else, and the exercise in question was trying to determine whether I was visible to the sergeant in charge who was standing about 250 metres away. If the corporal couldn’t see me, what chance would he have had?
(a) means even if you can locate them, getting to them and neutralising the threat without incurring further casualties (or even accepting some) is going to be difficult, time consuming and extremely strenuous. It is the lot of the infantry soldier – it is what the boots on the ground need to be able to do to secure territory, which is ultimately what they’re for.
All of which – and I admit that turned out a LOT more verbose than I thought it was going to when I started – is to say that the idea that you can protect yourself from someone who means to harm you with a gun is a fantasy. Trained, drilled, fit, strong soldiers, who spend thousands of hours practicing this stuff, who go into a combat patrol with kevlar on their head and body and weaponry that they’re damn good at using, and who do so not alone but as part of a team trained to work together to protect each other – THOSE people go into that situation fully cognisant of the fact that if the bad guy picks you as their first target, YOU ARE DEAD (or at best badly injured), and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it.
I can accept suspension of disbelief when its something like “John Wick” – that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, which is wish-fulfillment fantasy with no more pretense at realism than a Superman movie. I can accept it with “Kill Bill”, where the 1st class seats on the airplane come with a convenient place to put your katana while you’re relaxing with an inflight movie. That’s just an anime come to life.
I’m not willing to suspend that disbelief for this kind of ideologically-driven bullshit.
Yes, you’re right. So what we’d have, if Smith’s fantasy comes true, is whole streets full of Good Guys With Guns constantly turning this way and that, aiming pre-emptively at everyone they see, in no particular order (‘cuz that makes you predictable to your enemy, if any). And it’s inevitable that someone will see someone else aiming at them, and start shooting. And then it’ll be a situation somewhere between Stalingrad and the most disorganized gang war ever.
PS: Hey, look on the bright side: at least we’re not seeing the good guy harmlessly shooting the bad guy’s gun out of his hand anymore.
The idea of having frangible bullets that are “safe” to use on aircraft is not a flight of fancy on Smith’s part. When the book came out they already existed in the real world, having been invented in the mid 1970s for use by air marshals.
They both have very little penetration and because they shatter on impact they are much less effective beyond almost any barrier they can penetrate. When hitting flesh they cause hydrostatic shock, often increasing the damage to internal organs over a penetrating slug.
Now, they are hardly perfect and real ones will still cause damage to materials, (just not as much as a solid slug). However, a higher tech setting can probably justify having ones even better at not penetrating solid barriers, (so long as it remembers that would mean body armour would also be more effective against the rounds).